Greg Daly
Greg Daly considers the Tuam burials in light of contemporary funeral customs
If we are to be horrified by what we are learning about the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, we should probably reserve our anger more for how the infant children of unmarried mothers were treated in life than in death.
The Mother and Baby Home Commission of Investigation has, as we know, conducted test excavations late last year and earlier this year by the site of the former Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, finding two large structures. One was a septic tank that had been decommissioned and filled in, the other being a long structure containing 20 chambers, at least 17 of which contained significant quantities of human remains from infants between 35 foetal weeks and two–three years, all dating from the period when the home was in operation.
Admitting to uncertainty about the purpose of the structure, the commission speculates that it had been built for the containment of sewage or waste water, adding that it does not yet know if it was ever used for this purpose.
Asking for the State authorities to take responsibility for the appropriate treatment of the remains, and stating that the Coroner has been informed, the Commission says it “is shocked by this discovery and is continuing its investigation into who was responsible for the disposal of human remains in this way”.
Narratives
As yet, there is little in what’s been revealed to suggest that the remains of the dead children were treated other than respectfully, unless the phrase “disposal of human remains” is well chosen; it feeds into popular narratives about the bodies of children being dumped into sewers and septic tanks, and points away from the possibility that the bodies were interred in what would normally be called a crypt or even a catacomb.
It would not be surprising if the vault had once served another purpose, however distasteful, as long as it had been cleaned and – probably – consecrated; the catecombs of Paris, after all, are repurposed mine tunnels, and I once helped excavate a cemetery in repurposed fortifications.
In 2014, Philip Boucher-Hayes, one of those who has done important work – following, of course, the heroic efforts of local historian Catherine Corless – to explore what happened in Tuam, wrote of how one Mary Moriarty told him that in the 1970s she had fallen into the crypt when the ground subsided.
When she and neighbours investigated, he wrote, “she discovered a large underground space with shelves from floor to ceiling stacked with infant bodies”. She saw, she told him, “in excess of 100 tiny figures swaddled and guessed from the size they were newborn or stillborn”.
Described as such, the vault indeed appears to have been a crypt in which large numbers of bodies were interred, with the shelves and swaddling testifying to this having been done in a manner that was anything but careless.
A 2013 letter from the then head of the Bon Secours Sisters in Ireland wrote of how one child, a John Desmond who died in June 1947, had apparently died in the home, with his remains “probably being buried in the small cemetery at the home itself”, which she said was “located at the back of the home and was operated as a general grave”.
That this general grave was recognised as worthy of respect, however discreet, is pointed to by the simple topography of the area today: a playground lies on the site of the home, while houses have been built on the home’s land, but the site of the vault – or at least of part of it – was carefully segregated from both projects, making it possible for it to be visited even now.
And, of course, since the 1970s it seems local people tended to the site, with one couple having even built a grotto there.
This invites other questions, of course, not least that of why the children had been interred in an on-site crypt rather than in the cemetery across the road from the home.
Compliance
In this light, it’s worth remembering how prior to the Second Vatican Council, the Rituale Romanum called for pastors to ensure that, “in compliance with ancient and praiseworthy ecclesiastical custom, the bodies of little children are not interred in that part of the cemetery which is used for the general public.
“Rather, as far as possible, they should have their own special and separate plot, where none but baptised infants and children who die before attaining the use of reason should be buried.”
Obviously, this did not always happen, but the point behind this principle was that such children, regarded as innocents by the Church, were deemed to have been granted eternal life and as such were – unlike those buried elsewhere – not in need of our prayers. Indeed, there was a clear rite – not a Mass – for the burial of baptised children before the age of reason, explicitly recognising that such children’s salvation was guaranteed.
The funeral records of one Irish town, to take an example, reveal a combined total of 739 funerals for the years 1925, 1935, 1945, 1955 and 1965, with the youngest funeral on record in these years being that of a seven-year-old in 1965. Funerals for young children, it seems, were very rare, if they happened at all.
Even now, while funeral Masses typically focus on prayers for the deceased, those for young children tend to emphasise prayers for the bereaved.
The other obvious question lies in why the site wasn’t marked – it’s hard to escape the feeling that an awful lot of the current horror could have been avoided if there had been an appropriate marker at the site commemorating the children interred there.
After all, 796 children died in the home during the years it was in operation, and even if they were not all buried in the crypt, it seems likely that a substantial number of them were.
The answer to this probably lies in the pathological desire for respectability that blighted Ireland in its first decades of independence, which caused us to hide away anything that might be perceived as disgracing us in the eyes of the world. In the case of the Mother and Baby homes established from 1922 on, this meant unmarried mothers, visible proof that Irish people were not as pure as we liked to claim.
English rule in Ireland had long been justified by casting the Irish as barbarous and drunken savages who held to a idolatrous and superstitious religion and couldn’t be trusted to rule themselves, with Irish people typically caricatured in magazines as brutish apes.
The angry response of nationalists and others in 1907 to the first performances of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World point to how sensitive Irish people of the early 20th Century had become to the notion of us being seen as anything other than a land of responsible, sober, industrious, chaste people.
The ugly realities pointed to in Synge’s masterpiece were hardly compatible with the ambitions of a nation edging towards independence, let alone the “august destiny” envisaged by the signatories of the 1916 proclamation.
August destinies were fashionable in the Europe of the day, and Irish intellectuals looked forward to Ireland once again being Europe’s tutor, a reborn land of saints and scholars.
Obsessed with presenting a clean face, independent Ireland carried with it the effects of the long social revolution that followed the Famine and saw Victorian Protestant morality distorting Catholic social teaching, such that poverty became seen as a moral failing, and chastity was a national priority.
The price of this, all too often, was paid by women, the poor, and the children of both.