Excavation has begun in Ireland at an unmarked mass burial site to identify the remains of about 800 infants and toddlers who died at a church-run home for unmarried mothers.
The digging of the site on Monday marked the beginning of a two-year investigation planned by Irish and foreign forensic archaeologists and crime scene experts in the western city of Tuam.
The probe comes more than a decade after Catherine Corless, an amateur historian, first uncovered evidence of a mass grave there, forcing the government to form a commission to investigate the matter.
The commission found that the remains of 802 children from newborns to three-year-olds were buried in Tuam from 1925 to 1961 as it discovered an “appalling” mortality rate of about 15 percent among children born at all of the so-called Mother and Baby Homes, which operated across Ireland.
Subsequent test excavations from 2016 and 2017 found significant quantities of baby remains in a disused septic tank at the location, which now sits within a housing complex.
Ireland’s Office of the Director of Authorised Intervention (ODAIT) will undertake the excavation with experts from Colombia, Spain, Britain, Canada and the United States.
It will involve exhumation, analysis, identification if possible and reinterment of the remains found, Director Daniel MacSweeney said at a recent news conference in Tuam.
‘Denied dignity and respect’
“These children were denied every human right in their lifetime as were their mothers,” Anna Corrigan, whose two siblings may have been buried at the Tuam site, told reporters this month, the AFP news agency reported.
“And they were denied dignity and respect in death.”
The Tuam home, run by nuns from the Bon Secours Order, was demolished in the 1970s and replaced by a housing estate.
Significant quantities of human skeletal remains were found in chambers along with babies’ shoes and nappy pins underneath a patch of grass near a playground during the test excavations.
Corless found records that show as many as 796 babies and children died at the Tuam home over the decades that it operated. State-issued death certificates compiled show that various ailments, from tuberculosis and convulsions to measles and whooping cough, were listed as the causes of death.
“It’s been a fierce battle. When I started this, nobody wanted to listen. At last we are righting the wrongs,” Corless, 71, told AFP in May. “I was just begging: Take the babies out of this sewage system and give them the decent Christian burial that they were denied.”
A six-year inquiry sparked by the initial discoveries in Tuam found 56,000 unmarried women and 57,000 children passed through 18 such homes over a 76-year period. It also concluded that 9,000 children had died in the various state- and Catholic Church-run homes nationwide.
