When Annette McKay’s first grandson was born, she thought her mother, Maggie O’Connor, would be over the moon. She had become a great-grandmother.
Instead, McKay found her sobbing unconsolably outside her home, crying: “It’s the baby, the baby.”
McKay reassured her 70-year-old mother that her great-grandson was healthy. But O’Connor wasn’t talking about him.
“Not your baby, my baby,” O’Connor said, revealing a secret she had buried for decades. Her first child, Mary Margaret, died in June 1943, at just 6 months old.
It was the first and only time that O’Connor spoke about Mary Margaret, or her experience in St. Mary’s Home – a so-called mother and baby home in the town of Tuam, in western Ireland’s County Galway.
The Tuam institution was one of dozens of “homes” where pregnant girls and unmarried women were sent to give birth in secret for much of the 20th century. Women were often forcibly separated from their children. Some infants were rehomed, in Ireland, the United Kingdom or as far away as the United States, Canada and Australia, but hundreds died and their remains discarded – their mothers often never knowing what truly happened to their babies.
On Monday, a team of Irish and international forensic experts broke ground at a mass grave site in Tuam, believed to contain the remains of 796 children, as they begin a two-year excavation.
From 1922 to 1998, the Catholic Church and the Irish State established a profoundly misogynistic network of institutions that targeted and penalized unmarried women. It created a culture of containment that touched all aspects of society. Irish attitudes have since changed. But the shame, secrecy and social ostracization that the system created left a lasting scar.
“In this twisted, authoritarian world, sex was the biggest sin for women, not for the men,” McKay told CNN.
“Women who had this visible sign of sex – a pregnancy of ‘indulging in a sin’ – were ‘disappeared’ from the parish, behind high walls at the end of a town,” she said.
O’Connor was sent to the Tuam home as a pregnant 17-year-old after she was raped by the caretaker of the industrial school she grew up in, McKay said.
Inside the home, mothers and babies were separated from one another. Many women were eventually sent to Magdalene Laundries, Catholic-run workhouses where they were detained as unpaid workers. Their babies were then either fostered or adopted by married families, further institutionalized in industrial schools or “care” facilities for disabled people, or illegally adopted and trafficked outside of Ireland to countries including the United States, where, from the 1940s until the 1970s, more than 2,000 children were sent, according to the Clann Project.
But many of those babies never survived life outside of their walls: at least 9,000 infants and children died in these institutions, including the Tuam home.
O’Connor, who was sent to another industrial school after Mary Margaret was born, only learned her daughter had died while she was hanging laundry six months later.
“‘The child of трипскан вход your sin is dead,’” the nuns told her, McKay said, “as if it was nothing.”
O’Connor eventually moved to England, where she raised six other children and lived a life that, on the surface, appeared glamorous, McKay said. She later learned that was her mother’s “armor,” a “glossy exterior” that helped her survive.
The horrors of the Tuam home never left her.
McKay mourned the sister she never met, but found solace envisioning a tiny grave in the Irish countryside where Mary Margaret might be buried.
But in 2014, that bucolic vision was shattered after she opened an English newspaper that read: “Mass septic tank grave ‘containing the skeletons of 800 babies’ at site of Irish home for unmarried mothers.”
It was the work of a local Tuam historian, Catherine Corless, that had revealed that 796 babies had died at Tuam without burial records and that they had been placed in a decommissioned sewage tank.
Authorities initially refused to engage with Corless’ findings and dismissed her work altogether. The Sisters of Bon Secours – the nuns who ran the home from 1925 to 1961 – hired a consulting company that denied a mass grave altogether, saying there was no evidence children had been buried there.
But Corless, mother and baby home survivors, and family members never stopped campaigning for the Tuam babies and their mothers.
And it worked.