Forensic teams have begun exhumations at the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Ireland, once overseen by devout Catholic nuns.
What investigators believe to be nearly 800 infants and toddlers, aged from 35 weeks in utero to about three years old, were discovered buried in an old septic tank.
Operating between 1925 and 1961, the home served as a forced hideaway for unwed pregnant women.
These young mothers, dismissed as moral failures by both Church and State, were reportedly interned for months, compelled into slave labor, and then stripped of their infants—many boys and girls who would perish from malnutrition, disease, or sheer neglect.
Local historian Catherine Corless painstakingly revealed that out of 798 recorded deaths, only two had proper burials; the remains of the rest were never accounted for—until now.
Excavations began June 16 under the Office of the Director of Authorised Intervention in Tuam (ODAIT), and are expected to last up to two years, with painstaking DNA identification and dignified reinterment underway.
The New York Post reported:
Many of the infant remains are feared to have been dumped in the cesspool known as “the pit” at the former institution in the small town of Tuam, County Galway, local historian Catherine Corless told Sky News.
[…]
The other 796 children’s remains are believed to be under the site of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, which was demolished in 1971 and is now surrounded by a modern apartment complex.
Bon Secours, known locally as The Home, was a maternity home for unmarried mothers and their children, run by a religious order of Catholic nuns.
Unmarried pregnant women would be sent to the home to give birth and would be interned for a year to do unpaid work.
They were separated from their newborn children, who would be raised by the nuns until they were adopted, often without the consent of their families.
The full scale of the tragedy at Bon Secours was only uncovered in 2014 thanks to Corless’s findings.
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