Excavation hopes to find identities of children in mass grave

On a summer day, the site of the children's mass grave in Tuam appears deceptively bucolic. There are no crosses or tombstones in the walled patch of grass. Butterflies flit over shrubs. Robins cheep from branches. It's peaceful.

- Rory Carroll

 

"They are two-feet down from where we are standing," Catherine Corless said. "The bones have mingled together and water got in and thrashed them around. But they're there."

Corless is the local historian who a decade ago alerted Ireland, and the world, to a shocking truth about this Galway town: for decades an institution for unmarried mothers put the remains of dead babies and children in a disused subterranean septic tank.

Corless found that, between 1925 and 1961, 796 children died at the St Mary's mother and baby home, run by nuns from the Bon Secours order - but there were no burial records. Now a team of forensic investigators led by Daniel Mac Sweeney, a former International Committee of the Red Cross envoy, has been tasked with exhuming, analysing and identifying the remains.

"There has been nothing on this scale before in Ireland," Roderic O'Gorman, the children's minister, said in an interview. "This will be one of the most complex operations of its kind in the world."