One painstaking task that will bring its own rewards for Catherine

Country Living with Francis Farragher

It’s November and Christmas is just around the corner, a time when most of us strive for some kind of peace and happiness during the mid-winter period, but over the past week there still continues to be something quite haunting about the work of Catherine Corless, as she devotes a large chunk of her work of recent years to remembering and recording the almost 800 children buried in an unmarked graveyard just off Tuam’s Dublin Road.

The story again hit the headlines over the past week when she revealed that the burial site for the children, many of them infants, was in fact much larger than the very well kept little garden, that many local people have lovingly tended to over the decades.

Common sense though always had to dictate that the area required to bury 796 children had to be, in all probability, greater than the size of the enclosed current location, and Catherine Corless’s more recent work actually points to a County Council report back in 1979, referencing the burial area, at a time when there was a playground proposal for the site.

The St. Mary’s mother-and-baby home was established in the building that was the old workhouse in Tuam, dating back to the mid-1800s, but in 1925 the Bon Secours nuns took it over to cater primarily for young women ‘who got in trouble’ (to use that shocking but thankfully archaic phrase to describe pregnant single women). The rest as they say, is history, and a very painful and harrowing one too.

The story of course got distorted out of all sensible parameters when a septic tank was found in the same area and the world’s media cut loose on interpreting what was, and is, just a very sad reflection of an Ireland that was backward, uncaring in a ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ kind of way, and that was also hugely deficient in resources and knowledge in dealing with the health of mothers and especially their infant children.

Even the more reputable news organisations like The Guardian, The Washington Post and ABC News Australia couldn’t resist terms like the ‘dumping of bodies’ and the use of ‘septic tank’ graves. The reality is that each year between 1925 and 1961, about 22 children, mostly infants, died at St. Mary’s – almost every fortnight there was a burial at the back of the home. Shocking and horrible yes, but not a mass ‘dumping’ of bodies.

The reality of health care in our ‘great new country of freedom’ through the 30s, 40s and 50s, was that child mortality at birth was high, while as children grew up through their early school years, many also succumbed to a variety of what we would now regard as minor ailments.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.