Ireland often seems surreal. But it is also, if I may be permitted to coin a word, subreal. We share the island, not just with what is above ground but what it under it. Our reality is not just experienced – it is exhumed. As Seamus Heaney put it in Bogland, it keeps “striking/ Inwards and downwards,/ Every layer they strip/Seems camped on before”.
The subsoil of the grounds of the former Bons Secours Mother and Baby home in Tuam is described as a “yellow-grey silty gritty layer”. And it is being stripped now, down to where, between 1925 and 1961, perhaps 796 tiny human beings were stuffed in a disused sewage system. This non-resting place is, as the technical report published in 2017 has it, “an elongated structure, comprising 20 chambers, with juvenile human remains identified in 17 of those chambers”.
These chambers of horror are “deep and narrow”. Indeed – this is a kind of reality that has been buried very deep and confined to a very narrow strip of Irish consciousness. It is weirdly apt that Tuam in its original form is Tuaim, a tumulus or burial mound. It has become a microcosm for all that has been interred with Irish history’s discarded bones.
In the grounds of the home, there are many layers of yellow-grey oblivion. There have been, in modern times, three distinct cycles of shameful burial and exhumation just in this small patch of Irish earth.
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Before it was the Mother and Baby home, the complex was the Tuam workhouse. It opened in 1846, which meant that it was immediately overwhelmed by desperate victims of the Great Famine who died, not just of disease and hunger, but as Eavan Boland put it in her poem Quarantine, “Of the toxins of a whole history.” They were initially buried just beside the workhouse, until the authorities objected that the “burying ground ... is in such a state as to be injurious to the health of the occupiers of premises in ... the entire town of Tuam”.
[ Tuam families can see ‘light at the end of a very long tunnel’Opens in new window ]
In 2012, during works on the town water scheme, 18 pits containing 48 bodies of famine victims were uncovered. It seems probable that many more bodies lie in and around the grounds. Interestingly, even in the midst of that unspeakable catastrophe, these people had at least been buried in coffins – a dignity not afforded to the children who later died in the care of the nuns.
The second episode of burial and exhumation on this same patch of land occurred during and immediately after the Civil War. Between its periods as a workhouse and a Mother and Baby home, the Tuam complex had another brief life that also involved hidden burials.
It was occupied during the Civil War by the Free State Army. In March 1923, six anti-Treaty prisoners were executed in the workhouse and buried in the grounds. In May, two more prisoners suffered the same fate. These bodies were exhumed and reburied in 1924.
It again seems interesting that these dead men were given a memorial on the site: there is a commemorative plaque on the only preserved section of the wall of the Mother and Baby home. The famine and the Troubles at least occupied enough space in official memory for coffins and commemorations to be afforded to their victims. The children who died in the Mother and Baby home were not part of history until the extraordinary Catherine Corless made them so – thus they got neither coffins nor memorials.
The operation to identify so many now-jumbled bones of infants using DNA analysis and other cutting-edge techniques will, if successful, set a new benchmark for the rescue of the unwanted dead from the contempt of silence and anonymity
What makes the forensic excavation that began in Tuam yesterday even stranger is that it fuses an old Ireland with a new. It is both deeply atavistic and startlingly innovative. It is something that seems never to have happened before in human history.
There have been thousands of archaeological explorations of tombs and burial chambers. There have been numerous grim excavations of bodies dumped in mass graves after massacres or battles. (Daniel MacSweeney, who is heading the Tuam operation, gained his expertise in the Lebanon and the Caucasus. Oran Finegan, its leading forensic scientist, worked on “large-scale post conflict identification programmes” in the Balkans and Cyprus.)
There are also many cases of babies and other inmates being buried in unmarked or poorly recorded graves on the grounds of institutions – at, for example, the Smyllum Park boarding home in Scotland, the Haut de la Garenne boarding home on Jersey, the Ballarat Orphanage in Australia, and the Duplessis Orphans’ home in Canada. Here in Ireland, we had the hideous exhumation in 1993 of the graves of women buried at the High Park Magdalene home in Dublin – so that the nuns could sell the land for property development.
But the situation of the remains in Tuam – neither a grave nor a tomb – has, according to the technical group, “no national or international comparisons that the group is aware of”. And the operation to identify so many now-jumbled bones of infants using DNA analysis and other cutting-edge techniques will, if successful, set a new benchmark for the rescue of the unwanted dead from the contempt of silence and anonymity. This is making history in a double sense – doing something that has never been done before while simultaneously reshaping a country’s understanding of its own recent past.
And, hopefully, of its present. The digging up of the bodies of people disappeared by the IRA has helped us to grasp the truth that the Troubles themselves cannot simply be buried. Revenants like Jean McConville return, not just to remind us of the past but to warn us of what it means when people become, even after death, disposable.
While the Tuam excavation continues, we have, in the corner of our eyes, a peripheral awareness of the undead. Since they were not allowed properly to rest in peace, we cannot do so either. Since they were so contemptuously consigned to oblivion, we are obliged to remember. Since they were sacrificed to a monolithic tunnel vision, we must tunnel down to bring buried truths to light and hidden histories to consciousness.
