TUAM, Ireland
Behold a child.
A slight girl all of 6, she leaves the modest
family farm, where the father minds the livestock and the mother keeps a
painful secret, and walks out to the main road. Off she goes to primary
school, off to the Sisters of Mercy.
IRELAND
Tuam
Dublin
GALWAY
Her auburn hair in ringlets, this child named
Catherine is bound for Tuam, the ancient County Galway town whose name
derives from a Latin term for “burial mound.” It is the seat of a Roman
Catholic archdiocese, a proud distinction announced by the skyscraping
cathedral that for generations has loomed over factory and field.
Two miles into this long-ago Irish morning, the
young girl passes through a gantlet of gray formed by high walls along
the Dublin Road that seem to thwart sunshine. To her right runs the
Parkmore racecourse, where hard-earned shillings are won or lost by a
nose. And to her left, the mother and baby home, with glass shards
embedded atop its stony enclosure.
Behind this forbidding divide, nuns keep watch
over unmarried mothers and their children. Sinners and their
illegitimate spawn, it is said. The fallen.
But young Catherine knows only that the
children who live within seem to be a different species altogether:
sallow, sickly — segregated. “Home babies,” they’re called.
The girl’s long walk ends at the Mercy school,
where tardiness might earn you a smarting whack on the hand. The
children from the home are always late to school — by design, it seems,
to keep them from mingling with “legitimate” students. Their oversize
hobnail boots beat a frantic rhythm as they hustle to their likely slap
at the schoolhouse door.
The End
Articles in this series explore how we die and what it tells us about how we live.
A sensitive child, familiar with the sting of
playground taunts, Catherine nevertheless decides to repeat a prank she
saw a classmate pull on one of these children. She balls up an empty
candy wrapper and presents it to a home baby as if it still contains a
sweet, then watches as the little girl’s anticipation melts to sad
confusion.
Everyone laughs, nearly. This moment will stay with Catherine forever.
After classes end, the home babies hurry back
down the Dublin Road in two straight lines, boots tap-tap-tapping, and
disappear behind those Gothic walls. Sometimes the dark wooden front
door is ajar, and on her way home Catherine thrills at the chance of a
stolen peek.
Beyond those glass-fanged walls lay seven acres
of Irish suffering. Buried here somewhere are famine victims who
succumbed to starvation and fever a century earlier, when the home was a
loathed workhouse for the homeless poor.
But they are not alone.
Deep in the distant future, Catherine will
expose this property’s appalling truths. She will prompt a national
reckoning that will leave the people of Ireland asking themselves: Who
were we? Who are we?
At the moment, though, she is only a child. She
is walking home to a father tending to the cattle and a mother guarding
a secret, away from the Irish town whose very name conjures the buried
dead.
Ritual and Remembrance
In Ireland, the departed stay present.
You might still come across old-timers who
recall how families in rural stretches would clean the house and set out
a drink on the first night of November — the eve of All Souls’ Day — in
the belief that the dead will return. How it was best to stay in the
center of the road when walking at night, so as not to disturb the
spirits resting along the wayside.
Even today, the Irish say they do death well.
Local radio newscasts routinely end with a recitation of death notices.
In a country where the culture of Catholicism, if not its practice,
still holds sway, this alerts the community to a familiar ritual: the
wake at the home, the funeral Mass, the long gathering at the pub, the
memorial Mass a month later, and the anniversary Mass every year
thereafter.
Wry acceptance of mortality lives in the
country’s songs, literature, and wit. A standard joke is the Irish
marriage proposal: “Would you like to be buried with my people?” A
standard song describes a thrown bottle splattering whiskey – from the
Irish for “water of life” — over a corpse. Thus the late Tim Finnegan is
revived at his wake; see how he rises.
Respect for burial grounds runs deep, with
crowds gathering in their local cemetery once a year to pray as a priest
blesses the dead within. This reverence for the grave may derive from
centuries of land dispossession, or passed-on memories of famine corpses
in the fields and byways, or simply be linked to a basic desire
expressed by the planting of a headstone:
To be remembered.
Some 60 years have passed since Catherine’s
primary school days. It is a gloomy June afternoon, and she is walking
the grounds once hidden behind those shard-studded walls. As rain falls
from the crow-flecked sky, she drapes her black jacket over her head,
almost like a shawl.
Her name now is Catherine Corless, née Farrell.
At 63, she is a grandmother with a smile not easily given, and any
fealty to Catholicism long since lost.
Catherine Corless
Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times
True, she occasionally volunteers to paint the
weathered statues outside the local country churches: the blue of the
Blessed Virgin’s eyes, the bronze in St. Patrick’s beard. But this is
for the community, not the church. She finds deeper meaning in her
garden, in the birds at the feeder outside her kitchen window, in the
earth here at her feet.
Few photographs exist of the grim building that
once loomed over this corner of Tuam (pronounced Chewm), perhaps
because few desired the memory. In its place stand drab rows of
subsidized housing and a modest playground. A silvery swing set, a
yellow slide, a jungle gym.
One day, a few years back, Catherine began to
inquire about the old home that had stoked her schoolgirl imagination.
She set out on an amateur’s historical quest, but whenever she focused
on the children who lived there, so many questions arose about the
children who died there — the ones who never made it to the classroom,
or even past infancy.
What, then, of Patrick Derrane, who died at
five months in 1925, and Mary Carty, at five months in 1960, and all
those in between, children said to have been “born on the other side of
the blanket”? The Bridgets and Noras and Michaels and Johns, and so many
Marys, so many Patricks, their surnames the common language of Ireland.
Would people pause at their graves? Would they be remembered?
In asking around, what Catherine heard was:
Ah, them poor children. Them poor children.
The more she dug, the more a distant time and
place was revealed. Now, standing on the sodden grass, she can nearly
see and hear all that was. The polished halls and bustling dormitories,
the babies’ nappies and nuns’ habits, the shouts, the whimpers, the
murmur of prayer.
‘Waiting for the Crucifixion’
The women and their newborns often arrived
after the inquisitive streetlamps of Tuam had dimmed. They came from
towns and crossroads with names like snatches of song. Portumna and
Peterswell, Claremorris and Lettermore, Moylough and Loughrea.
And now they were here at the St. Mary’s Mother
and Baby Home, a massive building the color of storm clouds, a way
station for 50 single mothers and 125 children born out of wedlock.
The building opened in 1846 as a workhouse, but
almost immediately it began receiving victims of the Great Hunger, a
famine so horrific that the moans of the dying, The Tuam Herald
reported, were “as familiar to our ears as the striking of the clock.”
It later became a military barracks, serving the new Irish government
formed after a treaty between Irish rebels and Great Britain in 1921.
One spring morning during the civil war that followed, six prisoners —
republicans who disagreed with concessions in the treaty — were marched
into the yard and executed against the ashen wall.
The government repurposed the building to be
among the institutions intended as ports of salvation where disgraced
women might be redeemed. These state-financed homes were invariably
managed by a Catholic order, in keeping with the hand-in-glove
relationship between the dominant church and the fledgling state.
Given the misogyny, morality, and economics
that informed the public debate of the time — when a pregnancy out of
wedlock could threaten a family’s plans for land inheritance, and even
confer dishonor upon a local pastor — imagine that naïve young woman
from the country: impregnated by a man, sometimes a relative, who would
assume little of the shame and none of the responsibility. She might
flee to England, or pretend that the newborn was a married sister’s — or
be shipped to the dreaded Tuam home, run by a religious order with
French roots called the Congregation of Sisters of Bon Secours.
Their motto: “Good Help to Those in Need.”
You rose early and went down to the nursery
with your infant. Mass at 8, then porridge and tea for breakfast. Breast
feeding next, after which you rinsed your child’s diapers before moving
on to your daily drudgery. You might polish the dormitory floors with
beeswax or clean bedsheets stained with urine.
“An awful lonely ould hole,” recalled Julia Carter Devaney.
Julia Carter Devaney, right, with a friend at the Presentation Convent in Tuam.
Tuam Herald
Born in a workhouse and left in the care of the
Bon Secours, Julia became an employee who lived in the home for almost
40 years. Although she died in 1985, her rare insight into this
insulated world — one she described as “unnatural” — lives on in taped
interviews.
The gates remained unlocked to accommodate
deliveries, but so powerful was the sense of cultural imprisonment that
you dared not leave. Save for the chance gift of a cake from the bread
man, you starved for love or consolation over the loss of your innocent
courting days.
“Many a girl shed tears,” Julia said.
The Bon Secours sisters who watched your every
move were doing the bidding of Irish society. They, too, existed in a
repressive patriarchy with few options for women. They might have
experienced a spiritual calling as a young girl, or simply desired not
to be a farmer’s wife, having seen overworked mothers forever pregnant,
forever fretting. A vocation offered education, safety and status, all
reflected in clean, freshly pressed habits.
And Julia remembered them all.
Mother Hortense had a big heart, yet was quick
to punish; Mother Martha was more enlightened, but a thump from her
could “put you into the middle of next week.” This one hated the mere
sight of children, while that one used kindness the way others used the
rod. So it went.
The sisters frequently threatened banishment to the mental asylum in Ballinasloe, or to one of the Magdalen Laundries:
institutions where women perceived to be susceptible or errant —
including “second offenders” who had become pregnant again — were often
sent to work, and sometimes die, in guilt-ridden servitude.
You preferred instead to suffer at the mother
and baby home, bracing for that day when, after a year or so of penitent
confinement, you were forced to leave — almost always without your
child. Waiting for that moment of separation, Julia recalled, was “like
Our Lady waiting for the Crucifixion.”
Typical is the story of one unmarried woman who
had been sent to the home from a remote Galway farm. Determined to
remain close to her child, she took a job as a cleaner at a nearby
hospital and, for several years, she appeared at the home’s door on her
day off every week to say the same thing:
That’s my son you have in there. I want my son. I want to rear him.
No, would come the answer. And the door would close.
For the children left behind, there were swings
and seesaws and donated Christmas gifts from town, but no grandparents
and cousins coming around to coo. They lived amid the absence of
affection and the ever-present threat of infectious disease.
“Like chickens in a coop,” Julia said.
Goods from the mother and baby home were auctioned off in the early 1970s.
via Caroline Gormley
Many survivors have only the sketchiest
memories of those days, a haze of bed-wetting and rocking oneself to
sleep. One man, now in his 70s, remembers being taken for a walk with
other home babies, and the excitement of seeing themselves in the
side-view mirrors of parked cars.
“We didn’t even know it was a reflection of
ourselves in the mirror,” he recalled. “And we were laughing at
ourselves. Laughing.”
Until they were adopted, sent to a training
school or boarded out to a family, the older children walked to one of
the two primary schools along the Dublin Road, some of them calling out
“daddy” and “mammy” to strangers in the street. Shabby and betraying
signs of neglect, they sat at the back of the classroom, apart.
“I never remember them really being taught,” Catherine said. “They were just there.”
Teachers threatened to place rowdy students
beside the home babies. Parents warned children that if they were bad
they’d go right to “the home.” And even though the babies were baptized
as a matter of routine, there remained the hint of sulfur about them.
“They were the children of the Devil,” recalled
Kevin O’Dwyer, 67, a retired principal who grew up just yards from the
home. “We learned this in school.”
Still, when a bully targeted a young Kevin during one recess, the child who came to his rescue was a home baby. You leave him alone, the older girl warned. I see you doing that to him again, I’ll get ya.
The man has never forgotten his protector’s name: Mary Curran.
One September day in 1961, a rare and ferocious
hurricane howled across Ireland, downing power lines, destroying barley
fields, battering cottages. As gales flicked away slates from the roof
above, Julia helped lock the doors of the mother and baby home for good.
Its conditions were poor, some of its staff untrained, and County
Galway officials decided not to proceed with a planned renovation.
Abandoned, the massive H-block building
devolved into an echoing, eerie playscape, where games of hide-and-seek
unfolded in dull halls once polished with beeswax. Even the old chapel
became a place where children became the priests and confessors. “Bless
me, Father, for I have sinned. I shot Brother Whatever,” Kevin recalled.
“That kind of thing.”
The years passed. Galway County moved forward
with plans to demolish the home and build subsidized housing. And the
memories of hobnailed pitter-patter faded, replaced by the faint sounds
of children outracing the home baby ghosts that inhabited the property
at night.
In Pain, Finding Purpose
Catherine still wonders what led her to the
story of the mother and baby home. Chance, perhaps, or distant memories
of the little girl she once teased. Despite her bone-deep modesty, there
are even times when she feels chosen.
She thinks back to her solitary childhood, her
best friend a dog she called “Puppy,” her time spent navigating the
sadness that enveloped her mother. She admired the woman’s deep empathy
for others, but was puzzled by her refusal to say much about her own
people back in County Armagh, a good 140 miles northeast of Tuam. Sure they’re all dead and gone, is all she’d say, and God help you if you pried much further.
“A troubled soul,” her daughter said.
Catherine graduated from secondary school, left
a Galway art college for fear of lacking the necessary talent, and
found satisfaction as a receptionist. In 1978, she married Aidan
Corless, a man as gregarious as she was shy, a fine singer, nimble on
the accordion, comfortable on the community theater stage.
Four children quickly followed. Before long,
Catherine was minding the children of neighbors as well, immersing
herself in the homework, play and exuberance of the young.
Her mother, Kathleen, died at 80 in 1992,
leaving behind so much unsaid. Catherine eventually headed up to Armagh
to examine public records that might explain why her mother had been so
withholding, so unsettled.
As if part of some cosmic riddle, the answer
was provided in the absence of one. On her mother’s birth certificate,
in the space reserved for the name of the father: nothing.
Her mother had been conceived out of wedlock.
Other telltale strands to the woman’s early
years came to be known: Fostered out, moving from family to family
before finding work as a domestic. Then harboring until death a secret
she found shameful enough to keep from her husband.
“That she went through her life, that she didn’t like telling us,” Catherine said. “That she was ashamed to tell us…”
In this patch of pain and regret, a seed was planted.
The revelations about her mother fueled in
Catherine an interest in understanding the forces that shape who we are
and how we behave. While attending a rigorous night course in local
history, she learned an invaluable lesson:
“If you don’t find something, you don’t leave it. You ask why it’s not there. You use ‘why’ a lot.”
With the children grown, Catherine began contributing essays to the journal of the Old Tuam Society
about local history, all the while grappling with debilitating
headaches and anxiety attacks. The episodes might last for days, with
the only relief at times coming from lying on the floor, still, away
from light.
Burrowing deep into the past, though, provided
welcome distraction, and at some point she chose to delve into the
subject of the old mother and baby home: its beginnings as a workhouse,
its place in Tuam history, the usual. Nothing deep.
But there were almost no extant photographs of
the home, and most of the locals were reluctant to talk. Every question
Catherine raised led to another, the fullness of truth never quite
within reach. Why, for example, did one corner of the property feature a
well-manicured grotto centered around a statue of the Blessed Virgin?
Oh that, a few neighbors said. A while back an
older couple created the peaceful space to mark where two local lads
once found some bones in a concrete pit. Famine victims, maybe.
The story made no sense to Catherine. The famine dead weren’t buried that way.
Who were these boys? What did they see?
Frannie Hopkins
Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times
Frannie Hopkins was about 9, Barry Sweeney,
about 7. The two were at the fledgling stage of boyhood mischief as they
monkeyed around some crab apple trees, all within view of the deserted
home that figured in their fertile imagination.
Some evenings, Frannie’s father would delay his
pint at the Thatch Bar, at the top of the town, until he had watched
his son race down the Athenry Road, dodging ghosts from the old home to
his left and the cemetery to his right, all the way to the family’s
door. But on this autumn day in the early 1970s, the boys were daring in
the daylight.
Jumping into some overgrowth at the property’s
southwest corner, they landed on a concrete slab that echoed in answer.
Curious, they pushed aside the lid to reveal a shallow, tank-like space
containing a gruesome jumble of skulls and bones.
Frannie nudge-bumped Barry, and the younger lad
fell in. He started to cry, as any boy would, so Frannie pulled him out
and then the two boys were running away, laughing in fun or out of
fright. They told everyone they met, prompting Frannie’s father to say
he’d get a right kick in the arse if he went back to that spot.
County workers soon arrived to level that
corner of the property. The police said they were only famine bones. A
priest said a prayer. And that was that.
In adulthood, Barry Sweeney would go to England
to find work, and Frannie Hopkins would travel the world as an Irish
soldier. Both would return to Tuam, where their shared story would come
up now and then in the pub or on the street.
People would tell them they were either
mistaken or lying. Barry would become upset that anyone would doubt a
story that had so affected him, but Frannie would take pains to reassure
him.
Barry, he would say. The truth will out.
The Marys, Patricks and Johns
Now, 40 years later, here was Catherine
Corless, amateur historian, trying to unearth that truth, applying what
she had learned in her community center research class: Use “why” a lot.
When her headaches and panic attacks eased, she
pored over old newspapers in a blur of microfilm. She spent hours
studying historic maps in the special collections department of the
library at the national university in Galway City. One day she copied a
modern map of Tuam on tracing paper and placed it over a town map from
1890.
And there it was, in the cartographic details
from another time: A tank for the home’s old septic system sat precisely
where the two boys had made their ghastly discovery. It was part of the
Victorian-era system’s warren of tunnels and chambers, all of which had
been disconnected in the late 1930s.
Did this mean, then, that the two lads had stumbled upon the bones of home babies? Buried in an old sewage area?
“I couldn’t understand it,” Catherine said. “The horror of the idea.”
Acting on instinct, she purchased a random
sample from the government of 200 death certificates for children who
had died at the home. Then, sitting at the Tuam cemetery’s edge in the
van of its caretaker, she checked those death certificates against all
the burials recorded by hand in two oversize books.
Only two children from the home had been buried in the town graveyard. Both were orphans, both “legitimate.”
Neither the Bon Secours order nor the county
council could explain the absence of burial records for home babies,
although it was suggested that relatives had probably claimed the bodies
to bury in their own family plots. Given the ostracizing stigma
attached at the time to illegitimacy, Catherine found this absurd.
In December 2012, Catherine’s essay, titled “The Home,” appeared in the historical journal of Tuam.
After providing a general history of the facility, it laid out the
results of her research, including the missing burial records and the
disused septic tank where two boys had stumbled upon some bones.
“Is it possible that a large number of those
little children were buried in that little plot at the rear of the
former Home?” she wrote. “And if so, why is it not acknowledged as a
proper cemetery?”
She also shared her own memories, including
that joke she and a classmate had played on two home babies long ago. “I
thought it funny at the time how those little girls hungrily grabbed
the empty sweet papers, but the memory of it now haunts me,” she wrote.
Her daring essay implicitly raised a
provocative question: Had Catholic nuns, working in service of the
state, buried the bodies of hundreds of children in the septic system?
Catherine braced for condemnation from government and clergy — but none came. It was as if she had written nothing at all.
There was a time when Catherine wanted only to
have a plaque erected in memory of these forgotten children. But now she
felt that she owed them much more. “No one cared,” she said. “And
that’s my driving force all the time: No one cared.”
She kept digging, eventually paying for another
spreadsheet that listed the names, ages, and death dates of all the
“illegitimate” children who had died in the home during its 36-year
existence.
The sobering final tally: 796.
Five-month-old Patrick Derrane was the first to
die, from gastroenteritis. Weeks later, Mary Blake, less than 4 months
old and anemic since birth. A month after that, 3-month-old Matthew
Griffin, of meningitis. Then James Murray, fine one moment, dead the
next. He was 4 weeks old.
In all, seven children died at the mother and
baby home in 1925, the year it opened. The holidays were especially
tough, with 11-month-old Peter Lally dying of intestinal tuberculosis on
Christmas Day, and 1-year-old Julia Hynes dying the next day, St.
Stephen’s Day, after a three-month bout of bronchitis.
Measles. Influenza. Gastroenteritis. Meningitis. Whooping cough. Tuberculosis. Severe undernourishment, also known as marasmus.
Nine home babies died in 1930. Eleven in 1931. Twenty-four in 1932. Thirty-two in 1933.
The Tuam home was not alone. Children born out
of wedlock during this period were nearly four times more likely to die
than “legitimate” children, with those in institutions at particular
risk. The reasons may be many — poor prenatal care, insufficient
government funding, little or no training of staff – but this is
certain: It was no secret.
In 1934, the Irish parliament was informed
of the inordinate number of deaths among this group of children. “One
must come to the conclusion that they are not looked after with the same
care and attention as that given to ordinary children,” a public health
official said.
Thirty died in the Tuam home that year.
In 1938, it was 26. In 1940, 34. In 1944, 40.
In 1947, a government health inspector filed a
report describing the conditions of infants in the nursery: “a miserable
emaciated child…delicate…occasional fits…emaciated and delicate…fragile
abcess on hip…not thriving wizened limbs emaciated…pot-bellied
emaciated…a very poor baby…”
That year, 52 died.
Catherine felt obligated to these children.
Continuing to plumb the depths of the past, she eventually cross-checked
her spreadsheet of 796 deceased home babies with the burial records of
cemeteries throughout counties Galway and Mayo. Not one match.
“They’re not in the main Tuam graveyard where
they should have been put initially,” she remembers thinking. “They’re
not in their mothers’ hometown graveyards. Where are they?”
Catherine, of course, already knew.
The Truth Outs,
a Nation Reels
a Nation Reels
Catherine lives simply, almost monastically.
She favors practical clothing, usually black, and has never been one for
a night at the pub. She doesn’t drink alcohol or eat meat. Give her a
bowl of muesli at the kitchen table and she’ll be grand.
Those headaches and anxiety attacks, though,
remain a part of her withdrawn life. Aidan, her husband, has become
accustomed to attending wakes and weddings by himself. A few years ago,
he booked a Mediterranean cruise for two; he traveled alone.
“A very quiet, introverted person, wrapped up in her own thoughts,” Aidan said of his wife. “Suffering, if you like.”
But thoughts of the dead children of Tuam
pushed Catherine beyond her fears. Believing that the body of even one
“legitimate” baby found in a septic tank would have prompted an outcry,
she suspected that the silence met by her essay spoke to a reluctance to
revisit the painful past — a past that had consumed her own mother.
Now she was angry.
Adding to her fury was the knowledge that when a
Tuam hospital run by the Bon Secours closed in 2002, the religious
order disinterred the bodies of a dozen nuns and reinterred them in
consecrated ground outside the nearby pilgrimage town of Knock.
“I feel it at times: that those poor little
souls were crying out for recognition, a recognition they never got in
their little, short lives,” Catherine said. “It was a wrong that just
had to be righted some way.”
Seeing no other option, she contacted a
reporter for The Irish Mail on Sunday, a national newspaper. Not long
after, in the spring of 2014, a front-page story appeared about a
certain seven acres in Tuam.
It became the talk of Ireland.
The grounds of the old mother and baby home.
Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times
All who had been quiet before — the clerics,
politicians and government officials — now conveyed shock and sadness,
while the besieged Bon Secours sisters hired a public relations
consultant whose email to a documentarian did little for the religious
order’s reputation:
“If you come here, you’ll find no mass grave,
no evidence that children were ever so buried and a local police force
casting their eyes to heaven and saying ‘Yeah, a few bones were found —
but this was an area where Famine victims were buried. So?’”
The news from Tuam had shocked many in the
country, but the dismissive email reflected the lurking doubts about
Catherine’s work. She was, after all, only a housewife.
Mary Moriarty was getting her light-blond hair
done at a salon in Tuam one day when the beauty-parlor chatter turned to
this troublemaker Catherine Corless.
The entire matter should be forgotten and put behind us, someone said.
Mary, a grandmother well known in town for her advocacy work, would have none of it.
Well, she said. Every child is entitled to their name, and their mothers could be any one of us but for the grace of God.
She left the salon, introduced herself by telephone to Catherine, and recounted a story that she rarely shared.
Mary Moriarty
Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times
In 1975, Mary was a young married mother living
in one of the new subsidized houses built on the old mother and baby
home property. One morning, close to Halloween, a neighbor told her that
a boy was running about with a skull on a stick.
The boy, Martin, said he had found his prize in the overgrown muck, and there were loads more.
What the boy mistook for a plastic toy was
actually the skull of a child, with a nearly complete set of teeth.
“That’s not plastic, Martin,” Mary recalled saying. “You have to put it
back where you found it.”
Mary and a couple of neighbors followed the boy
through the weeds and rubble, across the soft wet ground. Suddenly, the
earth beneath her feet began to give, and down she fell into some cave
or tunnel, with just enough light to illuminate the subterranean scene.
As far as she could see were little bundles
stacked one on top of another, like packets in a grocery, each about the
size of a large soda bottle and wrapped tight in graying cloth.
When her friends pulled her up, Mary’s legs
were scratched and her mind was on fire. What had she seen? That very
morning, she reached out to a person in town who might know. Soon a
stout older woman arrived on a bicycle, her faithful dogs trotting by
her side.
Julia Carter Devaney, who used to work at the home.
“Ah, yeah, that’s where the little babies is,” Mary recalled her saying as she came to a stop.
Julia bent down at the hole and peered in. Mary
never forgot what the older woman said next: “Many a little one I
carried out in the nighttime.”
Mary did not know what to make of this. Perhaps
these were the bodies of stillborns – and therefore unbaptized.
Stillborns. Yes, that’s what they must be.
Eighteen months after falling into the hole,
Mary gave birth to her son Kevin at a Tuam hospital run by the Bon
Secours sisters. After breakfast, a nun presented her with her newborn,
who was swathed like a little mummy. The young mother’s mind instantly
recalled those stacks of graying bundles, and straightaway she unwrapped
her precious child.
Now, after listening to the woman’s tale, Catherine asked whether Mary would be willing to tell her story on national radio.
Of course.
The Dead and the Living
The veteran geophysicist guided her mower-like
contraption over the thick grass, back and forth across a carefully
measured grid. Equipped with ground-penetrating radar, the machine sent
radio waves through the topsoil and down into the dark earth.
The curious machine was hunting for secrets
concealed in the ground of the old mother and baby home, all beneath the
gaze of a statue of the Blessed Virgin.
This subterranean trawling was being conducted on an early autumn day in 2015 for the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes,
a panel created by an embarrassed government in response to Catherine’s
research. Its charge: to examine a once-accepted way of Irish life in
all its social and historical complexity.
The commission’s investigation into the homes —
a network that by the late 1970s was falling into disuse — is focused
on 18 institutions scattered across Ireland: in the capital city of
Dublin, and in Counties Clare, Cork, Donegal, Galway, Kilkenny, Meath,
Tipperary and Westmeath. The high infant mortality rate in some of these
facilities was startling. In the Bessborough home in Cork, 478 children
died from 1934 to 1953 — or about one death every two weeks.
The investigation’s broad mandate also includes
scrutiny of the network’s links to the notorious Magdalen Laundries.
The apparent coercion of unmarried mothers to surrender their children
for adoption, often to Catholic Americans. The vaccine trials carried
out on mother-and-baby-home children for pharmaceutical companies. The
use of home-baby remains for anatomical study at medical colleges.
It was all part of a church-state arrangement
that, decades earlier, a longtime government health inspector named
Alice Litster had repeatedly denounced, mostly to silence. This system
marginalized defenseless Irish women, she asserted, and turned their
unfortunate offspring into “infant martyrs of convenience,
respectability, and fear.”
The home.
via Noel O'Donoghue
The Tuam case incited furious condemnation of a Catholic Church already weakened by a litany of sexual abuse scandals. Others countered that the sisters of Bon Secours had essentially been subcontractors of the Irish state.
But laying the blame entirely on the church or
the state seemed too simple — perhaps even too convenient. After all,
many of these abandoned children had fathers and grandparents and aunts
and uncles.
The bitter truth was that the mother and baby homes mirrored the Mother Ireland of the time.
As its investigation continued, the commission
would occasionally provide cryptic updates of its work in Tuam. In
September 2016, for example, it announced that forensic archaeologists would be digging trenches to resolve questions “in relation to the interment of human remains.”
While she waited for the commission to complete
its work, the woman responsible for this national self-examination,
Catherine Corless, returned in a way to those days when her children and
the children of neighbors packed the house. Only now the ones gathering
about her were in their 60s and 70s, with hair of silver.
Home babies.
Often lost in the uproar over the many children
who died at the Tuam home were the stories of those who had survived.
And once Catherine’s research became international news, they began
calling and emailing her, seeing in this introverted woman their only
hope of trying to find out who their mothers were, who their siblings
were — who they were.
Catherine assumed the role of pro bono private
detective, following paper trails that often led to some cemetery in
England, where many unmarried mothers had gone to start anew. The
children they were separated from, she said, needed to hear that their
mother had “fared all right.”
Before long, some of these survivors were
gathering at the Corless house for a cup of tea and a chat. In their
habits and manners of speech, they reminded Catherine of someone close
to her who also had been born out of wedlock.
“They all have a kind of low self-esteem,” she
said. “They feel inadequate. They feel a bit inferior to other people.
It mirrored, really, the way my mother was.”
During her research, Catherine had built a
detailed, wood-and-clay model of the home, large enough to cover a
dining-room table. It had helped her to visualize.
Now she and Aidan would occasionally remove the
model from a high shelf in the barn out back so that survivors could do
the same. They would touch the gray walls and peer into the small
windows, as if to imagine themselves in the arms of their mothers.
P. J. Haverty. Below, holding a picture of himself and his mother in 1975.
Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times
Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times
P. J. Haverty, a retired mechanic, sat at the
Corless kitchen table one day, sipping tea and eating a ham-and-butter
sandwich. He was born in 1951, the son of a 27-year-old woman who had
been left at the home by her father when she was eight months pregnant.
Eileen was her name, and she seemed to vanish a year after giving birth.
The white-haired man remembers only a few
snapshot moments of the home. Wetting the bed mattresses that would then
be propped against the window to dry. Seeing himself for the first time
in a car’s side-view mirror. Walking out the door with his new foster
parents, the father choosing him because he looked sturdy for farm work,
the mother because he had smiled at her.
P. J. was happy enough until his teens, when he
was called a “bastard,” and people avoided the pew he sat in, and girls
at a dance tittered at the sight of him. “If the parents found out,” he
said, “they’d tell them to keep away from that lad, you don’t know
where he came from.”
He considered drowning himself in the
fast-moving river that coursed through his foster father’s field. “The
things that I was called,” he said. “I just thought everyone was against
me.”
Thanks to a hint dropped here, a secret
whispered there, P. J. managed in adulthood to locate his birth mother
in South London. Plump and with graying hair, she reassured him that she
hadn’t abandoned him. After leaving the Tuam home, she had taken a
cleaning job at a nearby hospital and, for more than five years,
returned every week to demand that she be given back her child — only to
be turned away at the door.
P. J.’s voice caught as he recalled what his mother, now dead, had said she told the nuns to no avail.
“That’s my son you have in there. I want to rear him. I want to look after him.”
‘Chamber of Horrors’
It was true.
In early March of this year, the Mother and Baby Homes Commission reported that “significant quantities of human remains” had been discovered on the grounds of the Tuam home.
The ground-penetrating radar and delicate
excavation had revealed what appeared to be a decommissioned septic
tank. And in 17 of that septic system’s 20 chambers, investigators found
many human bones. A small sampling revealed that they were of children,
ranging in age from 35 fetal weeks to three years, and all dating from
the home’s 36 years of operation.
Expressing shock, the commission vowed to
continue its investigation into “who was responsible for the disposal of
human remains in this way.”
Once again, Ireland’s past had returned to haunt.
His voice trembling with passion, the prime minister, Enda Kenny, addressed the Irish legislature on what he called the “chamber of horrors”
discovered in Tuam. In the “so-called good old days,” he said, Irish
society “did not just hide away the dead bodies of tiny human beings.”
“We dug deep and we dug deeper still,” he said. “To bury our compassion, to bury our mercy, to bury our humanity itself.”
Though the prime minister said that “no nuns
broke into our homes to kidnap our children,” others directed their
wrath at the Catholic Church and, of course, the Bon Secours order,
whose only response so far has been to express its “continued
cooperation and support” for the commission’s work.
The Corless household, meanwhile, became an
international newsroom, with family members fielding the constant
telephone calls and accommodating the television crews forever at the
door. Catherine answered every question out of duty, not vanity. But
when Ireland’s most popular television program, “The Late Late Show,”
invited her to appear as a guest, she balked.
There was her ever-present anxiety, which now
limited her driving to little more than weekly five-mile runs to the
SuperValu grocery in Tuam. More than that, she feared being accused of
self-aggrandizement at the expense of dead children.
With her family all but demanding that she accept — Imagine how many home-baby survivors, suffering in silence, might be reached
— Catherine reluctantly consented, but only if she would already be
seated when the program returned from a commercial break. She did not
want to be summoned from the curtain to unwanted applause.
Aidan drove her into Galway City to buy an
outfit: black pants and a black top, of course, brightened slightly with
a silver trim. Then up to Dublin.
“I was a mess,” Catherine recalled. “But I said: ‘This is it. I have to do it.’”
When she finished telling the story of the Tuam home on live television,
the audience rose in what the host described as a very rare standing
ovation. Catherine nodded, smiled slightly, tightly, and exhaled.
Watching on a monitor in an adjacent room, her husband fought back
tears.
“I’m married to her for 40 years,” he said later, still astonished. “And I don’t know her at all.”
Catherine’s Final Quest
Photographs of grandchildren adorn the tan
walls. A silver kettle rests on the stove. A laptop computer sits open
on the counter, beside a window that looks out on a garden, a bird
feeder and, beyond, an undulating field of grass.
This is the kitchen of Catherine Corless, and
her office. She conducts her online research here, and keeps assorted
documents on the kitchen table for easy retrieval when yet another call
comes in. Can you help me find my mother, my sister, my… She never refuses.
The future of the Tuam grounds that her
questioning disturbed has yet to be revealed. The government is
grappling with many complexities, including the sad fact that the
remains of infants and children, the Marys and Patricks, the Bridgets
and Johns, are commingled.
One option is to leave everything as is.
Another is to disinter the remains for possible identification and
proper burial — although it is unclear whether DNA evidence can be
recovered from those who died so young, and so long ago.
Other issues also need resolution. Potential
compensation for home baby survivors; litigation against the Bon Secours
sisters, who run a vast health-care network; the propriety of children
playing above the bones of other children.
And there remains the maddening mystery of why a
Catholic order of nuns would bury these children in such a manner. Was
it to save a few pounds for the cost of each burial? Was it meant as a
kind of catacombs, in echo of the order’s French roots?
A shrine built to honor the children.
Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times
The baptism of these children entitled them
under canon law to a funeral Mass and burial in consecrated ground. But
perhaps the baptismal cleansing of their “original sin” was not enough
to also wipe away the shameful nature of their conception. Perhaps,
having been born out of wedlock in an Ireland of another time, they
simply did not matter.
Her auburn hair cut short, Catherine stands now
at her computer, gazing through the window at the garden that blesses
her with a sense of oneness with it all. Her begonias are blood-red
bursts, her lobelias the bluest of blue, her mind forever returning to
the past.
A candy wrapper. Empty.
She has searched school and government records
many, many times. So far, though, she has been unable to find the name
of one particular little girl from the mother and baby home, her
long-ago classmate.
“It would be nice to meet her,” Catherine says, leaving no doubt as to what she would say if given the chance.
At Tuam
Among the hundreds of children who stare up at us from their septic tankare James Muldoon, who died in 1927
at the age of four months. At least he would never be forced to thank
the Lord for mercies large or small. That cry to high heaven
must come from Brendan Muldoon, who died in 1943
at a mere five weeks. A teenage nun bows before an unleavened
host held up by a priest like a moon held up by an ash tree.
In 1947 the eleven month old Bridget Muldoon, a namesake of the mother
who would shortly give birth to me,
has already distinguished herself as being a bit of a bother
while Dermott Muldoon, three months old in 1950, is about to join the ranks
of my foster-sisters and foster-brothers
in that unthinkable world where a wasp may recognize another wasp’s face
and an elephant grieve for an elephant down at the watering place.
Produced by Craig Allen, Kassie Bracken, and Umi Syam.
Dan Barry reported from Tuam, Ireland. Kassie Bracken contributed reporting from Tuam, and Megan Specia from New York.
Among those providing guidance for this story were: Sarah-Anne Buckley, lecturer of history, National University of Ireland, Galway, and author of “The Cruelty Man: Child Welfare, the NSPCC and the State in Ireland, 1889-1956”; David Burke, editor of The Tuam Herald; Tony Claffey, historian; Stephen Dolan of the Irish Workhouse Centre; Lindsey Earner-Byrne, lecturer of history, University College Dublin, and author of “Mother and Child: Maternity and Child Welfare in Dublin, 1922-60”; the Rev. Msgr. Thomas J. Green, professor of canon law, Catholic University; Kevin Higgins, solicitor; Liam Hogan, research librarian at the Limerick City Library; Yvonne McKenna, author of “Made Holy: Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad”; Conall Ó Fátharta, reporter for The Irish Examiner; J. P. Rodgers, author of “For the Love of My Mother”; Paul Rouse, lecturer of history at University College Dublin; Salvador Ryan, professor of ecclesiastical history at Maynooth College and editor of “Death and the Irish: A Miscellany”; and James Smith, professor of English at Boston College and author of “Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment.”
Other sources include: assorted government reports, historic and recent; The Irish Examiner; The Irish Times; The Irish Independent; The Irish Mail on Sunday; The Connacht Tribune; The Tuam Herald; RTE; IrishCentral.com; “Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland’s Baby Export Business,” by Mike Milotte; and “Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland,” by Diarmaid Ferriter.
Dan Barry reported from Tuam, Ireland. Kassie Bracken contributed reporting from Tuam, and Megan Specia from New York.
Among those providing guidance for this story were: Sarah-Anne Buckley, lecturer of history, National University of Ireland, Galway, and author of “The Cruelty Man: Child Welfare, the NSPCC and the State in Ireland, 1889-1956”; David Burke, editor of The Tuam Herald; Tony Claffey, historian; Stephen Dolan of the Irish Workhouse Centre; Lindsey Earner-Byrne, lecturer of history, University College Dublin, and author of “Mother and Child: Maternity and Child Welfare in Dublin, 1922-60”; the Rev. Msgr. Thomas J. Green, professor of canon law, Catholic University; Kevin Higgins, solicitor; Liam Hogan, research librarian at the Limerick City Library; Yvonne McKenna, author of “Made Holy: Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad”; Conall Ó Fátharta, reporter for The Irish Examiner; J. P. Rodgers, author of “For the Love of My Mother”; Paul Rouse, lecturer of history at University College Dublin; Salvador Ryan, professor of ecclesiastical history at Maynooth College and editor of “Death and the Irish: A Miscellany”; and James Smith, professor of English at Boston College and author of “Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment.”
Other sources include: assorted government reports, historic and recent; The Irish Examiner; The Irish Times; The Irish Independent; The Irish Mail on Sunday; The Connacht Tribune; The Tuam Herald; RTE; IrishCentral.com; “Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland’s Baby Export Business,” by Mike Milotte; and “Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland,” by Diarmaid Ferriter.
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