Irish baby dumped in septic tank 80 years ago, sister seeks peace

Irish baby dumped in septic tank 80 years ago, sister seeks peace

When Annette McKay's first grandchild was born, she thought her mother, Maggie O'Connor, would be overjoyed. She had now become a great-grandmother. Instead, McKay found her 70-year-old mother crying outside her home while shouting, "It's the baby, the baby." McKay tried to reassure her mother and explained that her great-grandson was healthy. But O’Connor didn’t speak of him.

“Not your baby, my baby,” O’Connor confessed while revealing a secret she kept hidden for decades. Their first child, Mary Margaret, died in June 1943 at just six months old.

The secret of the past

It was the first and only time O'Connor spoke about Mary Margaret or her experiences at St. Mary's Home - a so-called Mother and child home in the city Tuam in County Galway, western Ireland.

The dark history of mother-child homes

The Tuam Home was one of dozens of facilities where pregnant girls and unmarried women were sent to give birth in secret. These women were often forcibly separated from their children. Some infants were placed in Ireland, the United Kingdom or even as far away as the United States, Canada and Australia, but hundreds died and their remains were often discarded without the mothers ever knowing what had really happened to their babies.

On Monday, a team of Irish and international forensic experts will begin excavating one Mass grave in Tuam begin, which is said to contain the remains of 796 children. This is the start of a two-year excavation.

Institutional abuse and traumatic experiences

From 1922 to 1998, the Catholic Church, in collaboration with the Irish state, created a deeply misogynistic network of institutions that discriminated against unmarried women and punished. This culture of isolation affected all sectors of society. Although Irish attitudes have changed since then, the shame and silence created by this system has left a lasting scar.

"In this distorted, authoritarian world, sex was the greatest sin for women, not 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 mother-child homes

O'Connor was sent to Tuam Home as a pregnant 17-year-old after she was raped by the carer at the institution where she was raised. In the home, mothers and babies were separated from each other. Many women ended up in Magdalene Laundry -Facilities where they were held as unpaid workers. Their babies were either adopted into foster care or to married couples, further institutionalized in industrial colleges or facilities for people with disabilities, or illegally sold abroad, including the United States; From the 1940s to the 1970s, more than 2,000 children were sent this way, reported the Clann project.

But many of these babies did not survive outside 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 Mary Margaret was born, only learned of her daughter's death six months later while hanging out the laundry.

The search for justice

“‘The child of your sin is dead,’” the nuns told her, McKay reported, “as if it were nothing.” O'Connor eventually moved to England, where she raised six other children and lived a life that at first glance seemed glamorous. But the horrors of the Tuam home never left her.

McKay mourned the loss of the sister she had never met, but found comfort in the idea of ​​a small grave in the Irish countryside where Mary Margaret might have been buried. But in 2014, that idyllic notion was shattered when she read in an English newspaper: "Mass grave in septic tank contains 'the skeletons of 800 babies' at site of Irish home for unmarried mothers."

Uncovering the truth

It was the work of a local historian, Catherine Corless, who revealed that 796 babies had died in Tuam with no burial records existing and that they had been dumped in a disused sewage tank. Authorities initially refused to address Corless's findings and dismissed her work as unreliable. The Sisters of Bon Secours - the nuns who ran the home from 1925 to 1961 - hired a consulting firm that categorically denied the existence of a mass grave and said there was no evidence that children were buried there.

But Corless, survivors of the mother and child homes and their relatives never stopped advocating for the Tuam babies and their mothers. And it paid off.

A step in the right direction

In 2015, the Irish government launched an investigation into 14 mother and child homes and four rural homes, which discovered "significant quantities" of human remains on the site in Tuam. The investigation found "appalling levels of infant mortality" in these facilities and stated that the state did not raise the alarm about these circumstances, although this was "known to local and national authorities" and "recorded in official publications."

The inquiry found that before 1960, mother and child homes did not save the lives of “illegitimate” children; in fact, they appeared to significantly reduce these children's chances of survival.

The government investigation led to an official government apology in 2021, as well as the announcement of a compensation program and a letter of apology from the Sisters of Bon Secours. However, many relatives and survivors feel the government's response has been inadequate and believe they are still not being treated with the respect and dignity they deserve. However, there is now a general feeling of relief in Tuam.

The excavations and their significance

Over the next two years, forensic experts will work at the Tuam site to excavate and analyze children's remains. Niamh McCullagh, a forensic archaeologist working with the Office of the Director of Authorized Intervention in Tuam (ODAIT), reported that a "test excavation" at the site discovered 20 chambers in a disused sewage tank containing the remains of infants aged between 35 weeks and three years at the time of their deaths.

McCullagh told CNN that if forensic specialists find evidence that one of the children died unlawfully, they will inform the coroner, who will then notify the police. “The potential for this is definitely there, you can see that in the death register,” she said. However, she warned that identifying the remains and their cause of death could be difficult due to the fragmented nature of the remains, the amount of time that has passed and the lack of complete DNA samples from potential relatives.

Memories and hopes of survivors

"The harsh truth about infants is that they have to live with an illness long enough for them to feel its effects on their bones... So they don't often live long enough for some illnesses to leave a mark on their bones," she said. Outside the site where her two brothers, John and William, were born, Anna Corrigan, a 70-year-old from Dublin, told CNN that she hoped the exhumation would lead to justice and closure.

"They had no dignity in 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 learned of her brothers in Tuam through research into her mother's early life at an industrial college.

Corrigan's brother John weighed 8 pounds, 8 ounces when he was born in February 1946. But a report by authorities on conditions at the home, released just months after his mother's departure, painted a grim picture of the reality for the inmates, describing them as: "miserable, emaciated with an insatiable hunger" and "lacking control over bodily functions, probably mentally retarded." Of the 271 children living in the home at the time, 12 were described as “poor babies, emaciated, not thriving.”

John died of measles at 13 months old, as noted on his death certificate. While she is hopeful that her brother Will was adopted to North America and might still be alive, Corrigan is convinced that John is buried in a mass grave.

The Inescapable Thought

On Tuesday, relatives and survivors gathered at the site to be informed by experts about the next steps. "It could have been me. Any of us who survived there were a hair's breadth away from ending up in the septic tanks," survivor Teresa O'Sullivan told CNN. Born in the home in 1957, O'Sullivan learned from her teenage 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 didn't get back together until O'Sullivan was in her 30s.

Recently she has also found a brother on her father's side who assisted 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," O'Sullivan said of the babies whose bodies ended up in the septic tank. “We have to get them out of there,” she added.