Catholic nuns, missing babies, a mass grave — and a reckoning with Ireland's past

toggle caption Paulo Nunes dos Santos/for NPR

TUAM, Ireland — Anna Corrigan thought she was an only child.

It wasn't until she was in her 50s, researching her family tree, that she discovered a family secret: Corrigan found documents showing her mother, Bridget Dolan, had given birth to two boys in 1946 and 1950, in a home for unwed mothers.

It was an era when the Roman Catholic Church dominated Irish life. There was no sex education. Birth control and abortion were illegal, and pregnancy outside marriage brought shame.

Dolan died in 2001 without ever speaking about her sons.

"I never knew what she was going through," says Corrigan, 69, paging through black-and-white photos of her First Communion. "See the grip my mother has holding me? What was going through her mind, after losing two children? [Were they] taken away, dead, adopted?"

toggle caption Paulo Nunes dos Santos/for NPR

Throughout the 20th century, the Irish government and Catholic Church ran facilities called mother and baby homes, where single women who got pregnant could go to give birth. Mothers typically stayed about a year, while breastfeeding, but were then forced out — without their babies. These were similar to Ireland's Magdalene Laundries, Catholic-run, all-female workhouses where women who were considered disgraced often lived indefinitely, doing unpaid or underpaid labor, usually as laundresses.

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The last Magdalene Laundry operated in central Dublin until 1996; the last mother and baby home closed two years later. Tens of thousands of women passed through these facilities. Many of their children never came out.

Only now, as the Catholic Church's influence wanes and Ireland grows more secular — voting in 2015 to legalize same-sex marriage and abortion in 2018 — and as genetic testing goes mainstream, are families investigating their links to this dark chapter of Irish history.

Corrigan's search for her missing siblings has taken her to a muddy field in the western Irish town of Tuam, in County Galway, where a mother and baby home was demolished in the mid-1970s. It operated from 1925 to 1961, run by a Catholic order of nuns called the Sisters of Bon Secours.

toggle caption Paulo Nunes dos Santos/for NPR

toggle caption Paulo Nunes dos Santos/for NPR

In the mid-1970s, two neighborhood boys were playing on the grounds of the Tuam home, when they fell down a hole into a disused septic tank. To their horror, they discovered the tank was lined with tiny human skeletons — and the fate of some of Ireland's missing children became known.

But it would take decades for anyone to investigate how many babies were buried in Tuam, and even longer — until this past July — for anyone to unearth them.

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