Work begins in Ireland to recover bodies of 796 babies

Excavation has begun at the site of a former mother and baby home where hundreds of infants died between 1925 and 1961

- AMY-CLARE MARTIN CRIME CORRESPONDENT

The bodies of hundreds of infants who died in an Irish mother and baby home are to be recovered from a septic tank where they have lain hidden in an unmarked grave for decades. As

excavation work starts on the mass grave, thought to contain the bodies of 796 infants, it is hoped it will be possible to identify some of the remains before they are given a proper burial.

The painstaking process, expected to last two years, comes more than 10 years after historian Catherine Corless first uncovered the shocking secrets of St Mary’s mother and baby home in Tuam, County Galway. In 2014, she found there were no burial records for hundreds of infants and young children who had died between 1925 and 1961 at the home for unmarried mothers run by the Bon Secours sisters, a religious order of Catholic nuns.

When Ms Corless visited the site, now a housing estate, she learnt how two boys had lifted a broken concrete slab near a children’s playground in the 1970s and seen bones inside. Mary Moriarty, who lived in a house near to the site, told the BBC before her death that she had gone to see what the boys had found and “fell in a hole”. Inside, she saw hundreds of “little bundles” of cloth, which had gone black from rot and damp and were “packed one after the other, in rows up to the ceiling”.