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

[struggle4progress]

50. What you call distracting from the story, I consider an effort to find the story

Currently, I know of at least two and possibly three different classes of burials on the property that once contained the Workhouse: there are Workhouse residents, probably including victims of the 1840 famines; there are the recorded civil war prisoners executed, and there are likely to be at least some Home residents after 1925

The small Site in question is one of several locations, on the property that once contained the Workhouse, where one might look for burials, This Site might, in fact, have been explicitly purchased by the Workhouse for burials; and it might also contain a septic tank from the Workhouse era that was abandoned in 1937

The Site reportedly contains a box under a 2' x 4' concrete slab, in which 40 years ago two boys saw about 20 skeletons. That report, so far as we know now, did not trigger any alarm at the time. A recent ground-penetrating radar survey apparently has detected what seems to be a subsurface 16' x 16' box structure, which might be a former septic tank; it is not immediately obvious whether this is consistent with reports about the 1975 discovery

Infant mortality rates in Ireland in the first part of the 20th century seem shocking by modern standards, but the statistical profile is quite irregular, often depending on the course of local epidemics. The mortality rates were often lower in rural than urban areas, presumably due to issues involving spread of contagions. Even in England in the early 20th century, there were towns with infant mortality rates in the range 100-200 per 1000. Improvements in public health produced steady and dramatic declines in infant mortality in Ireland after WWII

It seems quite a lot of children died at the Home between 1925 and 1961: on average a child died every two weeks. To understand these figures, we need more information: if, for example, the Home population included about 100 infants, and all deaths are infants, the mortality rate would have been 260/1000, which seems high by any standard; if the Home population included about 200 infants, and all deaths were infants, the mortality rate would have been 130/1000, which is not unknown for some places at some times during the era. And perhaps almost half of the deaths come from the WWII era, when there was a general spike in infant mortality in the UK: this may involve compound effects from (say) both food limitations due to rationing and increased crowding

The Home was owned and funded by County Galway, which supported it under contract to the amount of about 10 shillings per resident per year, which adjusted for inflation and converted to today's US dollars might represent about $6.50 per resident per day -- not a terribly generous allowance. It seems possible nowadays to feed people in such settings for somewhat over $1.50/meal, which would leave under $2/day to cover all other necessities, such as clothing and bed linens, laundry, medical care, physical plant maintenance, and so on. The death records used by Corless are from official public sources, so the information would have been available to the County government, had anyone been interested