Preparatory works began on Monday at the site of the former mother and baby institution in Tuam, Co Galway, in advance of a long-awaited excavation due to start in mid-July.
Hoarding was brought on site during the morning to seal off the area.
The excavation will take place 11 years after research by local historian Catherine Corless revealed that 796 children died at the institution, which was run by the Bon Secours religious order between 1925-1961. A lack of burial records indicated the children could be buried on the site.
A test excavation in 2017 discovered a significant amount of human remains in what appeared to be a decommissioned sewage chamber. Ms Corless said she thought the site would be fully excavated shortly afterwards but there were numerous delays.
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Speaking to The Irish Times in Tuam on Monday, Ms Corless said it was “absolutely wonderful” that work is finally beginning.
“It’s great for all the families of the babies and relatives in that sewage system, because it was horrific.”
Ms Corless said that, while she received a lot of support from people across Ireland and abroad, she experienced pushback from within the local community in Tuam.
“A lot of businesses and a lot of people in authority, they really and truly wanted to keep this quiet and just put up a monument, not to let on that there’s so many [buried there]. They were minimising it the whole time,” Ms Corless said.
“I was told more often than not that I was giving Tuam a bad name and giving the church a bad name. Their take on it was just: leave it, this was the past and leave it there.”
Ms Corless said the treatment of the babies, and the lack of dignity in their burial, was “too horrific” for her to walk away.
“All those lovely little children and babies, that’s the one thing that drove me. That’s all that was in my mind, these babies are in a sewage system, they have to come out.”
The excavation process was delayed while the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes carried out its work.
Ms Corless had previously said she thought her work was complete in 2017, but “instead of that I had to fight harder and harder...perhaps I was naive at the start”.
She said she was naturally a shy person and becoming a public figure was “painful”, but she knew she could not give up.
“I just had to, the babies kept me going. It was so unfair what happened to them,” she said.
Ms Corless said the children buried at the site deserve more than a plaque, which had been suggested by some in the locality, as do their relatives. She said it was a “disgrace” that they had been “treated like they were nothing”.
She said she hopes the excavation will finally give survivors and relatives some “closure”.
Anna Corrigan, whose two brothers John and William Dolan might be buried at the site, said the children were “denied dignity in life and in death”.
Ms Corrigan, from Dublin, said the treatment of the children and mothers in question is “a wrong that should never have happened, but hopefully we can go some way to righting that wrong”.
The director of the exhumation, Daniel MacSweeney, said the process is likely to take two years and will be a “unique and incredibly complex excavation” as efforts are made to identify any remains found.
