Galway Mass Grave Story: A Cautionary Tale

Belfast Telgraph:  "Mass Grave of 796 Babies Found in Septic Tank at Catholic Orphanag...

Irish Central: "Mass Grave of Up to 800 Dead Babies Exposed in County Galway"

Al Jezeera: "Nearly 800 Dead Babies Found in Septic Tank in Ireland"

 
After reading these headlines, one would be excused for thinking that an object that was clearly a tank for human excrement had been recently opened, and the bodies of 800 skeletons had been exhumed.  That is exactly what is said above, isn’t it?  Except that isn’t what happened at all. 

Tuam Mother and Baby Home: The Trouble With the Septic Tank Story

The article above, from today’s Irish Times paints a very different picture.  The recent interest is not stemming from any new discovery.  The story is that the bones were seen by local boys in the 1970s in some kind of concrete enclosure.  One of those boys (now a man, still living in the area) says there might have been around 20 skeletons. A local historian has collected death certificates for 796 children who died in the home over a period of 36 years.  The resting place of their bodies, at this time, IS NOT KNOWN.  No excavation of the property has been done.  At this point, no 800 skeletons have been found.
 
The Times article raises more questions than answers.  Where are these children buried?  Why was no investigation conducted in the 1970s when bones were seen?  Was the crypt a septic tank, a water tank (as it was called in earlier stories), or something else?  Were these children given proper care when they were alive?  Then there are the philosophical questions: What is the relationship between the treatment of a body and the respect for a person?  How should we tread on land which is known to contain graves, and does this change with the passage of time?  Does engraving their names on a plaque right any of the wrongs suffered by the deceased, or does it serve another purpose: to remind us of the significance of every human life?
 
It’s important to note that the deaths of 796 children are not in doubt.  It is also clear that Catholic institutions like this one buried people in ways that were disrespectful and an affront to their own theological dictates.  After all, much larger mass graves than this one are found throughout the island, including 11,000 bodies found interred outside Miltown cemetery in Belfast.  The underlying view that certain human beings do not deserve life and dignity is intolerable, and the people who ran these institutions have plenty of questions to answer.  The people responsible for grossly misrepresenting these facts do as well.  Indignance is no substitute for accuracy.  As the facts continue to come out, they may be every bit as salacious as the rumours.  If they are less so, the inflated tales will only cloud the issue.  The truth, reported as it is verified, would honour the departed most.
 
Those of you who have followed this story, may have noticed its absence, until now, from this website.   A sense of caution unfamiliar in media circles prevailed as the dust settled around the shocking early reports.  At this point I feel obliged to disclose that my husband, Ryan, is an administrator on the site.  That makes me undeniably biased, but I hope my observations are still valid.
 
I appreciate that TheWildGeese.com is not interested in becoming just one more Irish tabloid.  As a reader, I am not interested in websites that run prematurely with half-baked stories and throw up headlines about Hollywood celebrities anytime there is the slightest hint of Irish connection.  Sites like that will continue to prosper, because the appetite for sensationalist voyeurism is wide, but it is also shallow.  I appreciate your desire to create something deeper; a community of people with interest in the history and culture of Ireland.  This includes debates on the issues of the moment, but also the themes of the age; the later giving the former context, nuance, and sanity.  To the Wild Geese community, I say, the broader, more balanced view you take does not go unnoticed.
 
This will likely not be the last article posted on the Wild Geese on this topic, and some may take a different view than mine on the way it should be reported here.  The Wild Geese will welcome those views as well, and that openness is another reason I will continue to be an avid reader.

Views: 2958

Tags: Faith, Media, News, Opinion

Comment by Ryan O'Rourke on June 9, 2014 at 5:57pm
Nope ... looks like it was Newstalk and not Irish Central that broke that story. So much for that, Robbie.
Comment by Robbie Doyle on June 9, 2014 at 5:59pm
I've no loyalty to Irish Central. I didn't say they broke the story. But they were quick to remind the public of its existence while it was topical.
Comment by Ryan O'Rourke on June 9, 2014 at 6:01pm
For my part, Robbie, I 'd rather not drive internet traffic to this site at all costs. In other words, speculation and rumour are cheap. Verifiable facts are valuable.
Comment by Ryan O'Rourke on June 10, 2014 at 4:28am

Forbes --- That Story About Irish Babies In A Septic Tank: Here's Why It's A Hoax

"There is a moral here for those who are increasingly bewildered by the modern world: the global media are becoming less and less accountable. Sometimes the truth eventually does come out, or at least some of us have sufficient knowledge to suspect the facts are misstated.  But very often readers do not have the experience and worldly wisdom to see through the nonsense, particularly in interpreting reported developments in nations whose cultures diverge sharply from those of the West (I am thinking in particular of East Asia, a region about which on the basis of 27 years of residence I can claim some knowledge ).

While we are constantly assured that we live in an Information Age, in reality the noise to signal ratio in our media has probably never been higher. This is  an age of disinformation." 

Comment by Ryan O'Rourke on June 10, 2014 at 4:40am

Thought this would be of interest to some of you, especially those who do not live in Ireland and who may not be familiar with these mass infant burial grounds.

There are over 500 of these "unconsecrated" burial plots in County Galway alone, and tens of thousands of them throughout the entire country -- a practice I find completely ridiculous and very sad, by the way.

Below is a map with the ones that have been discovered only in County Galway.  One of them shows a plot a stone's throw (literally) from our house on the south Connemara coast.  It's a grassy knoll right on the beach, now marked by a single stone cross monument.  Until only a decade or two ago, the high tides and storms would occasionally come in and erode that plot of land; it would, from time to time, wash away some of the corpses of the infants buried there.  Gruesome and depressing.  Then a local man came along and built a strong retaining wall and the stone cross monument that sits there now.

Here's that map showing the known burial sites in Galway:

Comment by Kelly O'Rourke on June 10, 2014 at 4:54am

Interesting letter from a professor at Queens in The Irish Times today:

Sir, – The media should be very wary of using the term “septic tank” to describe the structure containing the child burials at St Mary’s mother-and-child home at Tuam. It is offensive and hurtful to all those involved. The structure as described is much more likely to be a shaft burial vault, a common method of burial used in the recent past and still used today in many part of Europe.

In the 19th century, deep brick-lined shafts were constructed and covered with a large slab which often doubled as a flatly laid headstone. These were common in 19th-century urban cemeteries. The stone could be temporarily removed to allow the addition of additional coffined burials to the vault. Such tombs are still used extensively in Mediterranean countries. I recently saw such structures being constructed in a churchyard in Croatia. The shaft was made of concrete blocks, plastered internally and roofed with large concrete slabs.

Many maternity hospitals in Ireland had a communal burial place for stillborn children or those who died soon after birth. These were sometimes in a nearby graveyard but more often in a special area within the grounds of the hospital. It was not a tradition until very recently to return such deceased infants to parents for taking back to family burial places.

Until proved otherwise, the burial structure at Tuam should be described as a communal burial vault. – Yours, etc,

Dr FINBAR McCORMICK

School of Geography,

Archaeology

and Palaeoecology,

University Road,

Queen’s University,

Belfast.

Comment by Kelly O'Rourke on June 10, 2014 at 5:08am

Of course the response to the letter above will be, "So what?  It really doesn't matter what the mass grave container was called!"  To which I say, "EXACTLY."  Bad reporting now has us arguing semantics instead of the real issues about the treatment of children and the stigmatisation of young women.   We will never get to discuss societal repercussions of secreting away young mothers and dehumanising babies (continued today by a very different cast of characters) because we are too busy arguing, "Was it a septic tank, or wasn't it?"  The outlook that the end justifies the means can have messy repercussions. 

Comment by Robbie Doyle on June 10, 2014 at 11:48am

Decades of local knowledge about this and other unmarked mass graves, years of research by a small group in Tuam and a 2011 Prime Time investigative programme prompted little or no reaction. Suddenly, as soon as "sensationalistic" headlines spread around the globe, the state is finally jolted to begin a official inquiry (http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/inquiry-into-mother-and-bab...) into what went on in these mother and baby homes. So while some are happy to fire shots from the high moral ground, it appears that these words, "dumped" and septic tank," have in fact been a catalyst for good. Q.E.D.

Comment by Ryan O'Rourke on June 10, 2014 at 3:45pm

What we have here is simply a difference in philosophy.  You, Robbie, have clearly demonstrated that you're okay with rumour being passed off as fact as long as something good might come from it.  I disagree.   The end does not justify the means.  We'll never agree with each other on this.

I think we're all in agreement, however, that there was some seriously messed up stuff happening for a long time in Ireland with regard to these mothers and children.

Comment by Robert P. Lynch on June 11, 2014 at 12:21pm

To get the full picture it helps to be aware that these types of institution were THE "social safety net" for many generations in Ireland, during some very tough times. 
Blame has to be assigned to many parts of society (and all of it) as it existed 
at that time. The Church, the government, all parts of the established order (what the Irish might call, derisively, the "great and the good"), and, not coincidentally, the man and woman in the street, the home, and in the pews were all complicit in this situation. 

For a variety of social, economic, political and religious reasons they did not want to know, or have to deal with, these mothers and children, and a variety of other outcasts. It was very convenient for all involved to have them locked mostly out of sight with the Sisters.

They were very tough times. My mother resided in one of these residences from age 9 to 16 (she and her siblings lost their mother when she died in childbirth with the youngest and their father migrated to New York to find work after finding himself on the losing side of the Irish Civil War).

My mother spoke only obliquely about some of the abuses which went on and our family are only now discovering more from the official reports and partially released records. 

Back when Frank McCourt's book "Angela's Ashes" came out, my mother heard some contemporaries who came from his home town of Limerick complaining that things weren't as bad as he made them out to be.

"Nonsense", my mother scoffed. She said that while she came from an rural, as compared to Frank's urban one, that she assumed that every part of his story was true; that for people like them at the time there was absolutely "nothing", and that it might actually have been worse for the urban poor. She instinctively knew that the critics were speaking from a very Irish psychological place, a combination of imposed shame, denial and survivors' guilt.

The system, to some extent was built upon an inhumane "social welfare" system of "workhouses" set up by the British and the Irish Ascendancy during the Famine. The plight of the starving was somehow deemed to be their own fault and assistance was given in a punitive way designed to encourage recipients towards supposed dependency. The Tuam home was housed in one of these buildings and the same punitive, even penal, spirit haunted it.

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