The Tuam babies of Ireland

In 2014 a shocking news story emerged from western Ireland. Human remains, appearing to be those of infants and young children, had been found in a septic tank on the grounds of the former St. Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway. Soon, many grim facts about the Tuam mother and baby home emerged. More than 800 children died there, representing nearly one-quarter of the children who lived in the home during its operation. “An awful lonely ould hole” was how one former resident of the home once described it. The Irish prime minister called it a “chamber of horrors.”

From 1925 to 1961 the Tuam mother and baby home had been run by the Congregation of the Sisters of Bon Secours, a Roman Catholic religious order. The home was one of many institutions in Ireland run by religious orders in cooperation with the Irish government. At the end of the 20th century these institutions were at the center of numerous abuse scandals that shook the country and changed many people’s perceptions of the Catholic Church. But the discovery of the “Tuam babies,” as they came to be called, breached another level of outrage. For some, it marked the definitive end of Ireland’s reputation as one of the world’s most devoutly Catholic countries.

The discovery of the Tuam babies also opened another wound inflicted by the abuse crisis. After more than a decade of public protests, contentious debates about a memorial, and a lengthy government investigation (2015–20), the process of excavating the remains began in July 2025. The primary hope is that all the remains can be identified. But many people are still seeking answers to the question of what went wrong in modern Ireland that led to a tragedy on such a mass scale?

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Background: Irish Catholicism and mother and baby homes

To begin to understand what happened in the Tuam mother and baby home, it’s necessary to know just how powerful a social force the Catholic Church was in 20th-century Ireland. For a full article on the subject, see Ground Zero: Ireland and the Church Abuse Crisis.

When Ireland became independent from Britain with the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, more than 90 percent of the country’s population was Catholic, and weekly mass attendance was exceptionally high. Although the newly independent country guaranteed religious liberty for all its citizens, in 1937 Catholic social teaching was written into a new constitution. For example, divorce was banned and several articles of the constitution contained language that spoke of the sanctity of the family and described a woman’s rightful place as in the home. (These articles aroused debate for decades, spurring a national referendum in the 21st century that aimed to remove what some people considered outdated language.)

Together, the church and the state controlled most of Ireland’s hospitals, schools, orphanages, reformatories, and maternity homes. Their oversight was usually the responsibility of the Irish government, especially local councils and health authorities, but religious orders typically handled their day-to-day operation. In this way, Ireland not only provided an extensive social support system to its citizens but also enforced Catholic morals and beliefs. One of these beliefs was that having a child out of wedlock was a sin and a scandal, so much so that women who became pregnant outside of marriage were socially ostracized, disowned by their families, and fired from their jobs. Some were admitted to Magdalene laundries, where they performed unpaid manual labor under the watch of nuns as penitence for their sins.

To mitigate the shame of having a child out of wedlock, many unmarried pregnant women were sent to maternity homes, or mother and baby homes, a few weeks or months before giving birth. After giving birth (either at the home or at a hospital), they stayed at the home for a period typically ranging from a few months to two years. Many were discouraged from taking their children with them when they left, having essentially relinquished their right to raise them because of their social transgression. Instead, their children remained at the home until they were fostered out, sent to an industrial school (a type of reformatory or training school), or adopted (legalized in Ireland in 1952). It was common for these women and their children to be admitted to more than one institution and spend much of their lives under church and state control.

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Life in the Tuam mother and baby home

The St. Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam was a former workhouse that had been turned over to the Galway County Council in 1925 and repurposed into a maternity home. The council made all major decisions pertaining to the home and covered the costs of health care for the residents, including payments to a dispensary doctor and an external midwife. The Sisters of Bon Secours received no salaries, but the order covered the costs of additional staff, which might consist of local women or former residents who helped take care of the babies or assisted the nuns. These staff members were not specially trained, a fact that would play a role in the home’s demise along with budget concerns and poor conditions.

In the course of its operation, the Tuam home housed about 2,220 women and 3,350 children. For the women, daily life consisted of attending morning mass, followed by a breakfast of porridge and tea, then breastfeeding and cleaning their babies. Most of their day, however, was spent cleaning and maintaining the home itself, for which they were not paid. Children who remained in the home and were of school age attended one of Tuam’s primary schools. Like their mothers, they were ostracized. Locals recall that the “home babies,” as they were called, usually sat apart from the rest of the children and that they looked uncared for and were frequently ill.

Indeed, conditions inside the Tuam mother and baby home were dire. In the 36 years that the institution was open, more than 800 children died, often due to treatable conditions that included whooping cough, measles, influenza, gastroenteritis, meningitis, tuberculosis, and severe malnutrition. The highest recorded number of infant deaths in a single year occurred in 1942–43, with a total of 54 (out of 159 births and admissions). By comparison, the national infant mortality rate in 1943 was 83 deaths per 1,000 births, which was a significant increase in itself from the previous year. When a health inspector visited the home in 1947, she reported that some of the babies were “emaciated,” “not thriving,” “pot-bellied,” and had abscesses and “wizened” (shriveled) limbs.

In other years the council recorded improved conditions. But in 1961 the home was shut down, the primary reasons being its untrained staff and poor conditions and the council’s decision that necessary renovations were not worth the cost and effort. Eventually, the building was razed, and subsidized housing was built on the property.

Memories and bones: After the Tuam home’s closing

Life went on in Tuam, a town of less than 10,000 people in western Ireland, although some people had unsettling memories of the home. In the late 1970s or early ’80s, a local woman recorded the testimony of Julia Carter Devaney, a former resident who had lived in the home as a child and stayed on as a domestic worker. Devaney’s recollections painted a chilling portrait of a place where “scores of the children died under a year, and whooping cough was epidemic. They used to die like flies.” Devaney also mentioned “a little graveyard of [the children’s] own” and added: “It’s still there, it’s walled in now.” Her testimony did not surface for many years, and she died in 1985.

In the meantime, other locals sometimes found human bones on the home’s premises. In 1975, for example, two boys who had been playing on the grounds pushed aside a concrete slab, and the younger one fell into a hole filled with skulls. The oft-repeated explanation for these gruesome discoveries was that the bones belonged to victims of the Great Famine in the mid-19th century, or perhaps the home’s stillborn children. For decades nobody questioned it, although a local couple had dedicated some effort into installing a grotto near the site where the bones were discovered.

The truth emerges: Catherine Corless’s tireless research

The truth began to emerge in 2012, when local historian Catherine Corless published an essay in the Journal of the Old Tuam Society that detailed the home’s history and brought up the bones found on the property. Corless wondered why a crypt would have been placed in unconsecrated ground, an unlikely scenario in Catholic Ireland. She cited an old Ordnance Survey map of the grounds, noting that it showed a sewage tank located in the vicinity of the discovered bones.

Corless also detailed her efforts to match local burial records with the death records for the children in the home. Because there were no records of any of the children being buried in other local graveyards or on land belonging to the dead children’s families, she wondered where the children were buried and came to a disturbing conclusion: “Is it possible that a large number of those little children were buried in that little plot [i.e., near the tank] at the rear of the former Home?” At the end of the essay she suggested a memorial to acknowledge the site as a proper cemetery.

Initially, there was no response to Corless’s essay. Meanwhile, she did more painstaking research to determine how many children had died in the Tuam home, coming to the grim total of 796.

Government investigation: “Significant quantities of human remains”

Frustrated and angered by the lack of a response to her essay, Corless contacted The Irish Mail, and in May 2014 the newspaper published a front-page story about the Tuam home. Ireland was rocked to its core.

The next month Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny announced a government investigation into the country’s former mother and baby homes. For their part, the Sisters of Bon Secours initially declined to comment, then released a statement expressing shock over the discovery and affirming that they would fully cooperate with an inquiry. (Remarkably, the order also hired a public relations consultant who later denied the existence of a mass grave.) The government’s investigation began the next year; it included 18 homes, covering the years between 1922 (when the Irish Free State was established) and 1998 (by which time many maternity homes and similar institutions had closed).

The next few years brought more outrage. The tapes that a neighbor had recorded of Julia Carter Devaney’s memories resurfaced. Portions of her conversations were published, revealing an institution in which the nuns made their own rules and neglect was endemic. Corless uncovered other key evidence of earlier (and official) knowledge of a mass grave. She found that the minutes from a Galway County Council meeting in 1979 referred to a “children’s burial ground” on the home’s former premises. Another woman in Tuam told Corless of a conversation she once had with Julia Carter Devaney, who said that she had buried babies behind the home, presumably according to the instructions of the nuns or an administrative superior.

In October 2016 test excavations began at the Tuam site, which the investigating commission later confirmed contained “significant quantities of human remains” belonging to infants and toddlers. Moreover, the remains were found in a series of underground chambers within a structure built inside a decommissioned septic tank, although it was still unclear whether the structure had ever been used in that way.

In response to these findings, Enda Kenny issued an emotional statement in which he called the Tuam site a “chamber of horrors” and “a social and cultural sepulchre.” His most damning language was reserved for the moral and social piety that had once been Catholic Ireland’s pride:

As a society, in the so-called “good old days,” we did not just hide away the dead bodies of tiny human beings. We dug deep and we dug deeper still to bury our compassion, to bury our mercy, to bury our humanity itself. You see, no nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children. We gave them up to what we convinced ourselves was the nuns’ care.…We gave them up because of our perverse, in fact, morbid relationship with what you call respectability.

Further findings established that the number of children who had died in the home was 802, and that the structure in which the remains had been found dated to the late 1930s. (The latter finding is important because it debunks the theory that the bones belonged to famine victims.)

Protests and heartbreak: “Taking a stand with the babies”

Protests and vigils became a common expression of the anger and heartbreak felt by many Irish people after each new revelation. Pope Francis’s visit to Ireland in August 2018 in particular spurred protests. The pope apologized for the Catholic Church’s history of abuse in Ireland and asked forgiveness from survivors, but many Irish people remained unsatisfied. Notably, Catherine Corless turned down an invitation to meet him, stating that she was “taking a stand with the babies” and attending a vigil in Tuam during the papal mass in Dublin.

In January 2021 the Irish government released the investigating commission’s final report. Even taking into account the generally high infant mortality rate in Ireland in the first half of the 20th century, the report offered stark findings of life in an Irish mother and baby home. Among its revelations was that about 9,000 children had died in the 18 homes that were investigated and that “the proportion of Irish unmarried mothers who were admitted to mother and baby homes or county homes in the twentieth century was probably the highest in the world.”

As for the Tuam home, the Galway County Council issued an apology, faulting itself for being “far more consumed with mundane budgetary and financial oversight than its role as custodian of those who were most vulnerable and required its care and protection.” The Bon Secours sisters also issued an apology. The order contributed millions of euros to a compensation fund for survivors and offered to help pay for the excavation of the remains.

Although some people welcomed these apologies, many continued to express anger at the Catholic Church and the Irish government. In the meantime, Corless has been hailed as a national hero for uncovering the truth of what happened in Tuam. Many Irish people believe that the country’s other former mother and baby homes have similar dark truths buried in the past.

Excavation: Hoping for answers

After years of delays, the excavation of the Tuam babies began in July 2025; the process is expected to take at least two years. As of July 2026 the excavation team had found the remains of 99 infants and children. Beyond excavation, the remains must be identified so that families, survivors, and the people of Ireland can finally have answers about what happened to the home babies of Tuam.

Peter Mulryan, who spent the first four years of his life in the Tuam home, is one of those people seeking answers. After the discovery of the mass grave, Mulryan learned that he had a sister at Tuam whom he never knew and who may have died there. His experience led him to become an advocate for the Tuam home survivors. As the excavation began, he told the Irish Examiner:

I am waiting to find my sister, and hopefully it will give me the answers I have looked for. I have been waiting 11 years for the truth. Hopefully, I might be able to sleep properly when I find out one way or the other. But it is a moving time to see this finally unfold, we worked so hard to get to this point.