The Tablet – Michael Duggan: The children of Tuam
Michael Duggan
30 July 2026, The Tablet
The remains of 99 children have now been recovered from the site of the notorious former mother-and-baby institution in Tuam, Co. Galway. All of them were buried in wooden coffins placed in the earth. None had been buried in a septic tank.
IT IS 12 years since the former children’s home in Tuam, County Galway, in the west of Ireland, seized the world’s attention. The reasons for this are best captured by the headlines of 2014: “Bodies of 800 babies, long dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers” (The Washington Post); “Almost 800 forgotten Irish children dumped in septic tank mass grave at Catholic home” (ABC News Australia); “Nearly 800 dead babies found in septic tank in Ireland” (Al Jazeera); “Mass grave of 796 babies found in septic tank at Catholic orphanage in Tuam, Galway” (Belfast Telegraph).
Since then, the home – which was owned by Galway County Council, run by sisters of the Bon Secours Order, and in operation between the years 1925 and 1961 – has never been far from the news and for the same dismal reasons. In 2017, the Irish Independent wrote of “tiny bodies dumped in a septic tank, left to rot without human dignity”. In 2018, The Mail on Sunday ran with “Scandal of the cesspit babies … 800 children dumped in a mass grave by Irish NUNS”. In 2023, in a piece inspired by The Woman in the Wall (a television drama about “another Tuam”), the website UnHerd reminded readers that, seven years earlier, “800 babies and small children were discovered in a septic tank”.
AND ONLY LAST year, The Times told readers of “796 babies and infants … dumped by the nuns in a disused sewage system”, the BBC reported on 796 children believed to be “buried in what former Taoiseach Enda Kenny dubbed a ‘chamber of horrors’”, and NDTV in India headlined “how 796 babies were secretly dumped in septic tanks by nuns in Ireland”.
Irish artists have also drummed home the point. Paul Muldoon, Ireland’s most eminent poet of the post-Heaney era, wrote “On Tuam”, published in The New York Times in 2017, which memorialised “the hundreds of children who stare up at us from their septic tank”. In 2021, Hollywood A-lister Liam Neeson, co-producer of the new movie The Lost Children of Tuam, which received its premiere in Galway in July, spoke on Irish television about the “796 babies that are, of course, still there in these septic tanks”. And earlier this year, novelist John Banville told Guardian readers of nearly 800 babies buried in “an unmarked mass grave that had once been used as a septic tank”.
The picture conveyed was clear, emphatic, horrifying. Nuns of the Bon Secours congregation had spent three-and-a-half decades dumping the dead bodies of nearly 800 babies and infants into sewage tanks in County Galway. Stories of children demeaned in death were compounded by stories of these same children and their mothers mistreated in life: Enda Kenny said in his “chamber of horrors” speech that the children had been starved to death or, as he put it, starved “to the point of their disappearance … from life itself”. Feelings of disgust have been such that Tuam has repeatedly been portrayed as Ireland’s holocaust – a holocaust perpetrated by Irish women, Irish nuns.
Former residents of the home, meanwhile, and their relatives have had to show enormous patience in waiting for the long-promised excavation of the full Tuam site to get under way, enduring a winding road made up of partial explorations and discoveries; official reports, announcements and further scoping studies; and, in 2022, the creation of a new statutory agency, the Office of the Director of Authorised Intervention, Tuam (Odait).
Pre-excavation work began at the site a year ago and on 22 July Odait’s senior forensic archaeologist, Dr Niamh McCullagh, said that, to date, the skeletal remains of 99 infants and children, all seemingly buried during the period of operation of the home, have been recovered. All of these children, it has emerged, were buried in coffins in the earth. Odait has provided descriptions of some of these coffins: most, the evidence suggests, were made in the traditional, “single-shouldered” style, painted white, and fitted with mounts (i.e. objects such as handles). The children’s remains were discovered in an area entirely separate from the location of the old sewage system. Instead, they were in a part of the site that was “identified in historical documents as a ‘burial ground’” (much of it, until the dig began, lying underneath an access road built long after the closure of the home itself). In a small number of instances, two or three children were buried in the same coffin.
These discoveries seem to conflict with the blanket claim (made from 2014 onwards by news outlets of every rank, kind and stripe and exemplified by the quotations contained in my opening paragraphs above), that the remains of all of the 796 children who died at Tuam had been “found”, or “discovered”, or were otherwise known to be in a mass grave formed of a sewage tank. The claim was a hasty extrapola tion from actual facts – such as the absence of burial records for the Tuam children, and the co-location of old sewage structures with a modern memorial garden – that was then repeated continuously, even frenziedly. A far more complex picture is slowly emerging. Odait’s director, Daniel MacSweeney, would not be drawn on how long it will take for its work to be completed but its revelations appear to signal that the signature claim, which made Tuam into perhaps the darkest blot on the landscape of Catholic Ireland, can no longer be put forward even as a matter of guesswork or wild speculation.
But long before the forensic excavators got to work, there was other evidence that seemed out of step with reporting and commentary on burial practices at Tuam. For example, the government-established Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes uncovered official records showing that tenders were issued for coffins throughout the period of the home’s operation. There is also evidence of coffins being made on site by local handymen. But why would an institution that was dumping deceased children into sewage tanks bother with making or tendering for coffins? And why do we have reports of local residents witnessing burials in which coffins (or sometimes shrouds) were used?
Oddly, the commission did not seem to give much weight to the evidence it had uncovered, emphasising that no records had been found of coffins being actually purchased (rather than simply tendered for). Now, with some of these coffins appearing to have been found in large numbers, it seems clear that the commission should have shown more curiosity on this point. However, along with other lines of evidence that did not quite fit with the headlines, the history of coffin use at Tuam sat around largely unacknowledged and ignored.
While the commission is no more, the work of Odait continues. It should eventually be able to reveal the total number of children who were laid to rest in coffins within the historical burial ground: right now, it seems hard to imagine that this number will stop at 99. But what other outstanding questions might we expect to see answered by Odait?
For people who believe that they may have family members buried at Tuam, an identification programme has been set up to establish the likelihood of a link with human remains recovered during excavations. The Odait team has travelled to the US, UK and Canada to meet families and collect DNA samples.
AS FOR THE BROADER effort to understand exactly what happened to deceased children at an institution afflicted in the 1930s and 1940s by notoriously high mortality rates, Odait will surely wish to locate an under ground structure, situated somewhere on the former grounds, that Mary Moriarty, a local resident, described falling into in the 1970s. Moriarty (now deceased) reported seeing rows of shelves, possibly three and five levels high, on which were placed what she took to be dead babies, swaddled in cloth. She estimated that there were more than 100 tiny “parcels” in the portion of the chamber that she was able to see.
Mary Moriarty said that she understood the structure she had found herself in to be a crypt. She also said that, shortly after her fall, she went back to the site with a woman named Julia Devaney who was at the Tuam home for the entire duration of its existence, first as a child resident and then as an employee. Julia Devaney seemed to know exactly what Mary Moriarty was talking about, telling her that the chamber she had fallen into was the place where babies from the home were buried. She said that she had placed the bodies of babies there herself, carrying them through a tunnel connecting it to the main buildings.
Clearly, if Mary Moriarty’s account is accurate, there is an as yet entirely unexcavated structure at Tuam that contains a large number of remains and that bears no obvious resemblance to a septic tank. Oddly, again, the Commission of Investigation, in its report on burial practices, appeared to dispense with Mary Moriarty’s discovery in the space of just two sentences.
Other questions concern whether the children’s graves were unmarked. Nothing Odait has reported so far refutes this particular claim. No surface markers indicating the presence of burials have been found and Odait has said nothing about evidence of original markers, such as headstones, having been removed.
Then there is a pit, over three metres wide, uncovered by the excavation team some months ago in the same area in which the bodies have been found. Odait believes that this pit was originally created using a mechanical digger in the late 1970s or afterwards – that is, around 20 years or more after the home had been closed and the nuns had left. Burials had been disturbed and the pit was then backfilled with sand, gravel and building debris. Odait has not, as yet, reported finding any human remains in the pit, but presumably there must have been some present there once. If so, what happened to these remains? Where are they now?
Finally, a previous partial excavation revealed a “significant” though as yet unspecified quantity of children’s remains (not in coffins) lying in a series of underground concrete chambers built within a much larger masonry sewage tank that served the home for some of its existence. According to the Commission of Investigation, it was not possible, without a full excavation, to state conclusively the exact engineering purpose of this structure; however, it considered it “very likely” that it was “sewerage related”.
Some of the biggest questions that Odait, one hopes, will be able to resolve, concern these concrete chambers. How many children are in there? Who are they? Can a conclusive account finally be given of the history and purpose of the structure? How did the remains of these children end up being treated so differently from those that have been carefully excavated by Odait or that were chanced upon by Mary Moriarty?
Question heaped upon question. Thankfully, Odait appears to be going about its work transparently and meticulously, and with great sensitivity. Excavations alone could take another year or longer and time will be needed to complete a full forensic analysis. When it eventually finishes its work, we should know as much as we will ever know about what happened to the children who died at the Tuam home all of those years ago.
Michael Duggan is a freelance writer living in Surrey.