00:00In Ireland, the excavation has begun at a former mother and baby home in the west in County Galway.
00:10The site suspected of containing the remains of some 800 infants and young children.
00:17It was an amateur historian that first discovered evidence of all this back in 2014.
00:23Clemence Waller has more.
00:25Abused and discarded, but now hopefully soon at peace.
00:33This seemingly calm site, once host to the former Tuam mother and baby home, is the suspected grave site of hundreds of children's remains.
00:41Eleven years after the first horrifying discoveries, their bodies will finally be exhumed and identified, providing some relief for the victims and their families.
00:50They were sentient beings. They've got no dignity in life and they've got no dignity in death.
00:55So hopefully now when their voices are heard, because I think they've been crying for a long time, be found.
01:02The Tuam mother and baby home mass grave scandal was first uncovered in 2014.
01:06After local historian Catherine Corliss discovered that between 1925 and 1961, almost 800 children, aged from a few weeks to three years old, died in a home for unwed pregnant women and girls, run by the Catholic Sisters of Bon Secours.
01:23Test excavations two years later found significant quantities of baby remains dumped in a septic tank at the location.
01:29The current project is a daunting task, which will be undertaken by both Irish and international specialists, which should take two years to complete.
01:38The first objective is to recover all of the human remains from the site, where they are manifestly and appropriately buried, and to rebury them with respect and dignity, following a consultative process with families.
01:51And we will work to establish the causes and circumstances of death.
01:54The oppressive and misogynistic institutions represent a dark chapter in Ireland's history, which saw thousands of girls and women sent to these places against their will.
02:04It wasn't until 2021 that the Irish state issued an apology for its role in the shameful story, after years of pressure from the victims' families.
02:13For more, let's go to Dublin, Alison O'Reilly, senior news reporter for the Irish Examiner, and the maker of the documentary film, The Missing Children.
02:25Thank you for speaking with us here on France 24.
02:29You're welcome.
02:30In that report, we heard a clip from a woman whose two brothers are believed to be into, her name is Anna Corrigan.
02:40And you spoke with her.
02:42Tell us about that.
02:44Yeah, Anna came to me in 2014 after I'd written a story about Protestant children who'd been buried in a mass grave.
02:53But they were in a cemetery in St. Jerome's, and there was an unveiling of a plaque there for their names, 222 children.
02:59And she contacted me in early 2014 to say that she was looking for her two missing brothers and that they had been buried in a site at the former tomb mother and baby home in Galway in the west of Ireland.
03:14And she went on to say that she understood from the work of a local historian, Catherine Corliss, that there could be up to 800 children who had died in the home at the time.
03:22So I began to work on the story and it took a long, long time to obviously check everything that Catherine and Anna Corrigan had brought to me.
03:33But the evidence was there that up to 800 children had died in the former mother and baby home that operated between 1925 and 1961.
03:42And that these children were buried in a disused sewage tank on the grounds of the former mother and baby home, as you quite rightly said, was used to house unmarried mothers at the time.
03:55And these horrible, awful religious run buildings were dotted all over the country by the state and ran by the religious orders and housed women who were having children outside of wedlock.
04:08And at the time in Ireland, that would have been viewed as worse than murder.
04:13It was deeply shameful to be pregnant and not married.
04:16And it didn't matter if your pregnancy was the result of an assault or a rape.
04:22It was your fault and you had to deal with it.
04:25And there could be disappointment for some because they worry the forensic archaeologists whether they're going to be able to identify the remains.
04:34So a lot of these children are buried since 1925.
04:41And so that's a very, very difficult thing for forensics to work on.
04:46What makes this cemetery unique worldwide, I suppose, is that it is a burial site full of infants and young children and children who are premature as well.
04:58And so their bones can almost be mistaken for tiny stones and they can break very easily.
05:06So it is extremely tedious work and it's going to be exceptionally complex for the forensic team.
05:14And there's a large amount of forensics who are specialised, who have come in from all over the world,
05:18including here in Ireland, to work on this very unique project, the first of its kind in Ireland.
05:25And the ground to the mother and baby home burial site was broken at 10.38 this morning.
05:31So the work has begun.
05:33But what we will find in the course of the two years, and they said expected two years, depending on what they find,
05:40it just remains to be seen because it is, as you quite rightly said, one of the most complex mass graves that you can work on and excavate
05:50because of the fragile remains and the tiny infants.
05:54But what we do know is that test excavations on this site in 2016 and 2017 did show a significant quantity of human remains discarded in a sewage tank
06:06in the grounds of the former mother and baby home that did date to this home.
06:11So there are remains there, but who they belong to, we don't know yet.
06:16The one thing we have been told is that forensics will be able to give ages of children,
06:22and they're going to try and individualize each skeleton and try and put the remains back together.
06:28But as you said, it's going to be extremely complex.
06:31Did I hear you say that she got in touch with you, this sister of two of the presumed deceased there,
06:43got in touch with you because you had been investigating a similar case, but at a Protestant home.
06:48Yeah, so the Bethany Homes in Dublin was also one of the homes that was investigated.
06:55A commission of inquiry was established after I broke this story in May 2014.
07:02There was a lot of pressure.
07:03These institutions were known.
07:07Survivors of the homes had been trying to get the government to react for years
07:10for the appalling conditions and treatment of the women and children in these homes.
07:14It was the first time we ever got the names of these children.
07:18So the Bethany home was based in Dublin, near Harold's Cross, and 222 children that we know of died there.
07:27Now, they were in a cemetery in St. Jerome Cemetery, close to the former home.
07:33And Professor Niall Meehan had uncovered their names with the late Bethany survivor, Derek Lister, who died.
07:39And they were unveiling those names when Catherine Corliss and Anna Corrigan were working on another mass grave in Galway.
07:50And the commission of inquiry that was established off the back of my story in 2014
07:55found that up to 9,000 children are buried in mass graves that we know of across the island of Ireland
08:04because the commission only investigated 14 mother and baby homes and four county homes.
08:10But there were over 100 in Ireland.
08:13So we know that there are more than 1,000 children in Tipperary, in Ross Cray,
08:18from the former mother and baby home, Sean Ross Abbey,
08:21that people would know this story from the film Philomena, the Oscar-nominated film Philomena.
08:28There's also over 1,000 children in Bespera in Cork and more than 200 in Castle Pollard
08:34and up to 6,000 in St. Patrick's mother and baby home in Dublin.
08:39But they're the only ones that we know of.
08:41But we now have names for those homes that I've just mentioned.
08:45So Toome is just the tip of the iceberg.
08:48But the difference with Toome is the children here were buried in a disused sewage tank.
08:53Alison O'Reilly, there's the question of why there was this war against women, you might say,
09:02and their children on the one hand.
09:05And there's also the question of why this culture of complicity of silence about it all for so long.
09:15Ireland was a very different time at the time, and I'm not making excuses.
09:19I know my own grandmother spoke out against children that were locked up in the Magdalene homes,
09:25young girls, but that was very rare that somebody would speak out.
09:31Ireland had its own government, but unfortunately we had a Bishop Archbishop McQuaid
09:37who ran this country and seemed to be held in very high regard all over Ireland
09:42to be pregnant outside of marriage.
09:47And I'm not underestimating this.
09:48This was viewed to be worse than murder.
09:51You were, you got a knock on the door and you were told to get your child out of the community
09:58if she was pregnant.
09:59It didn't matter if she was assaulted, if this was incest, rape.
10:04You had to deal with it.
10:05And you were named on the altar in church on a Sunday as a disgrace to the community.
10:12And it was the way the country was ran.
10:15But, you know, I think we've left the, we've let the Irish government off way too much with this.
10:21And we blame the religious orders who were, you know, supposedly caring for these people.
10:26And it was, you know, a so-called response to a crisis of unmarried mothers.
10:31However, you know, the states were the regulators.
10:35The states allowed this to happen and they continually, continually licensed these places,
10:41inspected them and approved them to continue in their operation.
10:45The state has apologised, but not, it's not been enough for survivors
10:50because they began their apology by blaming all of society.
10:54But society were in a great fear of the church in Ireland at the time.
11:00One woman who's alive today and she's 94 years old, she's the oldest survivor of the two mother and baby home
11:07and looking for one of her sons who died.
11:11She said that the Irish police came to her home when she was pregnant.
11:16She was taken to the local police station and she was questioned by a retired judge
11:22in front of these two male police officers.
11:24And she was told, if you don't tell us the name of the father of this child, we're going to arrest you.
11:32And she said, well, I've nothing to lose and I've nowhere to go.
11:35So you might as well arrest me.
11:37So that is what was happening.
11:38We have testimony from living survivors who will tell you that the Irish police and the nuns came looking for you
11:45and you were sent away and hidden and your families were helpless.
11:51And I'm not saying that some families, you know, weren't strong enough
11:54and didn't support their children in these awful circumstances.
11:58But to do that, you had to be very, very brave and probably a bit wealthy
12:04and have a bit of power in society to be able to speak up for your child in these circumstances.
12:10It was a different Ireland.
12:12It was a different time.
12:13When did the times change?
12:15When was that moment where the Irish were no longer afraid?
12:21The last home didn't close till the late 90s.
12:24So we brought in a payment in the 80s for lone parents.
12:30Women began to speak out.
12:31The homes began to close.
12:34There was no control over women.
12:36There was still a fear.
12:37But women began to stand up and speak out and say, actually, you're not taking my child.
12:42Actually, I'm going to go to work.
12:45And women began to leave the home and go to work.
12:48Women began to become independent and want to have a career.
12:51Women decided that they weren't going to be housewives and and rare children all of their lives.
12:57And there's nothing wrong with that if that's what you want to do.
13:00But when women began to go to work and speak out and stand up and say, no, actually, I want to keep my child.
13:07They realised that there was actually no law in Ireland at the time that made you give up your child.
13:15It was fear.
13:17And Ireland, you know, allowed this to happen.
13:19And the country allowed this to happen because there was so much and we frightened people.
13:26We we had a code of silence by peer pressure, bullying and ostracising these women.
13:33And and that changed.
13:35Women began to say, no, you're not taking my child.
13:38I want my child back.
13:39And they learned their rights and they knew their rights.
13:42And there was legal advice there to say there was no law in the land that allowed your child be taken off you unless you were neglecting your child or, you know, being physically abusive to your child.
13:54There are different laws for that.
13:56But there was no law in the land to say as an unmarried mother, you weren't allowed to keep your child.
14:02So people began to stand up.
14:05The homes began to close.
14:06People started to turn away from the church.
14:09The scandals of sexual abuse and violence in the religious orders in our industrial schools, our Magdalene laundries, all of these religious run institutions, both Catholic and Protestant, people started to say no.
14:24And then there began to be no need for these homes anymore.
14:27And a payment was then eventually introduced into lone parents or, you know, deserted wives.
14:34And we began to support women in rearing children alone and providing housing for them.
14:42And that's how things began to slowly change.
14:45And you write in your story for the Irish Examiner how, even for yourself at times, some of this seems unbelievable.
14:51You say in your conclusion how people, it was ordinary people in the end who brought this story to light.
15:01It was women.
15:02It was women who brought this story out.
15:05Anna Corrigan is an unmarried mother of two girls.
15:10She's now a grandmother.
15:12Catherine Corliss was a grandmother working from her home.
15:15This wasn't a big team of researchers backed by a lot of finance.
15:19These were women who had an interest in the little children that died in these appalling circumstances.
15:27A lot of it was hunger, neglect.
15:30And, you know, just just absolutely horrific causes of deaths.
15:33The names are there.
15:35They're public now.
15:35And you can see the causes of deaths.
15:38And Anna Corrigan was looking for her two brothers because she had been researching her family history when she learned that our mother had two secret babies that she never told her about.
15:49And they came to me with that story and we worked on it and we exposed it.
15:54And in all of my career, and I've been a journalist for nearly 30 years, I have never seen a reaction to a story worldwide as I have with this.
16:04It's one that I'm very proud of because it was a very important story and a story that mattered.
16:11And I will say on the first week that this story came out in Ireland, there was no reaction from government.
16:18There was absolutely nothing.
16:19That's why we're very grateful to the international media, such as yourselves, who put pressure on the Irish government to react to this.
16:29And that's how this story came out.
16:31It was a week later when the Mail Online picked up my story and it exploded all across the world.
16:38And that is how we ended up getting an exhumation that started today.
16:43And quite rightly so, but it was very slow, the reaction, to get to this point.
16:52Alison O'Reilly, so many thanks for joining us today from Dublin.
16:56Thank you for having me.
16:58Stay with us.
16:58There's much more to come.
16:59More news.
17:00Plus, we'll give you in the day's sports all the ups and downs for the first mounting stage in the Tour de France.
