Qualla: Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home

Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AugusteBlanqui, CC BY-SA 4.0. Catherine Corless did not set out to expose a national wound. She was a local historian researching the old Children's Home in Tuam, ordering death certificates one by one from the registrar's office at two euro each. When she finished, she had 796 of them. Children who had died between 1925 and 1961 at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home. There was no corresponding burial record. They were simply gone. What she found next, on a small green plot bordered by housing estates on the northwest edge of Tuam, would force Ireland to look at something it had decided long ago to forget.

Image: AugusteBlanqui | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home: The Home

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AugusteBlanqui, CC BY-SA 4.0. Before the nuns arrived, the building was a workhouse, a relic of the Famine era when the destitute of north Galway were warehoused behind grey limestone walls. In 1925, the Bon Secours sisters took it over and renamed it. From then until it closed in 1961, the Home received unma...

Image: AugusteBlanqui | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home: Catherine Corless and the Death Certificates

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AugusteBlanqui, CC BY-SA 4.0. Corless lived in Tuam. As a child she remembered the Home children kept apart at school, given a different door, a different schoolyard. As an adult historian she began assembling their story for the local journal. The death certificates told her the children had died, often of m...

Image: AugusteBlanqui | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home: The Septic Tank

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AugusteBlanqui, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2016 and 2017, a state-appointed Commission of Investigation conducted exploratory excavations. They found what Corless had long suspected: a significant quantity of human remains, infants and small children, interred in a disused underground structure with twenty chambers, re...

Image: AugusteBlanqui | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home: The Excavation

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AugusteBlanqui, CC BY-SA 4.0. Full forensic excavation of the Tuam site began in earnest on 14 July 2025, conducted by the Office of the Director of Authorised Intervention. The work is expected to take roughly two years. International forensic specialists from Colombia, Spain, the UK, Canada, and the United ...

Image: AugusteBlanqui | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home: What the Site Is Now

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AugusteBlanqui, CC BY-SA 4.0. If you stand on the green today, you see a small memorial garden, a low statue, a quiet plot enclosed by suburban houses. Children played on this ground for decades without knowing. Mothers passed it. Many of those mothers - separated from their babies by adoption, by death, by t...

Image: AugusteBlanqui | CC BY-SA 4.0