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 an excavation takes place this summer, and is looking to hear from survivors, adoptees and family members from Tuam.
We spoke to Annette McKay whose mother was in Tuam and whose sister Mary Margaret is one of the 796. Annette is also on the advisory board for the excavation.
We also spoke to Tanya here.
In 2014, it emerged that 796 children died in appalling circumstances at the former mother and baby home in Galway during its operation.
However, the children who died there between 1925 and 1961 were buried in a disused cesspit where they still remain today.
Annette McKay’s sister Mary Margaret O’Connor died in 1942 from whooping cough when she was six months old.
It is Annette’s dream to reunite Mary Margaret in the grave with her late mother.
She also had strong words for the nuns who ran the institution who she believes have not been accountable.
Annette knew her mother was in an industrial school but she spoke of her time in Tuam, and the daughter she lost there, very little.
Annette told The Irish World: “My mother was very open about her time in the industrial school in Galway, and that was very, very traumatic.
“Apparently Lenaboy Castle was one of the worst of the industrial schools, and a very brutal, horrible place.
“We knew about the industrial school.
“However when my first grandson was born, that was when mum opened up about what had happened to her, that she actually was in Tuam and that she had a baby in Tuam.
“But that wasn’t until she was 70 and then she never referred to it again.
“We just assumed that somewhere in the west of Ireland there would be a little headstone with a name on it and to our shock and horror then we heard about a place called Tuam.
“So the idea that 796 children are in that place and she’s one of them is utterly horrifying and we just have to wait and see because in all this time, there still has been talk around illegal adoptions, trafficking of babies.
“Mum just said that she was told the baby got sick.
“She wasn’t with the baby, she went to yet another place and the baby was left in Tuam.
“Mary Margaret was born in December 1942 and died in the June of ‘43 so she was six months old.
“She died of, so they say, whooping cough.
“She said a nun told her that the baby had died and they told her to leave the same day so she didn’t see the baby.
“She wasn’t present when the baby was buried.
“And one relative told one of my aunts, many years ago, ‘Which of you O’Connor sisters had the baby that was taken to America?’
“So the sisters themselves felt there was a question mark around what really happened to that baby so it remains to be seen and it is very complicated.
“We understand with the exhumation that the babies have been lying in a water table, there’ll be movements of bones, displacement of the children, the babies at less than a year old, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to identify some of them.
“And all these questions still have to be asked.”
Annette featured in Tanya Stephan’s documentary The Missing Children that delves into the story of the Tuam home and the babies interred there.
“I first went to that place in 2014 and it’s the most banal place.
“It’s a little cut off area.
“There’s a children’s playground.
“There’s a big housing estate, and there’s a small grassy area with a statue of the Virgin Mary and some flowers and a sheet with names on.
“Somebody pointed out literally beneath our feet possibly are nearly 800 dead children.
“It’s a very grim place.
“You just wish that there was some truthfulness from the people who ran it, that there was proper records kept, that there was some understanding of what happened at Tuam.
“Nobody’s prepared to tell a true story of what really went on in that place.
“I know it was grim because my mum told me it was grim: The pregnant women were abused, treated very badly, denied proper medical care.
“Their children were denied medical care.
“The month that Mary Margaret died, 11 babies died in that month.
“Older Irish people seem very reluctant to talk about it because there’s still that stigma and there’s still that shame attached to the whole story and you can’t convince people that this is not their stigma and not their shame, the fault lies completely with the people who were in charge there.”
Although there has been an inquiry, a criminal investigation has never been opened.
“I went to the guards in 2014.
“I went to the Garda station in Tuam and I said, ‘I want to report a missing person’.
“And he said, ‘Okay, give me some details..’
“But when I told him that it was a baby in Tuam, he threw me out of the station.
“He said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous’.
“And then when the commission report came out in 2018,
I got a phone call from a special unit in Dublin of the guards’ children protective services.
“That guard and his partner spent hours on the phone with me when I was on holiday in Sligo with family.
“They came to the house.
“They spent the entire afternoon taking a 10 page statement off me and said, ‘Right, this is evidence. This is a tale of criminality about your mother: That she was raped, that she was underage. What happened to this child?’
“Then three weeks later, I got a phone call to say no further action will be taken.
“I don’t know what to make of it.
“I’m always astounded that that place still exists.
“We had a vigil in 2018 and I just put out on Facebook, ‘The Pope is coming to Dublin, it seems he’s not going to go and visit Tuam so I’m going to go to Tuam and I’m going to read out every baby name’.
“And then suddenly nearly 2,000 people turned up on that day.
“We took baby shoes and we said, ‘It’s symbolic. We take the baby shoes for children who never had the opportunity to wear shoes’.
“I was angry to say, ‘What the hell happened in that place? Why did so many babies die?’
“And when you look at the death certificates, a lot of the diseases were preventable and linked to deprivation.
“Marasmus is malnutrition. How did babies die of malnutrition?”
“When I first went there, I was so shocked.
“It exemplifies the idea they thought the women were trash so what did they do with their children? They threw the children away just like trash.
“It’s been very difficult to be on the board.
“I think the hurt this has caused my family and me, to think this all comes down to one tiny baby among 795 other babies that somebody threw away.
“Somebody threw my sister away as if she was nothing.
“It’s unimaginable the grief my mother felt.
“My brother drowned in an accident when he was 25 and my mother took to her bed for a year.
“It was like some extreme form of grief.
“Now I realise that was her second child that she’d lost and she’d never spoken about the first.
“In those days there was no idea that a baby called Mary Margaret existed so my poor mother not only did she lose her mother and was sentenced to the most dreadful system in the industrial school for the crime of being poor, she was literally taken to court and sentenced to Lenaboy Castle and from there she was taken to Tuam.
“In truth she never recovered.
“The damage and the trauma was lifelong.
“You can’t recover from something so traumatic.
“When the first redress board came and I’ve seen it in a paper and I said to mum, ‘They’re offering people that have been through the industrial schools some compensation?’
“And she said, ‘Oh, I don’t want to get involved’.
“She was terrified that it was something that was going to cause her more trouble and by the time she got the pittance from the redress board, she had dementia so there was no nothing.
“There was no redress.
“There was no justice.
“There was no apology.
“Nobody knocked on my mother’s door and said, ‘Maggie, I am so, so sorry for what we did to you’.”
Taoiseach Michéal Martin apologied on behalf of the Irish State but as Annette says, that was no good to her mother.
“I always said Tuam should have been dealt with under human rights process.
“The investigation should have taken place: An understanding, redress and, finally, an apology.
“But I could paper walls with apologies from Taoiseachs that have listened to everything, from the Ryan report to the commission, ‘We’re very, very sorry’.
“But what are you sorry for? We don’t know. Are you not prepared to know what happened?
“Why did these places exist and why were they allowed to function that let so many babies die? Tell us the true story and maybe then there would be an apology.
“But the apology seems to wallpaper over the cracks.
“Not good enough.
“We didn’t even get a copy of the Commission Report, which was promised, until 10 minutes before the Taoiseach read out the findings.
“I remember saying, ‘What the hell am I listening to? How dare they say that families, society was to blame for what happened in places like Tuam..’
“You put in the most authoritarian, powerful, vicious regimes, you put women and children into custody, you imprison them.
“They committed no wrongs.
“Nobody can save them because women who tried to escape would literally be dragged back from England.
“They had power to do that.
“And then you turn around and say, ‘Well, it was their own fault’.
“There’s just the refusal to look at it in all its grimness and all its hideousness and just face up to, ‘We were guilty. Religious orders were guilty’.
“The state was guilty for abdicating care to these people and then the religious took it up with further.
“There was school inspectors.
“I’ve seen some of the school inspection reports that say ‘the children are very emaciated, the children look desperately unhappy, The children are very thin. The place is dreadful. It is not an environment for children’, and yet it still continued.
“I remember (historian) Catherine Corless saying the day after her story hit the headlines, she was getting phone calls from all around the world, ‘What the hell is this story? What’s going on?’
“And she was contacted by Sister Marie Ryan who was the head of the Bon Secours and she was furious with Catherine saying, ‘How dare you do this? I’ve got elderly nuns who are in tears, how dare you bring this?’
“She was annoyed because the story was finally out in the public, not that she was upset because, ‘Oh my God, what were we in charge of? What did we do?’ She was mad because the story was out there.”
Bon Secours are offered some money for the excavation but it is only a fraction of what is required.
“It’s absolutely insulting.
“So who has to pick up the bill? Irish taxpayers have to pick up the bill. Why is that allowed?
“They’re the richest provider of healthcare in America apparently.
“Let’s have a forensic auditor go in and look at what the Bon Secours should be forced to pay.
“But again the Irish government says, ‘Well, we’re not closing the door on the idea that we might compel them but at the moment, we’re not going to look at that’.
“Why not?
“My mother had a very, very happy childhood.
“Annie, her mother, died in 1936 and hell descended on those eight children from which none of them ever recovered.
“My mum is just a casualty and an individual in a huge conveyor belt of abuse of innocent Irish women and children and yet at the heart of it sits the Bon Secours and other orders like them that profited because they were paid a fee for each child and put the children to work, put the women to work.
“They were literally used. They weren’t just abused. They were profitable.
“These poor women and children were profitable.”
Annette encountered the stigma and shame on her early visits to Ireland.
“I went the first time when I was seventeen and you visit the various aunties and you drink tea and then I would be in somebody’s house and somebody would say, ‘Who’s the English one?’
“And they say in a very quiet voice, ‘It’s Maggie O’Connor’s daughter’.
“And even at 17 I thought, ‘What has my mother done. Why do they not like my mum?’
“And I felt ashamed.
“So she left Galway.
“She came to England.
“It was never a happy life for mum.
“She struggled.
“She never had much money.
“There’s no chat show host that’s ever going to sit with Sister Marie Ryan and say, ‘Let’s tell you about Maggie, Sister Marie Ryan. You live in this wonderful world and there’s money and there’s opportunity and there’s privilege. Let me tell you about what you did to Maggie. Maggie might have made something of her life. Didn’t really have that opportunity, did she? Thanks to you and your Bon Secours order..’
“But there’s no shame for them.
“They don’t feel any shame.
“They’ve never been under a spotlight of shame.”
After the commission concluded its investigation, the details were sealed for 30 years which caused outrage among survivors’ groups who interpreted it as another cover up.
“I used to get all this, ‘Why are you coming here? Why are you stirring up this whole story? Why are you looking to cause trouble for these good sisters? They do lots of good’.
“Why are Irish people so reluctant to put these people under a spotlight?”
It is said in the documentary The Missing Children that people from outside Ireland do not understand why the places concerned have not been raided, nuns have not been arrested.
But here has been no justice so far the survivors.
“And it’s bitter.
“If I was truthful, I would say I’m bitter about the fact that not only did mum have a lifelong affliction.
“She loved us, that was never in doubt but the poor woman was struggling with such demons.
“When the redress board money was talked about I said, ‘Mum, it would be a little amount of money but it’s yours and you can spend it’.
“And she said, ‘I think I’ll go to Marks and Spencers’.
“I said, ‘Brilliant. Go to Marks and Spencers. Get a taxi. Treat yourself. Treat yourself every day’.
“I mean, how pathetic when you think about the money that these people have that she could go to Marks and Spencers as if that would somehow alleviate everything that she’s been through.”
Annette hopes the excavation and then the DNA could provide some answers and reunite her late mother with the child she lost albeit in the grave.
“My mother’s headstone in the cemetery doesn’t have her name on.
“I said it wasn’t going on the headstone until I could say that Mary Margaret had been reunited with my mum.
“That might not be possible but somebody will have to explain to my face why that is not possible.”
You would like to reunite them after so many years..
“Maybe that was a dream. I always had that dream.
“Every time I went to Ireland it was, ‘When am I going to be able to reunite my mum with the baby?’
“My brother’s in that grave, so should be the missing sister.
“I really, really hope people will come forward and be willing to do the DNA test and give these children back to families, give them give them back an identity.”
Annette is aware that many survivors have still not spoken about their experiences.
“With all my heart I wish they would drop that stigma and shame.
“It’s not theirs. It never was theirs and because there’s been no justice, they still carry that.
“And that’s bitter.
“What should be an acknowledgement is that crime was committed against those women and children.
“It was criminal so admit that.
“Admit that the Bon Secours, with all their fancy offices and respectability, were criminals.
“Let’s have a little bit of shame going the other way.
“Wouldn’t it be lovely to see some of these people under that spotlight too.
“What have you got to say today, Sister Marie Ryan?
“We’re starting an exhumation and it’s a wet day and we’re moving mud and it’s very grim.
“It’s all been hidden away.
“Tuam is just this anonymous little place, a patch of grass, a little statue.
“Actually it’s a very grim, dark, hideous place.
“So let’s see Sister Marie Ryan, will you be stood there on that day with your order?
“Will you finally face up to, ‘Oh my God, we did this’.
“I just want to see things moving forward.
“I’m 71 and my time is running out.
“I would like to think that I’m not asking my children to take up this case, this history.
“I would just like to see something.
“When I stood there in 2014 I made a promise that I would go back to that baby.
“I would like to think that I did my best, and my dream is that, actually, yes, I could go back to that baby.
“I would like the survivors to be better treated.
“I’d like them to have medical cards.
“I would like their old age to be better.
“I’d like them to not constantly have to fight to get records and get some idea of what happened to them.
“I’d like them all to be treated fairly which is not what’s going on under this new redress board.
“So there’s lots and lots of injustices still going on.
“Can’t we just see some justice?”
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.
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.
