International team set to excavate Irish mother and baby mass burial site

Excavation Workers begin setting up at Tuam, Ireland, Monday July 7, 2025 ahead of the excavation at St Mary's home for unmarried mothers and their children which which was run by the Bon Secours Sisters, the Catholic nuns based in Tuam. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison)

TUAM, Ireland — International experts will join Irish counterparts to uncover an unmarked mass burial site for children at a former mother and baby home in Tuam in western Ireland, the director of the excavation team said on Monday.

Staff from Colombia, Spain, Britain, Canada and the United States have joined the Office of the Director of Authorised Intervention (ODAIT) team in Tuam, its director Daniel MacSweeney said at a press conference in the town.

The full-scale excavation of the site in Tuam -- 135 miles (220 kilometres) west of Dublin -- will start next week and is expected to last two years, said MacSweeney.

The work at the burial site, which is being undertaken by the ODAIT, will involve exhumation, analysis, identification if possible, and re-interment of the remains of infants who died at the home between 1925 and 1961.

Niamh McCullagh, ODAIT’s Senior Forensic Consultant, said that the random nature in which remains were buried added to the difficulty.

Significant quantities of baby remains were discovered in 20 individual chambers within an apparently makeshift crypt two metres below ground at the site during test excavations between 2016 and 2017, she said.

MacSweeney told AFP that the complexity of the task “is unique as we are dealing with so many sets of infant remains”.

DNA samples have already been collected from around 30 relatives, and this process will be expanded in the coming months to gather as much genetic evidence as possible, said MacSweeney.

A 2.4-metre-high hoarding has been installed around the perimeter, which is in the middle of a housing estate built during the 1970s.

The site is subject to security monitoring on a 24-hour basis to ensure the forensic integrity of the site during the excavation.

Over a decade-long wait

The excavation comes over a decade since a historian discovered the unmarked mass burial site.

In 2014, local historian Catherine Corless produced evidence that 796 children, from newborns to a nine-year-old, had died at the location.

Her research pointed to the children’s likely final resting place -- a disused septic tank discovered in 1975.

The mother and baby home in Tuam was run by Catholic nuns between 1925 and 1961, and the site was left largely untouched after the institution was knocked down in 1972.

It was Corless’s discovery of the unmarked mass burial site that led to an Irish Commission of Investigation into the mother and baby home.

Women who became pregnant out of wedlock were siloed in so-called mother and baby homes by Irish society, the state and the Catholic church, which has historically held an iron grip on Irish social attitudes.

After giving birth at the homes, mothers were then separated from their newborn children, who were often given up for adoption.

The state-backed enquiries sparked by the discoveries in Tuam found that 56,000 unmarried women and 57,000 children passed through 18 such homes over the space of 76 years.

The commission’s report concluded that 9,000 children had died in the homes across Ireland.

Often, church and state worked in tandem to run the institutions, which still operated in Ireland as recently as 1998.

The ODAIT team was finally appointed in 2023 to lead the Tuam site excavation.

“These children were denied every human right in their lifetime, as were their mothers, and they were denied dignity and respect in death,” Anna Corrigan whose two siblings may have been buried at the site, told reporters.

“We are hoping that today maybe will be the start of hearing them as I think they have been crying for a long time to be heard,” she said.