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THE FIRST EXCAVATIONS at the site of the former Tuam mother and baby home are expected to start in the latter half of 2019.
Legislation must first be passed by the Oireachtas to give government the power to carry out these excavations.
The Commission of Investigation into the home, which was run by the Bon Secours nuns as a home for unmarried mothers from 1925 until 1961, announced in March 2017 that it had uncovered a significant amount of human remains at the site,
A decision to carry out a full forensic examination was announced in October.
Speaking to reporters, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar confirmed that the next stage of the Commission of Investigation will move ahead in 2019, once legislation is passed allow for the government to carry out excavations.
“In the meantime, we can start appointing the experts and the ground team who’ll be doing the actual work,” he said.
We’ve never really done this before in Ireland, on this scale, so we’ve a lot to set up, [and] a lot to learn before we do it.
“We’re not entirely sure what we’re getting into, but as a government we’re convinced this is the right thing to do, to remove the remains and to give those children a proper decent burial they didn’t get – and if possible to remain some of them, if we can, if the technology allows that. ”
The investigation was sparked by local historian Catherine Corless who, after cross-referencing death certifications from the home with local burials, found that 796 children who died at the home were not given an official burial.
This, combined with stories of local children finding a disused sewage system ‘filled to the brim with bones’, led to Corless to speculate that children were buried in a single plot at the site, as first reported by the Irish Mail on Sunday.
Initial forensic examinations of the site vindicated her: Two structures were found during the investigation, a septic tank and a long, underground structure divided into 20 chambers used for processing sewage or wastewater. The latter is where the human remains were discovered, with testing revealing the deceased were aged between 35 foetal weeks to as old as three years old when they died.
It is not yet clear whether it was ever used for sewerage or wastewater.
Experts have previously said that the excavation of the site will be extremely complex, and that identification of the remains would be difficult, primarily because they would have ‘mixed’.
The cost of the forensic investigation at the Tuam site is estimated at between €6 million and €13 million. The Bon Secours Sisters, who ran the mother and baby home, have offered the Government a €2.5 million voluntary contribution towards the investigation.
Additional reporting by Christina Finn and Cónal Thomas
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And so begins the truth hopefully….. I hope this will bring some sort of closure and peace to those families
Public Hanging for the people who were involved in this .
@Derek Moean: Hopefully we’ll find out how they were murdered and start the process to track down the killers.
@Juan Fangio: Turn down the rhetoric! There is no suggestion that these children were killed. If memory serves, infant mortality at the home was shown to be similar to the rest of the country at the time.
@Pharmy: Totally agree on child mortality but one ridiculous comment deserves another.
@Pharmy: I thought it came out that the infant mortality in mother and baby homes was about 5 times that of the rest of the country at the time?
@Caireann Rua: 4 out of 5 babies born in the Tuam home did not reach their first birthday. This was double the mortality rate of the other homes/institutions of neglect, never mind compared to the rest of the state.
@Pharmy: You have a selectively short memory so.
@Pharmy: The Iona Institute are Trolling?? What you really mean is: ” Shut up condemning the Catholic Church”! Sorry boys, the genie is out of the bottle for some years now. There is no going back! Disgusting!
All this legislation that needs to be passed on many important subjects yet the TDs will be on holidays then only sit e days a week until they have a half term break. Ridiculous ! Overpaid wasters
If there is a more apt metaphor for how children of unwed mothers were seen by the catholic church, I have not seen it. Truly horrific, and I would not be a bit surprised to read that there are many more mass graves filled with such children.
@The Risen: Indeed. To be honest, those children could have survived the disapproval of local churches if they hadn’t been starved to death by an organisation being paid regularly to look after them while pressing the mothers into indentured labour.
Another Horror they will undoubtably uncover
The Catholic Church is truly evil.
@Joseph Bent: fair & balanced Joseph
Anywhere else in the world where a mass grave is discovered crime scene is sealed off, forensics go in and anybody remotely connected is investigated
Ireland however,and it’s a managed cover up so nobody is held accountable
It’s funny how legislations are passed overnight and this is being dragged out
@TechBuzz Ireland: It’s almost as though some groups are lobbying to minimise “scandal”. They deserve better, I agree.
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