In Mary Lavin's 1969 short story/novella "The Lost Child," a Protestant Irish woman (Renee) married to a Catholic Irish man (Mike) converts to Catholicism while she is in the early stages of pregnancy. They've been married for years and have several children already, and Renee's sister Iris is very dubious about this. As they head to the church for the ceremony, Renee remembers a day when she, Iris, and Mike were touring the countryside and discovered a strange arrangement of stones in an unused field. With the help of a guidebook, they work out that this is one of the graveyards in which unbaptized infants used to be buried. Iris is horrified at the exclusion of these children from consecrated ground, from salvation, and from public memory; Mike, initially excited to have identified this piece of genuine Irish history, becomes defensive. Renee is obscurely troubled by the experience but not enough to reconsider. Later on in the story, Renee miscarries, and is plunged into depression. Mike assumes that she's brooding over the fate of her baby's soul, and asks her if she's still bothered by the memory of those unmarked graves. Renee says she'd forgotten about that; but his reminding her "makes it worse."
I thought of this story because another unmarked grave for Irish children has been much in the news of late. Though initial media reports that the remains of 800 children had been discovered in a septic tank have since been modified, nobody is disputing these facts: local historian Catherine Corless, who has been tracking down the death certificates of the children who died at the St. Mary's mother and baby home operated by the Bons Secours sisters in Tuam, Galway between 1925 and 1961, has verified that 796 infants and children died at St. Mary's in the 36 years of its existence. As this piece points out, this means that they were losing, on average, 22 children a year, or one every 2.3 weeks. Infant mortality in general was high in Ireland at this time, but not THAT high; the same piece links to a 1934 Dail Debate on a bill proposing to regulate maternity homes, which cites a report generated in 1927 by the "Commission on the Relief of the Destitute Sick and Poor, including the Insane Poor" to the effect that "one in every three illegitimate children born alive in 1924 died within one year of its birth, and that the mortality amongst these children is about five times as great as in other cases."
I would like to note (since The Explainer doesn't) that the 1927 Commission's report is not describing conditions in homes run by religious orders. The Commission was much more concerned with the "poorer classes" of private maternity homes which, instead of housing the children on-site or arranging adoptions for them, often put them out to nurse. It was the Commission's opinion that in many cases everyone involved in this transaction "connived at" the death of a child whose existence was a major social problem for the mother and her family. "The illegitimate child being proof of the mother's shame," the report remarks, "is, in most cases, sought to be hidden at all costs."
But the mother wasn't the only one trying to hide this "shame." Jim Smyth's 2007 book on the Magdalene Laundries arose out of his work on the Irish Free State's "culture of containment," which he argues was driven by a desire to suppress the material evidence of Free State Ireland's divergence from Catholic ideals. Pregnancy made sex visible, Smyth argues, and so the Free State sought to "contain"--not the men who fathered these children, but the women whose bodies were "proof" of Ireland's "shame." Much of the academic work done on these homes since has focused on the treatment of the mothers; so have most of the cultural treatments of them produced in the 1990s and after (e.g. Patricia Burke Brogan's Eclipsed, Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters). The story on the children was always that many of them had been adopted out, often to Catholic families in the US, often without the mother's consent; and obviously, this was what happened to many of the children born in these institutions. Clearly, however, adoption was not the fate in store for many others. As Lindsay Earner-Byrne has documented, many of the religious-run mother and baby homes had mortality rates comparable to the ones at Tuam.
Why post about this? I suppose it's partly because I would like everyone to know that without the slow, patient, and often un- or under-compensated labor of Irish historians, we wouldn't know about most of this. And I would like to do my part to see that their work, and the work of other people who have patiently documented the lives and deaths of all these mothers and children who were "sought to be hidden at all costs," gets the attention it deserves. To arrive at an accurate understanding of which children died in the Tuam home, Catherine Corless had to track down the original home's records through all the authorities to which they had migrated over the years, spend hours interpreting them, and then request--and pay for--796 individual death certificates. I can only guess at the thousands of woman-hours of work put in by Linsday Earner-Byrne to generate the statistics about mortality rates that were quoted in one little snippet of the Explainer piece. I would like the vast amounts of bone-crushing work involved in producing a reliable history--even of one institution in one town--acknowledged and appreciated, regardless of how the story then became sensationalized by the media.
But mainly I'm posting about the grave in Tuam because I just can't stop thinking about it. It's not really because the number itself comes as a shock. It's always been dangerous to be an unwanted child, especially one who lands in an institution; and that's true no matter who's running it. Currently in the US we are looking a scandal, which will unfortunately probably get little attention outside of progressive circles, regarding our treatment of undocumented immigrant children, who are being crammed into overcrowded holding facilities in Texas where they have about as much freedom of movement as battery-farmed chickens. Margot Backus and Joseph Valente have a book in press right now about literary responses to the mistreatment of children in twentieth-century Ireland. It goes back much further, in Irish history but undoubtedly in the history of other societies as well. James Connolly's The Re-Conquest of Ireland quotes a parliamentary debate in the Dublin House of Commons in 1790 on the disastrous history of the Foundling Hospital in Dublin:
The number of infants received in 1789 was 2,180; and of that number 2,087 were dead or unaccounted for. In ten years 19, 367 children had been entered upon the books, and almost 17,000 were dead or missing. The wretched little ones were sent up from all parts of Ireland, ten or twelve of them thrown together in a kish or basket, forwarded in a low-backed car, and so bruised and crushed and shaken at their journey's end that half of them were taken out dead, and were flung into a dung-heap. (qtd in Connolly, The Re-Conquest of Ireland, 231)*
I knew this about the Foundling Hospital; but it was startling to rediscover it in the middle of a 1915 tract by Connolly, which I happen to be reading right now, along with a lot of nationalist, socialist, and republican propaganda from the period before the civil war. It was the "dung-heap" reference that struck me. Connolly points out that earlier writers had used the dung metaphor to describe the true state of class relations under capitalism: not only are the poor refuse to be discarded, but the trashing of the poor is actually necessary for the fertilization of the civilization the rich enjoy. And that's really what rendered sensational a story with which many of us have been substantially familiar for the past 20 years: the suggestion that the members of a Catholic religious order had treated the bodies of the children they were ostensibly nurturing (materially and spiritually) like human waste. This is why it mattered so much to people to correct the initial misconception about the evidence uncovered by those two boys in 1975, and why I suppose some people will derive comfort from the knowledge that there were, at most, maybe 20 bodies in that pit, and maybe when they were put there it wasn't actually a working septic tank.
But none of that changes the fact that these children were, to the authorities in charge of the Irish Free State, the abject--something "to be hidden at all costs." Those babies may not all have been dumped in a septic tank; but like the unbaptized children buried in the graveyards that Mary Lavin represented in "The Lost Child," they were consigned to oblivion to the extent that it was possible to do so. Local memory, as some of these stories point out, was not that easily erased, and the field in which those children must have been buried, unmarked as it was, was nevertheless recognized as a graveyard (though for a while it was apparently assumed to be a famine grave). And there is, also, the question of why those babies were being raised at that home in the first place. How many of those mothers would have been willing and able to raise their children in the outside world if the social cost of doing so had not been made so punishingly high?
Another thing that strikes me as I think about this story is how long it took us--how long it took me--to start questioning my own assumptions about where all the children were going. It seems obvious to me now: of course they couldn't all have been adopted. Of course they couldn't all have survived. I wonder if it is simply that to Americans, at any rate, the idea of a religious institution having the power to hold an adult woman against her will when she has violated no laws is unusual and sensational--whereas the neglect of poor children is unfortunately quite familiar to us from our own culture. And in fact it is not only poor children who are being ground up in the machine of twenty-first century American politics. I live, after all, in a country whose lawmakers have decided that the occasional mass shooting of students ranging in age from 6 to 22 is an acceptable price to pay for their own job security.
As it happens, I'm reading a lot of propaganda produced during the late teens and early 1920s in which the writers set forward their visions of what Ireland will be like after the war is over and independence achieved. The contrast between these dreams of a Gaelic and Catholic state to come which will become the spiritual light of a chaotic world which it will lead out of the darkness of violence and anarchy and the many postindependence failures represented by the bodies buried around the home at Tuam is quite painful.
The 'correction' of the septic tank detail will no doubt accelerate the international media's inevitable loss of interest in the story. But the historians are still there, doing their work; and I believe that they will uncover and substantiate more stories that we didn't know--or only half-knew--about what happened to the children in these mother and baby homes. Not all of them will go viral. But watch for them anyway. The tragedy these histories document is one that is not confined to Ireland; and it is certainly not over.
* In James Connolly, Labour in Ireland, with an introduction by Cathal O'Shannon. Dublin: Sign of the Three Candles, n.d. [1950?]
