Days after heavy machinery rolled onto a quiet residential green in Tuam, County Galway, forensic teams in white overalls moved along a cordoned-off trench to recover the remains of hundreds of children who died inside St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home.
The full excavation officially began on 13 July 2025, when investigators broke ground on the former septic system where “significant quantities of human remains” were confirmed eight years earlier. The Office of the Director of Authorised Intervention, Tuam (ODAIT), treated the effort as a criminal-standard forensic recovery expected to last about two years. A 2.4-metre fence, grey screening panels, round-the-clock security, and a 5,000-square-metre perimeter now shield the site in the middle of a housing estate built after the institution’s demolition in 1972.
An 18-member forensic team—archaeologists, anthropologists, osteo-archaeologists, and crime-scene experts from Colombia, Spain, Britain, Canada, Australia, the United States, and Ireland—led the dig where, from 1925 to 1961, 796 babies and young children were buried without coffins or headstones. “We must be very, very careful to have a chance to identify who they are. The femur of a newborn is the size of an adult finger,” said Daniel MacSweeney, director of ODAIT and former International Committee of the Red Cross investigator, according to BBC News.
Crews first removed overburden soil with a toothless mechanical bucket that halted each time an archaeologist spotted bone. When any body part appeared, the team switched to hand tools to separate the commingled skeletons, many damaged by decades of water infiltration. “The difficulties in identifying the remains cannot be underestimated,” warned MacSweeney, as reported by BBC News.
Death records listed Patrick Derrane, five months old, as the first infant to die at St Mary’s in 1925; Mary Carty, also five months, was the last recorded in 1960. Only two of the 796 children ever received burial certificates. Catherine Corless, the local self-taught genealogist whose 2012-14 research exposed the burials, called the dig “a long-awaited moment… a joy for all the families who still hope to find their relatives,” according to BBC News.
Corless began her work by comparing death certificates with cemetery ledgers and realised the names of 796 children appeared in no local graveyards. She concluded the children had been “put in a tank,” a theory confirmed in 2017 when a government-ordered test trench uncovered bones ranging from 35 weeks’ gestation to about three years.
PJ Haverty, who spent his first six years inside what he called “a prison,” stood outside the fence on opening day. “We were dirt from the street… treated like rubbish,” he recalled. After placement with foster parents, Haverty had to arrive at primary school ten minutes late and leave ten minutes early so he would not speak to other pupils. Meeting Corless later, he said, gave him courage: “From that day I lifted my head… I did nothing wrong.”
During the home’s operation the Sisters of Bon Secours, who managed the institution, received state support to house unmarried mothers and their newborns. Many women were ostracised by their families, forced to work without pay, and pressured to sign adoption papers. A 2021 state commission concluded roughly 9,000 children died in Ireland’s mother-and-baby network between 1922 and 1998, called the mortality rates “extraordinary,” and issued a formal apology. Former Taoiseach Micheál Martin admitted the country had held “a completely distorted attitude towards sexuality and intimacy.”
About 80 relatives have already provided DNA, hoping to match samples once laboratory extraction starts. Information from institutional archives, parish registers, and personal testimony will supplement the genetic analysis, though identification may be limited because many infants died before baptism and decades of commingling might leave only partial fragments per child.
The Bon Secours order pledged €2.5 million toward the operation. The government stressed that contribution did not exempt the congregation from future compensation. Survivors’ groups argued broader redress was overdue; some children were adopted without consent, others illegally sent abroad, and many mothers never learned the fate of their babies.
Anna Corrigan, whose brothers John (born 1946) and William (born 1950) were delivered at the home, believed at least one lay beneath the grass. John’s death certificate listed measles and “mental illness” at sixteen months, but Corrigan never located a grave. “These children were denied the slightest human right during their lives… and deprived of dignity and respect in death,” she said.
Excavators also faced the possibility of famine-era remains and civil-war burials elsewhere on site. Scientists mapped 20 underground chambers that once formed the sewage system; they did not yet know how many contained bodies. “We cannot underestimate the complexity of the work that lies ahead,” said MacSweeney in The New York Times.
For now, Tuam residents pass by silenced machinery and tall screens where children once played. Corless, observing through a gap, wrote in the Observer that she felt “a sense of joy” watching professionals prepare to lift each bone. The government promised every child would receive a dignified reinterment under the Institutional Burials Act 2022—an act designed to correct the shame of unmarked graves such as these.
The exposed earth in Tuam remains both crime scene and memorial, slowly yielding evidence of what former prime minister Enda Kenny once called Ireland’s “chamber of horrors.”
The preparation of this article relied on a news-analysis system.