Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home operated between 1925 and 1961 in Tuam, County Galway, Ireland. The Home was run by the Bon Secours Sisters, a religious order of Roman Catholic nuns. Unwed pregnant women were sent to the Home to give birth. Excavations carried out between November 2016 and February 2017 that had been ordered by the Commission found a significant quantity of human remains. Carbon dating confirmed that the remains date from the timeframe relevant to the operation of the home.
About Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in brief
Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home operated between 1925 and 1961 in Tuam, County Galway, Ireland. The Home was run by the Bon Secours Sisters, a religious order of Roman Catholic nuns. Unwed pregnant women were sent to the Home to give birth. In 2012, the Health Service Executive raised concerns that up to 1,000 children had been sent from the Home, for the purpose of illegal adoptions in the United States. Excavations carried out between November 2016 and February 2017 that had been ordered by the Commission found a significant quantity of human remains. Carbon dating confirmed that the remains date from the timeframe relevant to the operation of the home. In October 2018, the Irish government announced that it would introduce legislation to facilitate a full excavation of the mass grave and site, and for forensic DNA testing to be carried out on the remains, at a cost estimated to be between €6 and €13 million. The Commission stated that it was shocked by the discovery, and that it is continuing its investigation into who was responsible for the disposal of remains in this way. The building that eventually became \”The Home\” was built in 1841 as a workhouse under the Irish Poor Laws. It had been designed by Poor Law Commissioners’ architect George Wilkinson to house about 800 people. In 1916, during the uprising against British rule, British troops took over the workhouse, evicted the occupants and made the building their barracks. In 1923, six anti-treaty IRA volunteers were imprisoned and executed at the building by Irish Free State forces, followed by two weeks later the last executions.
The nuns took over and later erected a crucifix in memory of the executed IRA members, led by Mother Hortense McNamara. In 1927, the Board of Health directed it to be converted into a home for single women who gave birth at a hospital or midwife’s home. This resulted from the prior closure of all workhouses in the county by the Galway County Health Board. In 2003, a report by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs found that the vault was a sewage tank after reviewing historical records and conducting a magnetometer survey. The report concluded, \”The combination of an institutional boarding home and commingled interments of juvenile remains in a sewage treatment system is a unique situation, with no directly comparable domestic or international cases. The report also noted that the site was also the location of a septic tank when overlaid with maps of the period of use as aWorkhouse. A fever hospital was later constructed next door. The nuns were trained nurses and midwives that were trained at the home rather than a hospital that was a midwife or midwives. In 2007, it was revealed that nearly 800 children had died in the home, with the most commonly recorded causes of death among the infants being congenital debilities, infectious diseases and malnutrition. It was estimated that almost all had been buried in an unmarked and unregistered site at the Home and the article claimed that there was a high death rate of residents.
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This page is based on the article Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
