Tuam survivor launches campaign to buy home in case missing son returns
Christina 'Chrissy' Tully: 'He won’t know that I never married and that I never go to sleep at night without saying the rosary for him in this house and he never left my thoughts.' Photo: Gofundme
A 94-year-old survivor of the Tuam mother and baby home has launched a fundraising campaign to buy her council house in Galway, in case her missing son returns to find her after she dies.
Christina “Chrissie” Tully was just 18 years old when she gave birth to a baby boy on December 13, 1949, while she was in the care of the Bons Secours nuns as an unmarried mother.
Having suffered complications, she was rushed to Galway Central hospital where she underwent a c-section. The baby was immediately taken away from her and Ms Tully was told that her son had died, but she believes this is not true.
In recent years she has conducted a painstaking journey to find the baby she named Michael but now fears she will die before she gets answers.
In a desperate bid to leave behind a legacy, Ms Tully has started a GoFundMe campaign to buy her house so that her son will “always have a home”. Ms Tully is hoping to raise €50,000 towards the purchase of the home.
She told the : “I don’t know where Michael is. He was taken away by the doctors I never saw his face. They said he died. We looked everywhere for his grave. But you wonder then, did he die at all? Nobody knows.
“He could be in that pit in Tuam, but he could also have been adopted. We just don’t know. One record we have, says ‘return to the Tuam home’, but that’s it.”
Ms Tully said despite requesting information from Galway hospital, and the adjoining cemetery as well as Tusla, there is no sign of a burial place for her son.
“What if Michael comes looking for me after I die?
“It’s a council house, but it wont be my home after I die. I’d like to buy it, so he knows I waited for him.”
Ms Tully previously told the Irish Examiner that she was taken to Loughrea barracks by two gardaí after she fell pregnant a second time five years later and a retired judge demanded she reveal the identity of the father of her children, or she would be arrested.
“I told him to go ahead and arrest me,” Ms Tully said. “My children have the same father, and he went off to England. I never married and my second child was taken away and adopted.
“The nuns put him up for adoption. I wanted to keep him. I hoped to get a job and a place to live with him.”
Ms Tully has since been reunited with her son Patrick Naughton who lives with his family in the UK.
Galway County Council did not respond to questions from the .
