Documentary film maker Tanya Stephan won awards for her film The Missing Children which looked at the scandal of the Tuam mother and baby home.
She is returning to that subject matter as the excavation is expected with a new film and wants to hear from survivors and family members of the 796.
In 2022 she won a BAFTA, a Grierson and an RTS award for the documentary.
Tanya’s other work includes Ukraine War Diaries and The Girl Who Caught A Killer.
Tanya Stephan told The Irish World: “We’re waiting on the excavation team to confirm when they’re going to begin the excavation but they have given us access and I’ve met with them which is brilliant.
“They’re a really great team but until we know when it’s actually going to start, it’s a little bit difficult to schedule.
“But in the meantime my main focus really is finding relatives of the 796, survivors and adoptees, particularly to the USA, because I’m really interested in that route and the different ways that people were adopted to the United States.
“What I’ve been doing is going back into all this research that we did for The Missing Children, opening it all back up and also finding all the threads that we didn’t have time or space to pursue because we had so much material, so many different avenues to pursue at the time.
“There’s some adoption stories that I’m following up on, people who contacted us even after the film went out.
“I just want to bring more people into this project, and new people as well as going back to some of the people that we filmed with.
“Obviously there were some really key people that we filmed with in the first film.
“I also want to bring some new people in and definitely look more deeply at where the children were going.”
I thought it came out of The Missing Children. Take us back to the beginning of that, how did that start? What moved you to make that? Do you remember first hearing about the scandal of Tuam?
“I first became aware of it when it hit the news.
“It must have been 2014 when it became this major news story because of Catherine Corless’ work and Anna Corrigan and Alison O’Reilly and that coming together of the three women who were looking into this.
“Suddenly I realised that there was this huge story underground.
“There was a lot of kind of news around them so I heard about it.
“Also there was a Radio 4 programme a bit later on about the Tuam babies.
“And I listened to that and I remember thinking, ‘But then what happened?’
“And the news cycle is so strange.
“It picks up on a story and then it just leaves it behind and in a way, for about four years in my head, I just moved on.
“But then I’ve always had quite a lot of interest in people finding out where they come from.
“I’ve made a film about a woman who is an egg donor.
“She was looking for the children that she had helped to conceive.
“And I got very involved in the world of donor kids and young people who were looking for their identity.
“And I also had a rumour in my family that I might have a half sibling somewhere so I was kind of a little bit in that world.
“I was speaking to a genetic genealogist called Maurice Gleeson.
“He became very involved in the Tuam story.
“I was talking to him about other research I was doing.
“He said, ‘DNA is going to become really important in the story of Tuam and it’s going to be interesting to see what DNA techniques they use to identify the remains’.
“I was like, ‘Oh Tuam’.
“This is now 2018.
“I was like, ‘Haven’t heard of Tuam for a long time, what’s happening with Tuam?’
“And when I started looking into it, an article came up from the Manchester Evening News, which was Annette Mackay saying, ‘My sister is one of the 796 babies of Tuam but I don’t know if she’s there or if she was adopted to America’.
“I read her piece and I thought, ‘That’s really interesting.
“Clearly the story hasn’t moved on since 2014.
“They haven’t excavated.
“Nobody has answers and then there’s all these other questions.
“Annette was living just outside of Manchester and I’m in London.
“I just rang her up.
“I was so fascinated by her story and kind of just felt like, ‘My God, this is a really big thing to look into’.
“I just took my camera and went up on the train and met her, and we started filming almost straight away because her story was just so incredible and she was telling me that she was going to these meetings in Tuam and, like I was saying, the excavation hadn’t happened. Things were not really moving on.
“And I said, ‘Is anybody making a film about your story? Because it just sounds so incredible’.
“She said, ‘No, there’s been the odd news thing but nobody’s making a film’.
“So on my way back on the train, I wrote her an email and I said, ‘Annette, I promise you we’re going to make this film happen. It’s going to take a few months but we are going to make this happen because it’s just such an important story’.
“I felt so moved and fire in my belly about it.
“It didn’t take a few months.
“Unfortunately it probably took another couple of years before we had all the funding in place and it was a very, very long journey to get the funding.
“But we did get that.”
Did you feel responsibility with the story and your subjects? The last thing you want to do is re-traumatise these women..
“Exactly, it’s women and it’s men.
“There are many men who are survivors and who have been adopted as well and who have siblings in the grave and so on.
“I think really the biggest part of the work was getting to know many of the people involved in the story and spending time.
“I wanted this film to really do justice and to do justice to their story so that people really felt that they were being heard and at the same time as a filmmaker, making a film that’s going to really grip and engage an audience that would otherwise know nothing about this.
“It is a really big responsibility.
“There are other people who’ve made films recently, particularly around this subject.
“The very first film, I guess, was Philomena.
“That kind of broke open the story.
“It opened up the story but there was just so much more to it that I think people didn’t even realise.”
Did you find the women very eager to speak because they had not been listened to for so long?
“I think that some of the survivors had begun to tell their stories.
“When Catherine Corless’ research first came out in 2014, people who really had never spoken before were speaking then.
“We have to kind of keep it in perspective that there are many people who have never spoken and never would and particularly mothers.
“Very, very few mothers have come forward.
“They carried the shame, they carried the pain of giving up their children.
“And also many of them have passed away since, tragically, before any of this came to light.
“I think the mothers are the least represented in this because there’s probably very few left and I think many of those who are left just wouldn’t come forward.
“I would love to speak to any of the mothers who were in Tuam but I think that’s a tricky one and I can understand why people would want to keep their privacy.
“For example, Kathy (The Missing Children), she’s a woman who we found through an article in Irish Central in the states.
“It was incredible.
“She was in a bookshop just kind of flicking through things and she saw this piece that we’d put in, this little piece and she said, ‘Oh, that’s kind of interesting. Maybe I’ll send an email’.
“But she wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, I’m desperate to tell my story. How can I do this?’
“I think she just thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ll give some filmmakers a hand’.
“And also, she had literally just found that she had a brother and a sister in England through doing a DNA test so she was in a very interesting place at that point.
“Sometimes I think these interviews and these relationships with contributors come about in a more gradual way.
“Kathy and I are still in contact and we speak on the phone.
“Sometimes it takes a little bit longer for people to really open up about their stories, particularly when they never talked about it before.”
“There’s no public archive about Mother and Baby homes.
“You can’t go to the National Archives and research the story.
“It’s not taught in school.
“I feel that people’s personal archives are really important in this story.
“And there are people who were adopted from Tuam and they just have a few letters, or they have the odd certificate, or they just have a little bit of information that might have been handed to them if they were told that they were adopted or if they did some research, and managed to get something from the government department but those few bits of paper can be incredibly revealing about the routes that people took when they were adopted.
“Someone’s records might have been slightly changed and they may not even have noticed but there’s something in there that reveals something more.
“I’ve really, really focused on personal archives in my research and it’s been extraordinary what we’ve discovered.”
Was the reaction to the Missing Children poignant to you?
Was it very moving to see the conversation it started?
“Yeah, it was broadcast on ITV in the UK and then it also went out on in Ireland maybe a couple of days later.
“As the film was going out on RTÉ, we were following the thread on Twitter and that was really amazing actually to have so many people talking about how important the story was.
“It was resonating.
“It was just such a positive reaction live in the moment.
“And I think contributors have had very positive responses to the film.
“Often, as a filmmaker, you don’t really know the ripples of your film but I think there were questions asked in the Dáil afterwards and the Archbishop of Tuam was asked questions about the film the next day on the news.
“It was sort of being talked about and people were being questioned and held to account, the authorities and the church, as a result of the film which also felt really good.”
I know it’s won awards but I bet such a meaningful reaction is what makes you more proud..
“Yeah, it is.
“And many things came together to finally make the government accept the need for the excavation and for it to finally be about to happen but the film, perhaps, was a part of that puzzle of elements that came together.
“We’ve really made the point in the film thanks to Niamh McCullough, the forensic archaeologist, saying about the damage that will be done to the remains by leaving them there. Having already opened up the site for the preliminary excavation, you can’t just leave it there.
“So hopefully people could sort of use the film to say, ‘Look, this is really what’s happening and this is really what needs to happen’.”
Is this an even more important project following the inquiry and the upset it caused?
“I guess we’ll discover, in a way, what the film will be as the excavation progresses because it’s a big mystery, we don’t know what the excavation will reveal.
“So I think certainly this film is as important and I hope it will in some way be a healing project, that something good might come out of it in terms of giving people answers and dignifying the children’s remains.
“Many people feel that just leaving the site as it was was just not acceptable and so it will probably take longer than people would wish because it’s a very complex process but hopefully some answers will come out of that.
“Like I say maybe some healing.
“You can’t say for sure what the impacts will be.”
Tanya has no Irish blood herself but was attracted to the story.
“I kind of came at this via a British story in a funny way, because Annette Mackay is a British woman and her mum was Irish and had given birth at Tuam but then came to England, like many of the mums to escape and start a new life.
“I wanted to reflect that international side of the story, the fact that obviously many, many Irish people have gone to America but many, many people were adopted to America whether or not they know that they are, and also to England.
“Many mothers moved here so I guess what I’m bringing to it, although I’m not Irish, is real interest in that more international perspective and the breadth of the story internationally.”
I notice a theme that runs through so much of your work and that is children in the middle of things they have no control over. So many of your projects are concerned with that..
“That’s a really interesting point.
“I think what happens to children and how children are treated, in a way, it’s becoming even more important as a story.
“If you look at Ukraine and the children who were stolen by Russia, put in camps.
“And then in America when they are separating children from their parents because they come over as illegal immigrants, it’s terrible.
“The children are used as a political tool in a way or become the victims of political situation.”
As you say news cycles move on…
“I think that this excavation will really thrust the story back into the headlines because nothing like this has ever been done before.
“Obviously they’ve excavated mass graves before but I don’t think they’ve ever done this with a historic site of children’s remains.
“It’s a very unusual situation.”
You want to hear from adoptees to America but also to here in the UK..
“Yeah, absolutely.
“I mean family members will be all over the place and so will adoptees.
“There’ll be some even in Australia.
“Yes, survivors, family members, adoptees.
“What we’re really trying to do is build as much of a picture as we can of this very difficult history, and the only way we can do that is through the people who are most affected by it and were there or had siblings there or relatives there.”
You can get in contact by Tanya by emailing tanya.stephan@truevisiontv.com, calling 020 8434 3404 and writing to
True Vision Productions I Suite 108-109 Boundary House, Boston Road, London, W7 2QE.
Tanya stresses that making contact does not imply participation in the film, someone can share a story or speak and then later not be part of the piece.
The Missing Children is available on ITVX.
The National Response line based at the London Irish Centre for
Anyone who was in a Mother and Baby and County Home in the Republic of Ireland and wants advice on the rights to the Payment Scheme can call the National Response line based at the London Irish Centre on 08005195519.
