Agonizing Question for Irish: What to Do With Children’s Remains?
13, 2018
A few years ago, an amateur historian shook Ireland to its core with a ghastly allegation: Hundreds of bodies of young children appeared to have been buried in an abandoned septic system by Catholic nuns who for decades had managed a home for unwed mothers
and their offspring in the County Galway town of Tuam.
"How would any of those doing the report like it if one of their siblings was being treated like that?" The scandal began when Catherine Corless, an amateur historian, dug into the history of the old mother-and-baby home in Tuam
that was managed by the Sisters of Bon Secours from 1925 to 1961.
Mr. Mulryan, the chairman of a group called the Tuam Home Survivors Network, listed a series of "appropriate actions," including complete excavation
and exhumation, thorough DNA analysis for individual identification and an inquest into the cause of death of each child.
After further sleuthing, she wrote an article in the local journal in 2012
that strongly suggested that the remains of hundreds of children, all born to unwed mothers and all baptized in the Catholic faith, had not been buried in consecrated ground, but in parts of a disused septic system dating to when the home was a 19th-century workhouse.
Even in its no-nonsense prose, the report revealed the emotional complexities of the nearly primal matter
that the Irish government faces — a matter touching on the profound influence of the Catholic Church on national policy, the subjugation of women, respect for the dead and proper redress for human rights abuses.
" the report said. that The group has not identified any directly comparable cases, either nationally or internationally,
that involved the complexities of commingled juvenile human remains, in significant quantities and in such a restricted physical location,