MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
One of Europe's biggest mass graves is being unearthed right now. It's in Ireland, and the victims are children who died in a home for unwed mothers. NPR's Lauren Frayer begins our story in Dublin.
(SOUNDBITE OF PAGES TURNING)
ANNA CORRIGAN: This is me, and this is me making my Holy Communion.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: Anna Corrigan pages through family photos. She grew up in a Dublin tenement.
CORRIGAN: An only child. I was born on the 1 September, 1956.
FRAYER: And it wasn't until Corrigan was in her 50s that she discovered a family secret...
CORRIGAN: This is John's birth certificate.
FRAYER: ...Two older brothers, born before her mother got married. Her mother died in 2001 without ever mentioning their existence. But when Corrigan started researching her family tree, she found documents showing her mother had spent time in one of Ireland's mother and baby homes, where single women went to give birth.
CORRIGAN: To the matron, please admit Bridget Dolan, 26 years of age.
FRAYER: Now, this was 1940s Ireland.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Altar boys shower rose petals, and a special place is reserved for women wearing hooded cloaks.
FRAYER: There was no sex ed. Birth control and abortion were illegal, and children born outside of marriage were seen as illegitimate. Corrigan scours old photos for any hint of the secret her mother kept.
CORRIGAN: And as you can see, the grip my mother has holding me. What was going through her mind after losing two children - taken away, dead, adopted?
FRAYER: Corrigan's search for her missing brothers has brought her to a town called Tuam in County Galway, where a mother and baby home closed in 1961 and was demolished about a decade later.
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FRAYER: Beyond this metal fence, it's just scrubby, muddy ground, a flag pole, and I can see a tall stone wall behind it, which used to encircle the home. It's now covered in moss.
PJ HAVERTY: It was a prison. And if you look out, all you seen was a high wall all around. You seen nothing.
FRAYER: PJ Haverty was one of the babies born on the other side of that wall, and he still lives down the road. He's 73 now.
HAVERTY: They didn't want any bonding between the baby and the mother. You couldn't hold the baby and rock it, talk to it.
FRAYER: So did she live there?
HAVERTY: She lived there for 12 months. And when the 12 months was over, then they opened the door and told her to get out.
FRAYER: Decades later, PJ found letters his mother had written to nuns who ran the home, begging for custody of him. The nuns refused and demanded she make monthly payments instead for his care.
HAVERTY: She used to come down every so often, and she'd give them the money. And she was hoping that she'd get to see me, but no. And then the final day she came down, then the nuns said, you don't need to come here anymore. He's gone.
FRAYER: He was sent to foster care just before his seventh birthday. Thousands of other children never came out. And in 1975, local boys were playing on the grounds of the home when they fell down a hole into a disused septic tank filled with tiny skeletons, and the fate of those other children became known.
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FRAYER: Did you grow up in this house?
ELLEN: No, I grew up in that house there.
FRAYER: Oh, you lived (ph) here.
I meet Ellen on a rain-slicked street behind where the skeletons were found. She didn't want to give her surname because of the shame she says this has brought her and her community.
ELLEN: We always knew. There was a mass there every year. Everybody knew it was consecrated ground. We were told when we went out to play, do not go in the babies' graveyard. Stay out of the babies' graveyard. And, no, it was fine. We all knew what it was...
FRAYER: Yeah.
ELLEN: ...And you didn't go in. You respect it. Like, we're Catholics, so you don't mess on consecrated ground.
FRAYER: Everyone knew, she says. Throughout the 1980s and '90s when she was growing up, all the neighbors knew there was a mass grave of infants behind their homes. But out of respect for the Catholic Church, nobody did anything...
CATHERINE CORLESS: I'll find what I did with it.
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CORLESS: They're usually all together - probably in here.
FRAYER: ...Until Catherine Corless started nosing around.
You have a whole research library here.
CORLESS: I - this is only a tiny part of it.
FRAYER: Corless is an amateur historian. She also heard rumors of a mass grave and decided to chase them up. In 2012, she asked a clerk at city hall for death certificates of anyone who died in the mother and baby home during its years of operation, from 1925 to 1961. She was expecting one a year, maybe.
CORLESS: And she said, there are hundreds. Now, I kind of got a cold shiver. Hundreds? I said. Yes, she said.
FRAYER: The clerk handed her death records for 796 children - infants through 4-year-olds.
CORLESS: Measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, some of them, boils all over the body - there was a lot of children in Ireland at the time, before penicillin, they were dying with. But the home had a rate of four times higher than the death rate of children and infants in Ireland of those diseases.
FRAYER: Why would the nuns not take them to a hospital? I ask. And why are there death certificates but no burial records? There's a Catholic cemetery right across the road.
CORLESS: It's blatantly obvious. They had no regard for those children because they were illegitimate, and they didn't seem to matter. They didn't bother bringing them to the cemetery across the road, and they just hid them. And then when that sewage system became defunct in 1937, that's when they started putting them into that tank. And it was a way of hiding, I suppose, all the deaths - all the babies that were dying.
FRAYER: After Corless published her findings in a local history journal, the Irish government ordered an investigation. The prime minister called this a chamber of horrors. And in 2021, the Catholic order of nuns that ran this facility issued an apology, saying they were part of a system that didn't live up to their Christianity.
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FRAYER: At a dark stone cathedral that still towers over this town...
UNIDENTIFIED PRIEST: May almighty God have mercy on us, forgive us our sins.
FRAYER: ...The daily mass is sparsely attended, and nobody is willing to talk to me about any collective responsibility.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Thank you, darling. We don't know anything about it.
FRAYER: A nun who didn't want to give her name because she's not authorized to speak for her order, the Sisters of Mercy, tells me she thinks the clergy have been treated unfairly.
UNIDENTIFIED NUN: Because these children, there's a lot of misinformation about it. These children, they were very well cared for - as best they could. They didn't have the resources.
FRAYER: Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED NUN: You know, today, people would say that children have too much - and families.
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FRAYER: Excavations are now underway on a mass grave of children who died here with nothing. Among those who've given DNA samples is Anna Corrigan, the Dubliner who thought she was an only child and is now searching for two brothers. She's located their birth certificates but only one death certificate. So her brother, William Dolan, born in 1950...
CORRIGAN: He's not on the list of the 796. So are they digging for him in Tuam?
FRAYER: In your heart of hearts, what are you hoping for?
CORRIGAN: Well, I believe he was adopted Stateside.
FRAYER: Do you even know if his name is still William?
CORRIGAN: No, it wouldn't be William.
FRAYER: She believes her brother may have survived and been sent to the United States for adoption, like thousands of Irish babies from this era.
CORRIGAN: And if anybody knows anything about William Joseph Dolan, born 1950 in Galway...
FRAYER: While reporting this story, I even found out one of my own cousins, adopted into my extended family in New Jersey, was born in a mother and baby home in Tipperary, Ireland, where more than a thousand babies went missing. And no excavations have been done there.
CORRIGAN: (Inaudible) OK.
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FRAYER: And so standing on the edge of this one mass grave, Corrigan tells me this is only the tip of the iceberg. Lauren Frayer, NPR News in Tuam, Ireland.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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