Excavations at site of home for unmarried mothers and their children, where it is alleged up to 800 children died, uncover human remains

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

A mass grave containing the remains of babies and children has been discovered at a former Catholic care home in Ireland where it has been alleged up to 800 died, government-appointed investigators said on Friday. The judge-led Mother and Baby Homes Commission announced Friday that excavations at the site of the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, had found an underground structure divided into 20 chambers containing "significant quantities of human remains." Excavations in the area from November to January have revealed an underground structure that is divided into 20 chambers with “significant amounts of human remains.”

DNA analysis of some of the remains shows that the age of the dead children was from 35 weeks to three years and that they were buried while the orphanage was in business from 1925 until it was closed in 1961. Photograph: Paul Faith/AFP/Getty Images

The discovery confirms decades of suspicions that the vast majority of children who died at the home were interred on the site in unmarked graves, a common practice at such Catholic-run facilities amid high child mortality rates in early 20th-century Ireland. Friday’s announcement by the government-appointed Mother and Baby Homes Commission confirms a 2014 investigation by a local historian who found death certificates for nearly 800 children who died at the home in Tuam, County Galway, from its opening in 1925 to its 1961 closure. “Everything pointed to this area being a mass grave,” Corless previously told the Guardian, who recalled how boys playing in the field had reported seeing a pile of bones in a hidden underground chamber there in the mid-1970s. The government's commissioner for children, Katherine Zappone, said Friday's findings were "sad and disturbing," and pledged that the children's descendants would be consulted on providing proper burials and other memorials.
A mass grave is discovered at a former Catholic orphanage in Tuam, Ireland, containing “significant quantities of human remains”, all of them children. It is alleged over 800 children died at this orphanage and most were buried in the 1950s.