Irish Authorities Dig for Remains of Over 700 Infants Allegedly Dumped in a Septic Tank by Catholic Nuns

The sound of machinery broke the morning silence in Tuam. Not the usual construction noise that punctuates Irish towns, but something altogether more sombre.

Forensic experts were setting up what locals know will be Ireland's most important excavation in decades.

Hoarding went up around the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home site on 16 June 2025. Security teams took their positions. And somewhere beneath a housing estate playground, the remains of nearly 800 children wait to tell their stories.

The discovery, first exposed by historian Catherine Corless in 2014, reignited national reckoning over systemic abuses as she continues to fight for this moment, when what started as a simple local history project became a crusade that would force an entire nation to confront its ugliest secrets.

When History Refuses to Stay Hidden

According to Sky News, Catherine Corless never set out to become Ireland's most reluctant whistleblower.

A farmer's wife with four children and nine grandchildren, she simply wanted to write about the old workhouse building she remembered from childhood – those imposing ten-foot walls that dominated the Dublin Road.

What she found kept her awake at night.

Death certificate after death certificate. At least 796 of them. Children who died between 1925 and 1961 at what locals called 'The Home'. Babies who lived just days. Toddlers who never saw their third birthday. A nine-year-old whose name was recorded but whose grave was not.

Tuberculosis. Malnutrition. Measles. Pneumonia. The causes read like a Victorian medical textbook, but these deaths happened well into the 20th century, in an Ireland that was supposedly moving forward.

The math was brutal: one child died roughly every two weeks for 36 years straight.

The Town That Didn't Want to Remember

Tuam tried to forget. When Corless published her initial findings in the local historical society's journal, the silence was deafening. No questions. No outrage. No demands for answers.

'That really bothered me,' she recalls. 'Nobody local wanted to know.'

The authorities she approached – church leaders, council officials, government departments – all claimed ignorance. Some told her plainly to drop it. Others suggested she was damaging Tuam's reputation.

But Corless had found something else in her research. Two local boys, playing in the 1970s, had stumbled across small bones near where The Home once stood. Adults had dismissed it as animal remains. Now, cross-referencing death records with burial records, a horrifying picture emerged.
Only two children from The Home had proper burials in local graveyards. Two out of 796.

Expose Systemic Abuses of the Past

Ireland's mother and baby homes, numbering at least ten, housed around 35,000 women over decades, often subjecting them to neglect, forced labour, and separation from their children.

A 2021 inquiry revealed an 'appalling level of infant mortality' across 18 such institutions, with approximately 9,000 children dying, many from respiratory infections and gastroenteritis.

The New York Post reports that mothers at Tuam who bore additional children out of wedlock were sometimes sent to Magdalene laundries, notorious for their harsh treatment of 'fallen women'.

When Journalism met Justice

In 2014, journalist Alison O'Reilly was writing about unmarked children's graves in Dublin when Corless contacted her. What followed changed everything.

The Irish Mail ran the story on 25 May 2014. Within hours, international media descended on Tuam. The phrase 'babies in septic tanks' ricocheted around the world, sparking outrage from New York to Sydney.

The Irish government, caught flat-footed, ordered immediate investigations. It took three more years before test excavations confirmed what Corless suspected: significant quantities of human remains, aged between 35 weeks gestation and three years old, lay buried in what appeared to be a decommissioned sewage system.

The Institution That Broke Children

The Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home wasn't unique. Across Ireland, church-run institutions housed unmarried mothers and their children.

At Tuam, unmarried women arrived pregnant and ashamed. They gave birth in pain and often died in poverty. Their children, if they survived infancy, faced a childhood marked by hunger, disease, and systematic neglect.

The mortality rate tells the story: whilst child deaths nationwide were falling through the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, The Home maintained a death rate that would have shocked Victorian England.

Medical reports from the 1940s noted that children at Tuam were dying at twice the rate of other mother and baby homes. Nothing was done.

The Excavation Ireland Never Wanted

Monday's work begins a process that terrifies as much as it promises to heal. Daniel MacSweeney, the former Red Cross official leading the excavation, calls it 'unique and incredibly complex'.

Excavating children's remains is archaeology's most delicate work under the best circumstances. Here, forensic teams must work in a site where bodies may have been interred without coffins, possibly in mass graves, in conditions that may have compromised preservation.

DNA analysis will attempt to identify individuals and match them with living relatives. Some families have already provided samples, hoping to finally learn what happened to siblings, cousins, or parents they never knew.

The process will take two years minimum and cost upwards of £10 million ($13 million). For some families, it's money well spent. For others, particularly in Tuam, it's an expensive reminder of things better left buried.

The Apologies That Came Too Late

In 2021, the Bon Secours Sisters issued what they called a 'profound apology', admitting they 'failed to protect the inherent dignity' of women and children in their care. The Irish government followed with its own formal apology for the state's role in the system.

For Corless, standing beside the excavation site on Monday, the apologies felt hollow without action. She's spent eleven years fighting for this moment, often against fierce local resistance and institutional indifference.

'The babies kept me going,' she says simply. 'It was so unfair what happened to them'

Public sentiment on X reflects outrage and sorrow, with users like @HustleBitch_ condemning the 'starvation, neglect, and abuse' that led to these deaths. Survivors and families, like Annette McKay, hope for answers and dignified burials.

Corless, as per Times Now World, expressed relief at the excavation's start, calling it a 'long journey' to uncover the truth.

What Lies Beneath

As forensic teams begin their careful work, they're not just excavating bones. They're unearthing a society's shame, and a state's complicity in a system that valued moral propriety over human life.

The children of Tuam died forgotten. They were buried without ceremony, without headstones, without acknowledgement that they had ever existed. Now, as Ireland finally confronts this chapter of its history, these children may achieve in death what they were denied in life: dignity, recognition, and names on proper graves.

The excavation will continue through 2026. Families wait. Survivors hope. And in Tuam, the sound of machinery continues, slowly, carefully, bringing Ireland's buried children home.

The excavation, expected to last two years, aims to identify remains for dignified reburial, offering closure to families like that of Annette McKay, whose sister died at the home in 1942 after their mother was raped at 17.