At Tuam baby home site, justice must trump commemoration

Mary Morrissy Considering ‘memorialisation’ on equal terms with investigation will quite literally pave over the wrongdoing, writes Mary Morrissy.

Considering ‘memorialisation’ on equal terms with investigation will quite literally pave over the wrongdoing, writes Mary Morrissy.

MAYBE it’s the weather, or the World Cup, or Brexit, but the publication last Friday of the latest report on the Tuam Mother and Baby Home by Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Katherine Zappone, seemed to get swallowed up by the silly season without much attention being paid to it. Maybe that was the point.

Or maybe we’re suffering from mother and baby home fatigue? A surfeit of shame can do that to you.

Last December an expert technical group (ETG), led by forensic archaeologist Niamh McCullagh, identified five possible options for managing the Tuam gravesite and responding appropriately to the discovery of infant remains. The options ranged from leaving the gravesite as is, that is completely undisturbed (described as “memorialisation”), to a full excavation of the entire area with exhumation of all known remains.

This latest report, commissioned by Galway County Council and involving a consultative process with the public, was intended to consider those experts’ options and come up with conclusions. Conclusions, that is, not recommendations.

This process is part of what the minister last year described as a “transitional justice” approach to Tuam, placing survivors and victims at the centre of a healing process. But the results of the Galway consultation process don’t show much evidence of either justice or healing.

There were 798 written submissions to the council from interested members of the public, including those living close to the site, survivors of the Tuam home and/or their relatives.

An analysis of the submissions showed two choices clearly favoured above the others. A total of 328 wanted a complete forensic excavation of the gravesite — where up to 800 babies are believed to be buried — with full DNA analysis of the remains, while 392 favoured “memorialisation” alone. Of the local residents, 87% opted for non-disturbance of the site while 89% of the relatives wanted a total excavation.

Let’s wind back to Zappone’s notion of “transitional justice”. According to the UN, transitional justice is defined as “the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempt to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation”.

But there’s nothing in this definition about “memorialisation”, which forms a major part of the debate about the Tuam site — and the sites of other mother and baby homes.

The Tuam home, St Mary’s, run by the Bon Secours order of nuns, opened in 1925 as a mother and baby home/orphanage. However, the building itself dated back to the Famine era — it was built in 1841 as a workhouse. Ten years after its closure in 1961, the building was demolished to make way for the building of a council estate.

Local historian Catherine Corless, whose dogged research first highlighted the scandal at Tuam, found that for 798 death certificates for babies at the Tuam home over 40 years, only two records of burial existed. That means there were 796 children whose burials were not accounted for.

Since she published her research, further evidence has emerged of falsification of birth certification at other mother and baby homes which may mean that some of the deaths in Tuam were incorrectly registered to cover the fact that the children were adopted illegally.

Either way, wrongdoing has been committed here.

The survivors of Tuam and their families passionately want to know what happened to their relatives, both those who lived and those who died there, many of them buried unmarked in underground chambers, including a septic tank, on the site going back decades. They want these children’s remains to be exhumed, identified and buried respectfully in consecrated ground.

The Tuam residents, through no fault of their own, find themselves living beside a toxic site, a place associated with one of the darkest and most sorrowful episodes of our recent past. Two of them interviewed anonymously by the Guardian in 2014 were quoted as saying they would “lie down in the road to prevent exhumation of the bodies”. It would, they said, be disrespectful.

What we have here is not just two groups of people who are at odds, but two competing processes that are being pitted against one another. Justice versus commemoration. But doesn’t justice trump commemoration?

Don’t we need to know all the facts first? Like what really happened here, painful and unsavoury as that may be? Then we can decide what it is we’re commemorating and how to do it. Considering “memorialisation” on equal terms with investigation in this case will quite literally pave over the wrong-doing.

We’ve just gone through a period of commemoration, remembering our national origins in the wake of the 1916 Rising, and we face a more contentious period of remembrance with the upcoming Civil War centenary. It’s taken us 100 years to work out how to incorporate these wounds into our national psyche and honour them.

The wounds of the mother and baby homes and Magdalene Laundries are still raw and open. And much more recent. Nothing about them has been resolved, least of all our own part in them.

Places hold on to memories. They become identified by accidents of history with wrongdoing — remember the hungry grass of the Famine, think of Auschwitz.

When British poet Owen Shears was asked by the BBC to produce a commemorative programme for the 50th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster in 2016, he found the same problem (144 schoolchildren were killed when unsafe coal slag heaps in the Welsh mining village engulfed a primary school). “The more I researched Aberfan, the more I realised that such disasters, especially when they occur in small communities, are anonymising and dominating. A place’s character becomes defined in relation to the disaster. . . the event appropriates the name.” Tuam too is a small town that has become synonymous with dead babies and septic tanks, even though it was local people, not the council or official authorities, who created and take care of the shrine that exists to commemorate the remains on the site today.

This is a place that has been reviewed by investigative committees, researched by historians, picked over by forensic archaelogists, but even with all that attention, it has never been declared a crime scene. Which, for the moment, is what it is.

Do we really need another report to do justice here? Why not throw up the Garda white tape and start digging?

- Mary Morrissy is the associate director of creative writing at UCC. Her latest book is Prosperity Drive, a novel in stories.