Hundreds of lost children in Tuam are finally being found

Ireland has begun excavating the mass grave of nearly 800 children at Tuam’s former mother and baby home—uncovering a truth long buried by silence and shame.

Underneath what looks like nothing more than a patch of grass in a quiet residential area of Tuam, County Galway, nearly 800 children lie buried—without coffins, without names, and without justice. For decades, the site sat in silence, adjacent to a playground, the past buried not just in earth but in national shame. But that silence is finally being broken.

After years of delays, investigators have begun exhuming the remains believed to be buried in a mass grave beside the old site of St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home. The excavation is expected to last two years, and while the task is heavy, it marks a long-overdue step toward acknowledging one of Ireland’s darkest chapters.

The woman who uncovered the truth

This isn’t a story that started with a commission or a government investigation. It began with a single woman, a local historian with no formal training, and an unrelenting sense that something wasn’t right. Catherine Corless had grown up near the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, and like many in the area, remembered the high walls topped with shards of glass, a cruel symbol of the separation and shame the place embodied.

But Catherine didn’t stop at memory. She dug through local archives, requested death certificates, and asked questions no one wanted to answer. “I found records for 796 children,” she recalled. “Diseases like measles, whooping cough, even untreated laryngitis. But there were no burial records. Not a single one.”

Where the children went

Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of unmarried women were sent to homes like St Mary’s. Many were cast out by their families, condemned by a society that saw pregnancy outside of marriage as a moral failing. Their babies were often taken from them immediately after birth, and in many cases, the children didn’t survive long.

The first recorded death at Tuam was Patrick Derrane, who died in 1925 at just five months old. The last was Mary Carty, who passed in 1960, also only five months. In those 35 years, it’s believed another 794 infants and young children died in the facility—many likely buried in what used to be a sewage tank.

The former Irish prime minister Enda Kenny would later call the site “a chamber of horrors.”

Discovery in a playground

Locals had whispered for years about something buried beneath the grass. But it was children, playing in the 1970s, who stumbled across skeletal remains while running through the field next to the old home. The bones shocked the town. A small shrine was built where the remains were found, and it became a site for prayer and reflection.

Still, no formal investigation was launched. That wouldn’t come until 2014, when Corless’s research finally reached the national press. The Irish government responded by forming a commission. In 2017, the commission confirmed what many had feared: a mass grave existed, right where the old building once stood.

Justice, long overdue

It took more than a decade of pressure from activists, survivors, and journalists, but the first shovels have finally broken ground. It’s not just about recovering bones. It’s about restoring dignity to children who were denied it in life—and even in death.

For Catherine Corless, this moment is bittersweet. “This shouldn’t have taken so long,” she has said. And she’s right. It should not take decades of silence, shame, and grassroots effort to acknowledge such a tragedy.

But now, at last, there’s movement. And in that movement, perhaps, a beginning of healing—however slow, however painful.