800 babies were murdered and dumped in a septic tank in Tuam.
That is what the majority of the public believes about the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home.
In 2021, controversial Irish leader Leo Varadkar, who occasionally attend the Traditional Latin Mass, stated as a matter of fact that there were babies buried in a septic tank.
The final Commission report for the Mother and Baby Homes made no such claims, but their interim report did address it and dismissed it, stating:
The human remains found by the Commission are not in a sewage tank but in a second structure with 20 chambers which was built within the decommissioned large sewage tank.
The precise purpose of the chamber structure has not been established but it is likely to be related to the treatment/containment of sewage and/or waste water. It has not been established if it was ever used for this purpose although soil analysis illustrates that it is likely it was so used for an unspecified duration. The Commission does not consider that any of its features suggest that it was 10 deliberately formed as a crypt or formal burial chamber. If that were the case, an entirely different type of structure would have been expected that would allow for easy human access.
It has not been established that all the children who died in the Tuam Children’s Home are buried in this chamber structure. There is some evidence that there may be burials in other parts of what were the grounds of the Home.
It seems clear that relatively extensive work and construction was conducted in and around the site of the Children’s Home in Tuam, particularly during the July – December 1937 period. The Commission thinks it possible that the reworking of the old sewage tank and the construction of the second structure described above may have occurred at this time. If this is so, then the human remains found in the chambers are likely to date from after 1937. This raises the question of where the children who died before then are buried.
The final Commission report stated that coffins were made on site:
He described the home as having an economy of its own with the handy man sometimes making coffins
The same report interviewed those who had lived. Many of them responded about how cruel secular society had been towards them:
This woman said that the girls in the home were allowed visitors but no one ever came to visit. ‘No one wanted to know you while you were in there. I think about three girls had a visitor while I was there. I had none.
Others said:
A former child resident wrote of her memories of the Sisters of Bon Secours in 2002. She described them as ‘the kindest and dearest nuns I had the privleg (sic) of knowing’. ‘I am shocked and appalled at the people who falsely accuse the Bon Secours nuns of abusing the children in their care’. She said that she was wellfed, clothed and kept warm in the winter by the Sisters. The children learned how to sing and step-dance with the nuns and staged plays at Christmas time. ‘We had a good instructor and entertained priests, nuns and high class people of Tuam. We lacked nothing’. She cried when she was boarded out, aged seven but soon grew to love her foster family. Sister Hortense sent a gift every Christmas to her and to other boarded out children. She described Sister Hortense as having ‘a heart of gold’.
And the child of another:
He went to the local national school in Tuam where he ‘was always conscious that he had boots and socks on his feet and some of the other children “townies” came to school without shoes even in winter time’. He recalled being beaten by a teacher but this stopped when the chaplain to the Tuam home threatened to prevent the teacher from teaching again if he continued with the beatings. He took part in school concerts and sang in the Cathedral choir and recalled that a gramophone was put on in the home in the evenings.
In 2014, a now forgotten Irish Times article actually pointed out the absurdity of the wildly believed claims.
Written by Rosita Boland, it was entitled Tuam mother and baby home: the trouble with the septic tank story.
The subheading said: Catherine Corless’s research revealed that 796 children died at St Mary’s. She now says the nature of their burial has been widely misrepresented.
It opens with:
‘I never used that word ‘dumped’,” Catherine Corless, a local historian in Co Galway, tells The Irish Times. “I never said to anyone that 800 bodies were dumped in a septic tank. That did not come from me at any point. They are not my words.”
In case that did not register, read those words again:
‘I never used that word ‘dumped’,” Catherine Corless, a local historian in Co Galway, tells The Irish Times. “I never said to anyone that 800 bodies were dumped in a septic tank. That did not come from me at any point. They are not my words.”
Boland then recounts the numerous headlines which twisted the story after the initial revelations.
The Washington Post for example, claimed Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank. Al Jazeera said Nearly 800 dead babies found in septic tank in Ireland. The New York Daily News said 800 skeletons of babies found inside tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers.
None of these were true. But you can imagine the psychological effects that this had on the Irish population. How many people stopped attending Mass, kept their kids from Catholic schools or reconsidered their vocation because the church was happy for them to believe that this had really occurred?
Boland points out that Corless’s work did indeed highlight 796 babies died, over a 30 year period, but then points out that infection spread rapidly and consequently compared to high death rate of the time in society at large, it was not unthinkable.
Boland then quotes Corless:
“I never used that word ‘dumped’,” she says again, with distress. “I just wanted those children to be remembered and for their names to go up on a plaque. That was why I did this project, and now it has taken [on] a life of its own.”
Boland then mentions how the story about bones occurred because some boys “came upon a sort of crypt in the ground, and on peering in they saw several small skulls. I’m told they ran for their lives and relayed their find to their parents.” This was in proximity to the home, hence the conflation between the grave being definitely of those in the home with no other explanation.
She spoke with one of the boys, who said: “But there was no way there were 800 skeletons down that hole. Nothing like that number. I don’t know where the papers got that.”
The boy said that the number was closer to 20.
Towards the end of the story, Boland states that she pointed out to Corless that the sewage tank remaining in use between 1925 and 1937 means that it was not possible for 796 babies to have been put into it. Boland tells us that ‘Corless admits that it now seems impossible to her that more than 200 bodies could have been put in a working sewage tank’.
In a follow up post, Boland addressed Corless’s daughter, who had written a blog in response, in which Boland says that Corless’s daughter said that ‘this is false’, regarding the admission of the impossibility of the burials between 1925 and 1937.
Boland says that she recorded a video in the morning where Corless said ‘it’s quite possible’ that 796 bodies were in the tank. Boland then writes.
‘I called her about 5pm, and asked if she would check the number of deaths registered between 1925 and 1937. She phoned me back some minutes later, and told me it was 204.
I had carefully read and reread her article, The Home, which was first published in the Journal of the Old Tuam Society. In it, your mother states “the new sewage and drainage scheme was brought into Tuam in late 1930.” Your mother had earlier qualified that date as being 1937.
We then had a conversation about the fact the sewage tank was clearly still in use at the Home until the arrival of the new public water system. It was then that your mother stated to me on the phone that given the tank was in operation between 1925 and 1937, it thus now “seemed impossible” to her that bodies would have been put in a working tank during those years.
‘‘I put it to her that it could not then be the case that all 796 bodies could be in the tank, as other media outlets were reporting. She agreed. I have my notes of that phonecall’’.
