Diarmaid Ferriter: Truth of what lies beneath Tuam home must be uncovered

Four years after the painstaking research of Catherine Corless on the Tuam Mother and Baby Home received extensive national and international attention, and calls for "urgent inquiry", the tortured quest to uncover the full extent of what went on in and under the home's grounds was back in focus during the week.

At a meeting in Tuam on Monday night, Minister for Children Katherine Zappone spoke to some of those affected and outlined her "personal" view that the possibility of exhumation of the remains and their reinterment should be "investigated".

This could amount to “taking all reasonable steps to investigate the scope for retrieval of human remains and if logistically possible, to exhume and reinter the bodies in a respectful and sensitive manner” but that due to “questions of scale” this was not “altogether straightforward”.

Interestingly, the media was banned from this meeting but some inside were determined that the proceedings would be relayed by live tweeting. And well they might have. It is unacceptable that this has been allowed to drag on for four years and there should be a lot more clarity and transparency about why that is so. It has been widely reported that residents of Tuam have differing opinions as to what should be done with the site, but Corless, who favours full exhumation, identification and reinterment of remains, has also maintained that there were problems with the way the residents were consulted and that it was inappropriate to “poll” people on a menu of different options.

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Far too many qualifications have bordered the responses of the State and Galway County Council to this emotive question. It should have been confronted properly four years ago, for the simple reason that the question of what lies beneath will not go away and the longer it drags on the more damage that is done to all concerned.

Foot-dragging

At the Galway Arts Festival last weekend, President Michael D Higgins rightly made a point of praising the research of Corless on the recorded 796 deaths at the Mother and Baby Home as “an extraordinary act of civic virtue”. The pity is that such virtue has not been matched by a sufficient response to her revelations. Corless also spoke at the festival and outlined the foot-dragging and door-shutting that has been apparent in the wake of her work, along with an inadequate engagement with the issues raised by the Bon Secours Order, which ran the home.

If the remains in Tuam were archaeological, there would be a concerted and focused effort to establish their full extent

The homes for unmarried mothers existed because, according to the Catholic Archbishop of Tuam in 1926, Dr Thomas Gilmartin, "the future of the country is bound up with the dignity and the purity of the women of Ireland". There was moving testimony at the festival from PJ Haverty, born in 1951 in the Tuam home, who spent the first five years of his life there before being fostered into a loving home. He outlined the heartbreak of discovering that after his mother left the home "she knocked on the door for 5½ years trying to take me out, but the nuns wouldn't allow it". PJ could never escape the shame and stigma of being born "illegitimate" and the judgments of that era; as he put it "you were just a bastard in their eyes".

Archaeology vs human remains

In a further interview on Monday, Corless made the point that if the remains in Tuam were archaeological, there would be a concerted and focused effort to establish their full extent. Just consider the justified fuss, for example, that is being made about the discovery of a passage tomb cemetery dating back over 5,000 years that has been discovered beside Dowth Hall in Co Meath during an excavation carried out by Devenish in partnership with the UCD school of archaeology, visited by the Minister for Culture and Heritage and publicised because the excavators want “to share our findings with the community”.

Problematic headlines went around the world in 2014 declaring definitively that 800 bodies had been “dumped” in a septic tank in Tuam. There were premature, simplistic and speculative assertions and Corless pointed out in June 2014: “I never said to anyone that 800 bodies were dumped in a septic tank.” All the more reason why uncovering exactly what is there should have begun at that stage. This would also have allowed those most closely affected by this to come to terms with the truth.

As revealed by historian Lindsey Earner Byrne, an inspector in the department of local government and public health in the 1930s and 1940s, Ann Lister, compiled reports on some of the realities of life and death in these Mother and Baby Homes. Lister also wrote a report for a Catholic charity, subsequently censored, the conclusion of which should ring in Katherine Zappone's ears: "These babies are our own; they are entitled to Irish citizenship". Recognising that should involve the urgent uncovering of the truth of what lies beneath in Tuam.