Dead bodies of 800 babies found in a septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers

The discovery of nearly 800 dead babies in the septic tank of a home run by nuns has set off a round of soul-searching in Ireland and sparked calls for accountability from government and Catholic Church officials.

According to new evidence, 796 children were secretly buried in the sewage tank of a home in Tuam, County Galway, where unmarried pregnant women were sent to give birth in an attempt to preserve the country’s devout Catholic image.

Officials said they were “horrified” at the discovery and said it revealed “a darker past in Ireland,” a country often haunted by its history of abuse within powerful church institutions.

The home was run by nuns from the Bon Secours Sisters congregation between 1925 and 1961. It was one of the “mother and baby” homes across Ireland, similar to the Sean Ross Abbey, in Tipperary, where Philomena Lee gave her child up for adoption in a story that was this year made into the eponymous Oscar-nominated film “Philomena.”

People who lived near the home said they have known about the unmarked mass grave for decades, but a fresh investigation was sparked after research by local historian Catherine Corless purportedly showed that of the hundreds of children who died at the home, only one was buried at a cemetery.

Speaking to the Irish Mail, which first reported her research, she also said that health board records from the 1940s said conditions at the home were dire, with children suffering malnutrition and neglect and dying at a rate four times higher than in the rest of Ireland.

Charlie Flanagan, minister for children and youth affairs, said that there was a “cross-departmental initiative underway” to determine how to react to allegations.

“Many of the revelations are deeply disturbing and a shocking reminder of a darker past in Ireland when our children were not cherished as they should have been,” Flanagan said.

According to the Reuters news agency, Ireland’s Roman Catholic Church told the order of nuns who ran the former home that it must co-operate with any inquiry into the discovery. Tuam’s Archbishop Michael Neary said that the diocese had no part in running the home but urged the Bon Secours Sisters to “act upon their responsibilities in the interests of the common good.”

“I am horrified and saddened to hear of the large number of deceased children involved and this points to a time of great suffering and pain for the little ones and their mothers,” he said.

The Bon Secours congregation did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment.

The claims came to light after Corless obtained death records for the home and cross-checked them with local cemetery records. Two local boys reportedly unearthed the home’s concrete-covered tank while playing in 1975 and found hundreds of children’s bones inside. The tank has now been surrounded by a housing estate, but an officer from Ireland’s Gardai police force said remains had recently been found after a police survey at the site.

“We do not know what we’re dealing with here yet, it could go back much further,” the officer told NBC News on condition of anonymity. “This is a historical investigation going back to the 1950s.

“We are investigating this matter, the grounds have been surveyed and there is what appears to be human remains discovered. But [the remains] could go back as far as famine times, which is 160 years, we just don’t know yet.”

Police could not confirm if a full excavation of the site was planned.

Ireland’s once-powerful Catholic Church has been rocked by a series of scandals over children’s abuse and neglect in recent years. The Church operated as a quasi-social service in the 20th century and the mother and baby homes were run in a similar fashion to the Magdalene Laundries, where single women who became pregnant were sent away.

“Children went in there so the families could conceal their shame”

While government and church officials were quick to express their shock at reports of Tuam’s high infant mortality rate and allegations of mass burial, the traits were not uncommon for such institutions in Ireland, according to Eoin O’Sullivan, associate professor at Trinity College Dublin.

“Tuam was a former workhouse and conditions were pretty bleak,” said O’Sullivan, co-author of the 2001 book “Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools.”

“Ireland’s first mother and baby home, at Bessborough, in Cork, had an even worse infant mortality rate of around 82 per cent: In the year ending March 31, 1944, 124 children were born or admitted there, and 102 died.”

O’Sullivan added that the practice of mass burial, often with just one headstone marking the site, was not uncommon in many mother and baby homes and psychiatric hospitals at the time.

“Remember that the children went in there so the families could conceal their shame, and the kids were often adopted,” he said. “The nuns were not going around grabbing pregnant women; the women were taken there by their families who knew what conditions were like.

“Why have politicians and the Church reacted with such shock? I’m not sure. I suppose they have to every time something like this comes out connected with religious institutions.”

A man’s discovery of bones under his pub could forever change what we know about the Irish

10 Years ago, an Irish pub owner was clearing land for a driveway when his digging exposed an unusually large flat stone. The stone obscured a dark gap underneath. He grabbed a flashlight to peer in.

“I shot the torch in and saw the gentleman, well, his skull and bones,” Bertie Currie, the pub owner, said this week. The remains of three humans, in fact, were found behind McCuaig’s Bar in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. And though police were called, it was not, as it turned out, a crime scene.

Instead, what Currie had stumbled over was an ancient burial that, after a recent DNA analysis, challenges the traditional centuries-old account of Irish origins. From as far back as the 16th century, historians taught that the Irish are the descendants of the Celts, an Iron Age people who originated in the middle of Europe and invaded Ireland somewhere between 1000 B.C. and 500 B.C.

Yet the bones discovered behind McCuaig’s tell a different story of Irish origins, and it does not include the Celts.

“The DNA evidence based on those bones completely upends the traditional view,” said Barry Cunliffe, an emeritus professor of archaeology at Oxford who has written books on the origins of the people of Ireland.

DNA research indicates that the three skeletons found behind McCuaig’s are the ancestors of the modern Irish and they predate the Celts and their purported arrival by 1,000 years or more. The genetic roots of today’s Irish, in other words, existed in Ireland before the Celts arrived.

“The most striking feature” of the bones, according to the research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science journal, is how much their DNA resembles that of contemporary Irish, Welsh, and Scots. (By contrast, older bones found in Ireland were more like Mediterranean people, not the modern Irish.)

Radiocarbon dating shows that the bones discovered at McCuaig’s go back to about 2000 B.C. That makes them hundreds of years older than the oldest artifacts generally considered to be Celtic–relics unearthed from Celt homelands of continental Europe, most notably around Switzerland, Austria and Germany.

The senior author of the DNA research paper, Dan Bradley of Trinity College Dublin, was reluctant to weigh in on the cultural implications, but he offered that the findings do challenge popular beliefs about Irish origins.

“The genomes of the contemporary people in Ireland are older–much older–than we previously thought,” he said.

Numerous digs, most notably in Austria and Switzerland, have traced the outlines of the Celts. The artifacts offer evidence going back as far as about 800 B.C. The ancient Greeks and Romans also left written accounts of the Celts, and probably knew them well–the Celts sacked Rome around 390 B.C. and attacked Delphi in Greece in 279 B.C.

It seemed plausible that this group that had invaded Rome had invaded Ireland as well, and in the standard view, it was this people that eventually made it to Ireland. For decades, however, archaeologists and other scholars have noted just how flimsy the evidence is for that standard account and how broad, nonetheless, is the application of the word.

In a 2001 book, Cunliffe, the Oxford scholar, argued on the basis of archaeological evidence that the flow of Celtic culture was opposite that of the traditional view–it flowed from the western edge of Europe, what he calls “the Atlantic zone”–into the rest of the continent. In many places of the Atlantic zone, he notes, people were buried in passages aligned with the solstices, a sign that they shared a unified belief system.

“From about 5,000 B.C. onwards, complicated ideas of status, art, cosmology were being disseminated along the Atlantic seaways,” Cunliffe said, and that culture then spread eastward.

“If we’re right, the roots of what is known as ‘Celtic’ culture go way way back in time,” Cunliffe said. “And the genetic evidence is going to be an absolute game-changer.”

If the new scholarship proves correct, exactly what to do with the word Celtic will probably be a matter of some dispute: Should it be applied to languages or cultures that, no matter how clearly defined, were largely uninfluenced by the historical Celts of continental Europe?

Complicating any answer are old ethnic antagonisms: The old notions of a distinct “Celtic race” or “Irish race” have been used not just for poetic tributes, but for scorn.

The new evidence from genetics, however, undermines notions of a separate Irish race, describing them instead as one sliver of the European spectrum. According to the genetic research, the Irish are at the extreme end of a genetic wave that washed across Europe, a wave of migrants that swept westward from above the Black Sea across Europe about 2,500 B.C.

That wave of migration had been documented in previous research led by David Reich at Harvard University, but it was unclear whether it had extended all the way to Ireland. The Y chromosome and other aspects of the DNA in the bones found behind McCuaig’s, however, link the Irish to that surge of population.

Viking-Era Child’s Remains Discovered in Dublin

RTÉ reports that the remains of a child and an iron buckle or fastener were uncovered in Dubh Linn, a dark tidal pool where the River Poddle enters the River Liffey at the site of Dublin Castle, by a team of researchers led by Alan Hayden of University College Dublin.

The find was made during an excavation near Dublin Castle where in ancient times the River Poddle flowed into the Dubh Linn near the River Liffey.

The skeleton, which was largely intact, was found just at the point before the river entered the pool and is thought to date from the 9th or 10th century.

After it was excavated it was discovered to be that of a child aged between 10 and 12 years of age – most likely a boy – and is thought to have been wrapped in a shroud before being thrown into the river.

The body was found with shoulders hunched together and an iron buckle or fastener was found with the body.

Alan Hayden from the UCD School of Archaeology who was leading the dig said the fact that it was not given a proper burial and was dumped in this manner could suggest an act of violence.

Further tests will be carried out to determine the date of death, gender and the ethnic origin of the person.

The dig, which is being carried out on the site of office development on Ship Street beside Dublin Castle, has already discovered that the original Dubh Linn was much larger than originally thought, extending beyond the walls of Dublin Castle.

Now the dig has found that the size of the original Viking settlement or Longphort can be shown to be double the extent previously established.

The archaeologists uncovered banks that would have run along the Poddle and the Dubh Linn with gaps to bring in boats. Inland there would have been a high fortification.

The area of the Longphort in the 10th and 11th centuries would have extended from the present-day Molly Malone statue on Suffolk Street to St Patrick’s Cathedral.

The dig has also established that Vikings continued living at the Dubh Linn even after the more famous Wood Quay settlement was established a kilometre away.

The Poddle was culverted in the 12th century and covered over completed in the 18th century. A 19th century well was found on the site.

Medieval Monastery Excavated in Ireland’s County Meath

The Irish Independent reports that archaeologists led by Geraldine Stout have uncovered pottery; the bones of cows, sheep, cats, and dogs; seeds; nuts; a key; a timber dash-urn with a paddle for churning butter; and a bakery at the site of a thirteenth-century monastery in eastern Ireland.

The new findings were discovered by a team of archaeologists, led by experts Matthew and Geraldine Stout at Beamore in East Month during a four week Covid-19 dig. Armed with two-meter COVID Sticks to ensure social distancing and colour co-ordinated equipment to avoid cross-contamination, the team tried to decipher the size of the monastery by the number of sourdough loaves made each day.

“One loaf equals one monk so the size of the oven might suggest how many came from France to live and work at the monastery,” said Geraldine.

“We had to think long and hard if we were even going to do a dig this year in the times that were in it.”

“Everyone was divided into pods for cuttings (sections of excavation) and they stayed with that group for the month. Each cutting had colour coded equipment which was not to be passed around to other groups to minimize the risk of cross-contamination.

“I gave everyone what I called the ‘COVID stick’ which was a two-meter yellow-painted stick so they had an idea of the distance they had to stay away from another person.

“We also got a special wash portacabin which I never saw before which enabled us with hot water to wash our hands and there were sanitising stations everywhere.

“But as much as we had reservations at the start, the measures worked and the excavations have given us more questions to come back and answer next year.”

And if the Cistercians ever had to practice social distancing, it wasn’t obvious in their findings which included evidence to suggest a communal toilet and bakery at the self-sufficient site.

Last year, the excavation team discovered ‘significant’ find of a rare French building and medieval pottery which supported a long-held belief that the site was once home to a unique Cistercian monk community from Normandy. 13th-century French jugs, ceramic roof tiles, and even a corn drying kiln and dried peas which proved crop rotation was ongoing in the 13th century were found on the lands outside Drogheda, owned by local historian and author John McCullen.

Unusual features of an existing gatehouse in a field, suggesting a diagonal French buttress were described as ‘very rare, if not unique in Ireland’ according to two of Ireland’s foremost medieval building archaeologists David Sweetman and Con Manning. It is believed that the site was the home of a 13th Century medieval monastic farm associated with the French Cistercian foundation of De Bello Becco (Beaubec)

The excavations which ended in early August were the second of a €50,000 three-year project, funded by FBD Trust and administered through the Kilsharvan Community Council. Author and archaeologist Geraldine Stout has a particular interest in the Cistercians, having worked on a similar site in Bective in Meath and says they were great innovators and farmers.

“We know that Walter de Lacey gave lands to this Abbey in Beaubec before Normandy in 1201, so there would have been about 100 monks living here up until the 16th century,” she said

“De Bello Becco was flourishing in Ireland in 1302 when it had to pay a tithe of 29s 4d to the Diocese of Meath, which placed it in a group of the highest valued churches in Meath.

This year, the jackpot continued and finds included a medieval key, animal bones of cows, sheep, cats, and dog as well as mixed farming produce of peas, beans, oats, wheat, and rye. Fruits including grapes and figs which, the Stouts say, had to have been imported from France and were further evidence of mixed farming.

“We also pushed back the dating of human settlement at Beamore with the discovery of a prehistoric ceremonial pit circle and stone tools beneath the medieval monastic farm”

Remnants of a medieval timber dash urn with a paddle that was used to church butter were also found to prove a long-held belief that the Monks were a self-sufficient community.

“In the main residential block, an impressive, communal latrine was found with thirteenth-century detailing and outside the main residential block we found evidence of a water system that supplied the needs of this community for toilets, washing and food preparation.

“We found a cellar in the ruins which suggest it could possibly have been used for toilet facilities as well as a pot that worked like a medieval air freshener,” says Matthew.

Geraldine believes: “There were between 30 and 50 monks living here. The smallest Cistercian settlement had 12 monks minimum and this is a more sizable community, looking at the scale of the building here.

“We know that each monk was given a loaf of bread for his day’s work so if we work out mathematically the size of the oven and how many loaves it could hold, it would suggest how many monks lived here.

“We were lucky to find waterlogged deposits which preserved a lot of timber and seeds for us so we can tell by the flat oats and cereal that the Monks made and ate sourdough bread – so I guess history and trends can repeat themselves,” she laughed.

5,700-year-old Neolithic house discovered by archaeologists in Cork

Archaeologists in North Cork have uncovered the foundations of a 5,700-year-old Neolithic house in addition to evidence of Iron Age smelting and Bronze Age burial sites. 

The archaeologists excavated a total of eight sites as part of two road realignment projects on the N73 road which links Mallow and Mitchelstown, near the villages of Shanballymore and Kildorrery, and a house dating back to 3700BC was found at one of the sites.

It is believed that the house belonged to some of the very first people to live in the area and found alongside were quantities of grain, pottery, and stone tools dating back to the same period.

At a different site in the townland of Waterdyke, archaeologists found evidence of charcoal pits required in the smelting process to produce iron. The pits date back to between 266AD and 1244AD while further evidence of smelting was also found at Annakiska South. 

There was also evidence of a 17th-century enclosure at Annakiska South as well as clay pipes and glass in addition to evidence of a 17th-century smithy situated on the original road that would have made horseshoes for travelers passing between Mallow and Mitchelstown. 

The Irish Examiner reports that farming knowledge only arrived in Ireland around 200 years before this house was built, meaning that the settlement is one of the oldest farming settlements on the island of Ireland. 

Archaeologists also discovered evidence of ritual sites dating back to roughly the same period at the settlement. 

They found evidence of stone tools and pottery deliberately buried in holes in the Middle Neolithic era (3500BC to 2900BC) in a form of ritual that may have been associated with human burials.

The tools and pottery may have been buried as an offering of gifts for the gods of the underworld. 

There was also evidence of a barrow cemetery dating back to the Bronze Age nestled by the banks of a meandering stream and overlooked by a nearby settlement. 

Cork County Council and Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII), who carried out the excavations and the roadworks, published an “online story map” documenting the archaeologists’ results. 

The online map, created by TII project archaeologist Ken Hanley and Cork County Council resident archaeologist Ed Lynne, also documents previously discovered sites along the route and can be viewed here. 

Possible Bronze Age Burials Unearthed in Ireland

At the excavation site of a new community hospital in the Sheil District, Ballyshannon, several finds from the Bronze Period have been discovered.

In the course of archaeological research, a large capstone was found last week. It comprises a large flat sandstone boulder complete with rock art in the form of cup marks incised into its upper surface.

Monuments of this kind are classified as Boulder Burials and are thought to date to the Bronze Age 2,500 BC to 500BC.  

The capstone did overlay a small amount of cairn material within a large pit, which was fully investigated but contained no burial.

The National Monuments Service and National Museum were made aware of the unearthing of the capstone last Monday (August 24) and a team of three archaeologists has been on the sites since carefully examining the area where the capstone was unearthed and a wider area close to it.  

On Friday, August 28 the capstone was carefully removed from the site for further examination and analysis.

Subsequent further archaeological Investigations have uncovered the remains of an inverted urn burial. Urn burials date to the Bronze Age and comprise a large ceramic pot usually highly decorated, and containing cremated remains.

The urn has been removed by the Specialist Conservator and sent for conservation. All the cremated remains recovered from the site will be analyzed by osteoarchaeologist and the results presented in the site excavation report.

Mr. Shane Campbell, HSE Estates Manager, North West was present at the unearthing and stated “The earth removal work that started last week is part of an overall €21 million euro construction of the new Sheil Community Hospital.  I wish to offer reassurance that work is continuing on site as planned.

The contractor is on-site and continuing with the site clearance, removal of trees, etc and erecting the site Hhoarding, all as planned, the archaeological works will not delay the overall works programme.  

The HSE would like to thank Tamlyn McHugh and Fadó Archaeology for their painstaking work in uncovering these significant historical artifacts and ensuring they are properly conserved.”  

Ancient Irish DNA reveals incredible secrets, including Down Syndrome

In the earliest periods of Irish history, archaeologists and geneticists led by those from Trinity have shed new light.

The amazing findings of this study include an adult male genome hidden in the heart of the Newgrange passage tomb points to first-degree incest, implying he was among a ruling social elite akin to the similarly inbred Inca god-kings and Egyptian pharaohs.

Newgrange passage tomb in Ireland is world-famous for its annual solar alignment where the winter solstice sunrise illuminates its sacred inner chamber in a golden blast of light. However, little is known about who was interred in the heart of this imposing 200,000 tonnes monument or of the Neolithic society which built it over 5,000 years ago.

The survey of ancient Irish genomes, published in Nature, suggests a man who had been buried in this chamber belonged to a dynastic elite.

The research, led by the team from Trinity, was carried out in collaboration with colleagues from University College London, NUIG, University College Cork, University of Cambridge, Queen’s University Belfast, Sligo Institute of Technology and the National Monuments Service, with support from the National Museum of Ireland and National Museums Northern Ireland.

“I’d never seen anything like it,” said Lara Cassidy, professor at Trinity College Dublin, first author of the paper. “We all inherit two copies of the genome, one from our mother and one from our father; well, this individual’s copies were extremely similar, a tell-tale sign of close inbreeding. In fact, our analyses allowed us to confirm that his parents were first-degree relatives.”

Matings of this type (e.g. brother-sister unions) are a near universal taboo for entwined cultural and biological reasons. The only confirmed social acceptances of first-degree incest are found among the elites – typically within a deified royal family.

By breaking the rules, the elite separates itself from the general population, intensifying hierarchy and legitimising power. Public ritual and extravagant monumental architecture often co-occur with dynastic incest, to achieve the same ends.

“Here the auspicious location of the male skeletal remains is matched by the unprecedented nature of his ancient genome,” said Professor of Population Genetics at Trinity, Dan Bradley. “The prestige of the burial makes this very likely a socially sanctioned union and speaks of a hierarchy so extreme that the only partners worthy of the elite were family members.”

The team also unearthed a web of distant familial relations between this man and other individuals from sites of the passage tomb tradition across the country, including the mega-cemeteries of Carrowmore and Carrowkeel in Co. Sligo.

“It seems what we have here is a powerful extended kin-group, who had access to elite burial sites in many regions of the island for at least half a millennium,” added Cassidy.

Remarkably, a local myth resonates with these results and the Newgrange solar phenomenon. First recorded in the 11th century AD, four millennia after construction, the story tells of a builder-king who restarted the daily solar cycle by sleeping with his sister.

The Middle Irish place name for the neighbouring Dowth passage tomb, Fertae Chuile, is based on this lore and can be translated as “Hill of Sin.”

“Given the world-famous solstice alignments of Brú na Bóinne, the magical solar manipulations in this myth already had scholars questioning how long an oral tradition could survive,” said Ros Ó Maoldúin, an archaeologist on the study. “To now discover a potential prehistoric precedent for the incestuous aspect is extraordinary.”

The genome survey stretched over two millennia and unearthed other unexpected results. Within the oldest known burial structure on the island, Poulnabrone portal tomb, the earliest yet diagnosed case of Down Syndrome was discovered in a male infant who was buried there five and a half thousand years ago.

Additionally, the analyses showed that the monument builders were early farmers who migrated to Ireland and replaced the hunter-gatherers who preceded them. However, this replacement was not absolute; a single western Irish individual was found to have an Irish hunter-gatherer in his recent family tree, pointing toward a swamping of the earlier population rather than an extermination.

Genomes from the rare remains of Irish hunter-gatherers themselves showed they were most closely related to the hunter-gatherer populations from Britain (e.g. Cheddar Man) and mainland Europe.

However, unlike British samples, these earliest Irelanders had the genetic imprint of a prolonged island isolation. This fits with what we know about prehistoric sea levels after the Ice Age: Britain maintained a land bridge to the continent long after the retreat of the glaciers, while Ireland was separated by sea and its small early populations must have arrived in primitive boats.