After 80 years, Annette McKay struggles to bury her sister Mary Margaret, who was disposed of in a sewage tank in Tuam, Ireland. A story of secrets and the search for justice.
After 80 years, Annette McKay struggles to bury her sister Mary Margaret, who was disposed of in a sewage tank in Tuam, Ireland. A story of secrets and the search for justice.
Irish baby disposed of in sewage pit 80 years ago, sister is looking for peace
When Annette McKay's first grandson was born, she thought that her mother Maggie O’Connor would be overjoyed. She had now become an great -grandmother. Instead, McKay found her 70-year-old mother crying in front of her house while she called: "It's the baby, the baby." McKay tried to calm her mother and explained that her great -grandson was healthy. But O’Connor didn't speak of him.
"Not your baby, my baby", admitted O’Connor as she revealed a secret that kept her hidden for decades. Her first child, Mary Margaret, died in June 1943 at the age of just six months.
The secret of the past
It was the first and only time that O’Connor spoke about Mary Margaret or her experiences in St. Mary’s Home - a so -called Mother-Kind-Heim in the city tuam in the Westirian County Galway.
The dark story of the mother-child homes
The Tuam home was one of dozens of facilities in which pregnant girls and unmarried women were sent to give birth in secret. These women were often violently separated from their children. Some infants were conveyed in Ireland, in the United Kingdom or even as far away as in the USA, Canada and Australia, but died hundreds, and their remains were often rejected without the mothers ever learned what had really happened with their babies.
On Monday, a team of Irish and international forensic experts will be excavated to an
"In this distorted, authoritarian world, sex for women was the greatest sin, not for men," McKay told CNN. "Women who had this visible sign of sexuality - pregnancy as a 'sin' - were 'disappeared' from the community, behind high walls at the end of the city."
The cruel reality of the mother-child homes
o’connor was sent to the Tuam home as a pregnant 17-year-old after raping by the supervisor of the institution in which she grew up. In the home, mothers and babies were separated. Many women finally ended up in Magdalene-Laundry facilities. Her babies were either adopted in foster families or to married couples, further institutionalized or illegally sold in industrial schools or institutions for people with disabilities, including the USA; From the 1940s to the 1970s, more than 2,000 children were sent so much,
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But many of these babies did not survive the time outside of the walls: at least 9,000 infants and children died in these institutions, including the Tuam home. O’Connor, who was sent to another school after the birth of Mary Margaret, only learned about the death of her daughter six months later during the laundry.
The search for justice
’the child of your sin is dead ',” said the nuns to her, McKay reported, “as if it were nothing.” O’Connor finally moved to England, where she raised six other children and lived a life that appeared glamorous at first glance. But they never left the horrors of the Tuam home.
mcKay mourned for the sister, whom she had never met, but found consolation in the presentation of a small grave in the Irish landscape, where Mary Margaret might have been buried. But in 2014 this idyllic idea was smashed when she read in an English newspaper: "Mass grave in the septic tank, 'The skeleton of 800 babies' contains at the site of an Irish home for unmarried mothers."
uncovering the truth
It was the work of a local historian, Catherine Corless, who unveiled that 796 babies had died in Tuam without any funeral documents and that they had been stored in a disused sewage tank. The authorities initially refused to deal with Corless' findings and rejected their work as unbelievable. The sisters of the Bon Secours - the nuns that headed the home from 1925 to 1961 - got an advisory company that categorically denied the existence of a mass grave and explained that there were no evidence that children had been buried there.
But Corless, survivors of the mother-child homes and their relatives never stopped working for the Tuam babies and their mothers. Und es zahlte sich aus.
a step in the right direction
In 2015, the Irish government launched an investigation into 14 mother-child homes and four country homes, which discovered "significant quantities" of human remains on the site in Tuam. The investigation stated in these facilities a "frightening level of infant mortality" and explained that the state does not raise an alarm in terms of these circumstances, although "this was known to the local and national authorities" and "was recorded in official publications."
The investigation found that mother-child homes did not save the lives of “illegitimate” children before 1960; In fact, they seemed significantly to reduce the chances of survival of these children.
The state investigation led to an official apology from the government in 2021 as well as the announcement of a compensation program and an apology letter from the sisters of the Bon Secour. However, many relatives and survivors perceive the government's reaction as inadequate and believe that they are still not treated with respect and dignity that they are entitled to. Nevertheless, there is now a general feeling of relief in Tuam.
the excavations and their meaning
In the next two years, forensic experts will work at the Tuam location to dig and analyze the remains of children. Niamh McCullagh, a forensic archaeologist who works with the office of the Director of Authorized Intervention in Tuam (Odait), reported that a "test excavation" discovered 20 chambers in a disused sewage tank, which contained the remains of infants that were between 35 weeks and three years old at the time of their death.
mccullagh told CNN that the forensic specialists, if they find evidence that one of the children has died illegally, will inform the forensic doctor, who will then notify the police. "The potential for this is definitely available, you can see that in the death register," she said. However, she warned that the identification of the remains and the cause of death due to the fragmented nature of the remains, the period of time that has passed, and the lack of complete DNA samples could be difficult for potential relatives.
memories and hopes of the survivors
"The bitter truth about infants is that they have to live with an illness long enough so that they can feel their effects on their bones ... So they don't often live long enough so that some diseases leave traces on their bones," she said. In front of the place where her two brothers, John and William, were born, Anna Corrigan, a 70-year-old from Dublin, said to CNN that she hoped that exhumation would lead to justice and a degree.
"You had no dignity in your life. They had no dignity in death. They were denied all human rights," said Corrigan, who was raised as an only child. It was only in 2012, after the death of her mother Bridget, that she found out about her brothers in Tuam by researching her mother's early life in an industrial school school.
Corrigan's brother John weighed 8 pounds and 8 ounces when he was born in February 1946. But a report by the authorities about the conditions in the home, which was published just a few months after his departure of his mother, drew a dark picture of reality for the occupants and described them as: "miserable, emaciated with an insatiable hunger" and "without control over the body functions, probably mentally hindered." Of the 271 children who lived in the home at the time, 12 were developed as "poor babies, who do not thrive".
John died of measles at the age of 13, as was noted on his death certificate. While she is hopeful that her brother wants to be adopted to North America and could still live, Corrigan is convinced that John is buried in the mass grave.
The inevitable idea
On Tuesday, relatives and survivors gathered on site to inform the experts about the next steps. "I could have been. Each of us who survived there was only a hair width from landing in the septic tanks," said surviving Teresa O’Sullivan to CNN. O’Sullivan was born in 1957 and learned from her youthful mother that she had never stopped looking for her, even though the nuns had told her that "she had messed up her own life" and her child had been sent to America. They only came together again when O’Sullivan was in their 30s.
Lately she has also found a brother from the father's side who supported O’Sullivan when the excavations began. "We were next to them. They were in the rooms with us, they were in the building with us," said O’Sullivan about the babies whose bodies ended in the septic tank. "We have to get them out of it," she added.
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