JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
To Ireland where today, excavations began at one of the country's most notorious mother and baby homes. These were homes for unwed mothers, also known as Magdalene Laundries, often run by the Catholic Church. But their conditions were often poor. Thousands of women and children died at these sites. We find NPR's Lauren Frayer in western Ireland, where remains were being unearthed. And we should note, she's brought us reporting with details of a mass grave. Hi, Lauren.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: Hi, Juana.
SUMMERS: So Lauren, just start by telling us who were these infants and how did they end up there?
FRAYER: Who they are we honestly don't know because some of them never got birth or death certificates. This saga goes back to an era when Ireland was dominated by the Catholic Church. Pregnancy outside marriage was something that was shameful. Women were sent to these mother and baby homes to give birth. Many of the homes also operated as commercial laundromats, and that's the name Magdalene Laundries. Those women's babies were seen as a product of sin. Some weren't baptized. They weren't given medical treatment. And I'm in County Galway, in the town of Tuam, which was home to one such facility for decades from around the 1920s to the 1960s. And excavations began here today with bulldozers, digger machines. They're using ground-penetrating radar, unearthing the remains of what historians believe are 796 babies and toddlers buried in a septic tank behind the facility.
SUMMERS: Well, Lauren, how did people learn that so many infants are buried there?
FRAYER: So in the 1970s, some neighborhood boys were playing in the area. I spoke to one of them, Franny Hopkins. He describes falling into a hole in the ground behind the home and literally finding himself surrounded by skeletons.
SUMMERS: Wow.
FRAYER: I spoke to neighbors who said, oh, yeah, we've always known there was a mass grave there. But nobody did anything about it, and it's taken 50 years to finally excavate them, only after a local amateur historian started sifting through public records and realized how many children went missing at this one facility. And finally, the Irish prime minister, or taoiseach, in 2017, publicly called this septic tank a chamber of horrors.
SUMMERS: So Lauren, am I right to understand that there are families who believe that they might have relatives who died in this home?
FRAYER: Yeah, so women went into this facility, gave birth, then were forced to leave, but the nuns kept their babies. Women were not allowed to take their children out. Some of those children were sent into foster care, but a lot went missing. And families want answers. I met a woman today named Anna Corrigan at the excavation site. She grew up in Dublin believing she was an only child. She started doing family tree research, going through government records, births, deaths, and found out that her mother actually gave birth to two boys before her that she never knew about. And her mother actually died without ever revealing her time in this home or the existence of her two other children. I spoke to Corrigan today. It was pouring rain. It was windy. There was a digger machine behind us. But she described her motivation for coming here.
ANNA CORRIGAN: It's sympathy for what my mother lived through. I mean, I never knew what she was going through. And then the fact that I didn't know my brothers. I mean, that was - I was deprived. I was deprived of the family life.
FRAYER: Corrigan's found birth certificates for her brothers but only one death certificate. So she actually thinks one of them may have been offered up for adoption, possibly to a family in the U.S., which is something that's happened often. And she's looking to see if her brother may still be alive. She's given DNA samples to find out.
SUMMERS: And Lauren, last thing, what about the legal responsibility for these deaths?
FRAYER: Yeah, so this home and others like it were run by the Irish government in partnership with the Catholic Church. The Irish government issued a formal apology back in 2021. The order of nuns who ran this home have also apologized. Today, I met two people who were actually born inside the home and survived. Some of them - they're in their 60s and 70s - have been paid compensation by the government. These excavations are expected to take two years - after that, DNA matching and hopefully, you know, finally closure for some families.
SUMMERS: NPR's Lauren Frayer in County Galway, Ireland. Lauren, thanks for your reporting.
FRAYER: Thanks, Juana.
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