Dig starts at Irish home where 796 infants died

The real work is scheduled to start next month, 11 years after Irish historian Catherine Corless found records to show hundreds of infants had died at the institution, which was run by the Bon Secours sisters, an order of Catholic nuns, between 1925 and 1961.

The battle to uncover the truth about Tuam has been long and painful for all involved. After Corless’s research was highlighted by the Irish press, the Dublin government dragged its heels, eventually establishing a commission in 2015 to investigate what happened at Tuam and other mother and baby homes across Ireland. The commission ordered excavations at the Tuam site and in 2017 announced that the remains of infants aged between 35 foetal weeks and three years old had been discovered in an underground structure that appeared to be a disused sewage tank. Enda Kenny, then the Taoiseach, described it as “a chamber of horrors”.

Following the discovery, a coroner was appointed to oversee the investigation, which was widened to include all similar institutions in Ireland. A team of international experts, including a forensic archaeologist and anthropologist, was established to join the inquiry. The commission was due to issue a final report in 2018 but was given an extension – finally publishing nearly 3,000 pages, one third of which was testimony from survivors, in January 2021. The delay was blamed on the need for legal advice on possible reparations for victims.

The report concluded that an estimated 9,000 children had died in a network of 18 institutions in Ireland between 1922 and 1998.

In 2019 the Institutional Burials Act, which gave the government legal grounds to begin the excavation, was drafted, then delayed by Covid until it entered the statute books in 2022. It took another two years of what some have called “organised delay” for the government to appoint a director to lead the excavation.

Preliminary work was expected to begin last autumn, but issues including underground electricity cables and water pipes supplying local homes are reported to have, again, delayed the dig.

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• Catherine Corless: Why I refused to give up until I learned the fate of those lost souls

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