Tuam shows importance of dealing only in facts

World of Politics with Harry McGee

One of the fundamental values of journalism is that facts are sacred. Journalism is dying. All the old media are dying. They put a value – as in, a salary or fee – on a reporter establishing if something was true or not, without fear or favour.

Sometimes the reporter got it wrong, but they went the whole nine yards endeavouring to stand up the truth of it, in so much as they possibly could.

Not anymore.

The media industry is in the midst of a disruptive phenomenon. It is being replaced by something that is more immediate, cheaper and infinitely more superficial. Facts don’t need to be established anymore.

For a lot of the new practitioners (many of them working for nothing) they become facts as soon as they appear on the screen, and can be finessed or manipulated or distorted to suit a particular purpose or agenda.

And unfortunately a lot of mainstream media has had no choice but to succumb to that manic projectile vomit of information and opinion, and parrotted out stuff that has subsequently been shown to have no foundation.

The English journalist Nick Davis coined a good word for it in his book on this subject: churnalism.

The story about the Tuam mother and baby home is a good illustration of this.

A local historian Catherine Corless discovered some very salient information about the operation of the home by the Bon Secours order of nuns between 1925 and 1961. Her painstaking research showed that some 796 children and infants had died in the home over a 26-year period, or 22 a year.

When she tried to match the names of those who had died with the local burial records of graveyards in the vicinity of Tuam, she came up with a blank, save for one small boy who was buried in his family plot.

The only logical explanation was a small plot adjacent to the old children’s home. It is marked as a children’s burial ground by national monuments. Some maps dating as far back as 1992 show a sewage tank market there too.

Before the mother and baby home was opened in 1925, the complex was a workhouse dating back to the 1840s and it is likely that bodies from that period were also buried there, or nearby.

In 1975, two local boys who were playing in the plot, which had then become wasteland, disturbed the tank-like structure and saw some skeletons. Corless surmised that the tank, no longer operational after 1938, might have been made into a crypt of some kind – and she hoped that it had been cleaned out.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.