Caring for those long forgotten

Lifestyle – It started as a history project but Catherine Corless opened a window into one of Ireland’s darkest chapters. Now, with her memoir in print, she tells STEPHEN GLENNON how a quiet, unassuming mother of four became a shining beacon for our time.

When Catherine Corless began a local history evening course in 2010, little did this unassuming home-maker realise it would set her on a journey that would change her life.

Sitting at the kitchen table in her beautiful country dwelling at Carrowntanlis, between Tuam and Dunmore, Catherine remembers the 796 children from the Tuam Mother & Baby home whose bodies were dumped down a sewage tank between the 1930s and 1950s in the hope they would be forgotten.

Yet, history buried in the dirt can often push its way back to the surface, like a seed reaching for the light, and through the work that Catherine has done those lost children have found a voice – if not a surrogate mother – beyond their undignified grave.

Since the story broke in the Connacht Tribune in 2014, it has been a constant battle for Catherine and the survivors of the Tuam Mother & Baby home to win justice for those children and those left behind. Yet, she continues to persevere in the hope that the State, the Church and the Bons Secours Sisters will do right by the dead and the survivors alike.

To keep the focus on the atrocity, Catherine has released a book, described by publishers Hachette Ireland as “part memoir, part detective story”.

Written in cooperation with journalist Naomi Linehan, Belonging: A Memoir of Place, Beginning and One Woman’s Search for Truth and Justice for the Tuam Babies is Catherine’s personal account of her investigation and why, as a mother and grandmother, it resonates so deeply with her.

While Catherine sees the value of the book now, she didn’t always. A private person, she shunned a number of previous attempts to tell this story until, in 2019, she consented. “They (Hachette Ireland) said, ‘look, if you don’t write this book, somebody else is going to and who can tell the truth, only yourself’. I said, ‘okay so’.”

However, she put stipulations in place, one of which was that she would receive no royalties from its publication. They will go to the Tir na nÓg Orphanage Mission, which is a non-profit voluntary organisation created to alleviate the suffering of children in Tanzania.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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