Tuam mother and baby home: the trouble with the septic tank story

[struggle4progress]

47. I've learned something by looking around:

Last edited Wed Jun 18, 2014, 08:10 PM - Edit history (1)

Although some press accounts incorrectly identify this as the location of the Bons Secours community, that community was actually located about a kilometer away from this property. The Home was the former Workhouse for County Galway. Quite a few persons died in the county during the nineteenth century famines, and in that era the population of the workhouse reached several thousand. Several dozen unmarked graves of famine victims were discovered in 2012 on the larger property, though not at the small site now in question

At some point, it was decided that the Workhouse burials were too close to the infirmaries, and the county bought additional adjacent property in a nearby township for burial purposes. It is plausible that this additional property constitutes the small Site currently under discussion, since it also lies in a different township, but immediately adjacent to the township boundaries. On the other hand, a later map indicates the Site in question contained a sewage tank. So it seems possible that the Workhouse installed a sewerage system near burials. In the late 1930s, after continuing complaints from neighbors about Home sewage problems, the Home connected to public utilities

During the civil war, the Workhouse was temporarily commandeered as a military barracks, and several rebels were executed and buried on the property shortly before the end of the rebellion

The property was converted to a mothers and children's home in the 1920s but remained a County institution, owned and funded by the County while it was in operation. The conversion seems to have resulted from deteriorating conditions at another mothers and children's Home that had also previously been a workhouse, the Glenamaddy home. Closure of the Glenamaddy home became possible with the transfer of population to the Tuam Home, which was administered for the County under a contract with the Bons Secours sisters

The Bons Secours sisters assert that when the Tuam Home was closed in 1961, they transferred all administration records back to the County. Sometime after the Home was closed, it was demolished and new housing was constructed on much of the former site

Corless obtained her death figures entirely from public records, so the local authorities were aware of the deaths at the Home. Curiously, there seem to be reported about five times as many deaths a year during WWII as in the remaining years of facility operation. She seems to have been unable to locate any burial records. It is, of course, plausible that many of those who died at the home were buried on the grounds there, though there are many other children's burial grounds in the county where some might have eventually been placed

Two persons say that as school-aged children in 1975 they found skeletal remains, of perhaps twenty people, in a box under a broken 2' x 4' concrete slab on the site. Corless believes this could represent burials of children from the Home in the decommissioned sewage tank. Perhaps that's so -- but it's not known at present to be the case