Vigil to mark children’s tragedy

Every now and then a story comes along which stops one in one’s tracks. A story which makes a person question their belief in the innate decency of man or woman. That story is the tragedy that was revealed finally to the world by Catherine Corless.

Photographs can be found online of the children taken while they were “in care” at the Mother and Child Home in Tuam. Grim, joyless faces with pained eyes stare hard-faced back at the camera, reminiscent of those children we saw television pictures of in Romanian orphanages in the 1980s after the fall of Ceausescu. What desolation was visited upon them that ripped the childlike joy from their eyes and replaced it with a deadman’s stare? How can the final resting place of an innocent child (supposedly treasured above all by the Church) be a tank used to store human excrement? Is that what their little lives were worth?

This story has been in the public domain to a greater or lesser extent since 1975. People knew there were little bodies buried there. Why is it only this week that any awakening of the public consciousness has occurred and at a pace which would embarrass an overweight glacier?