796 de@d babies found hidden in septic tank at unmarried mothers’ home run by nuns

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Authorities in Ireland have started excavating a septic tank at a location they suspect holds the remains of 796 infants who died at a Catholic nun-run facility for unmarried mothers.

According to local historian Catherine Corless, many of the baby bones are thought to have been disposed of in “the pit,” a septic tank at the defunct facility in the little town of Tuam, County Galway, she told Sky News.

According to Corless’ study, between 1925 and the home’s closure in 1961, 798 children died there; only two of them were interred in a local cemetery.

The remains of the remaining 796 children are thought to reside beneath the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, which was destroyed in 1971 and is now encircled by a contemporary apartment building.

A religious order of Catholic nuns operated Bon Secours, also referred as locally as The Home, as a maternity home for single mothers and their offspring.

Pregnant unmarried women would be interned for a year to perform unpaid labor after giving birth in the home.

Frequently without their families’ permission, women were taken away from their newborn infants, who would be fostered by the nuns until adoption.

It wasn’t until 2014 that Corless’s research revealed the entire extent of the Bon Secours catastrophe.

A group of detectives started their forensic investigation this week, several years later.

Finding the infants’ bodies, burying them with dignity, and providing survivors with some measure of closure might take up to two years.

“I don’t care if it’s a thimbleful, as they tell me there wouldn’t be much remains left; at six months old, it’s mainly cartilage more than bone,” Annette McKay, whose sister, according to Sky News, is one of the 798 victims.

After being r@ped at the age of 17, her mother, Margaret “Maggie” O’Connor, gave birth to a baby named Mary Margaret at home.

Her mother didn’t know until a nun informed her that the girl had died six months later.

“She was pegging washing out and a nun came up behind her and said ‘the child of your sin is dead,’” said Annette, who now lives in the UK.

The whole scope of Ireland’s oppressive system has only recently come to light, and Bon Secours was only one institution in it.

Mothers at Bon Secours who “reoffended” by having more unmarried children would be transferred to the notorious Irish institutions known as Magdalene laundries, which are typically managed by Catholic groups but covertly subsidized by the government.

At first, “fallen women” was mostly used to refer to sex workers, but the Magdalene laundries subsequently began accepting “seduced” women, r@pe and incest victims, and female orphans or toddlers who had been abused or abandoned by their family.

Only in the 1990s did the remaining Magdalene laundromats close.

In 2014, the Irish government formally apologized, and in 2022, a compensation plan was established, which has so far given 814 survivors the equivalent of $32.7 million.

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