The story of 796 babies found buried in a septic tank on the grounds of a Mother’s Home in Ireland have gripped the press for the last week. But now the author of the research that started it all says the facts are being misrepresented.

According to The Irish Times, Catherine Corless, a local historian in County Galway, has spent years researching records from the former St. Mary’s mother-and-baby home in the town, an institution run by the Sisters of Bon Secours between 1925 and 1961.

Her research uncovered the records of 796 mostly infant children who died during the home’s 36 year-history of a variety of diseases ranging from tuberculosis, convulsions, measles, whooping cough, influenza and other illnesses.

On average, state-issued certificates showed that about 22 children a year died at the home. This number was not considered unusual during a time when the infant mortality rate was very high in Ireland, and particularly so in institutions that could house up to 200 children and 100 mothers at any given time and where infections can spread like wildfire.

In an article entitled “The Home”, which was published in 2012 in the Journal of the Old Tuam Society, Corless revealed that there were no burial records for the children at either the home or local cemeteries. She concluded that many of the children were buried in an unofficial graveyard located behind the home where some maps indicated the presence of a septic tank. However, this particular site was described as a “small grassy space” that locals would visit to plant flowers and even erected a grotto.

It was Corless’ desire to use the article to raise money to have some kind of plague created to mark the site of the children’s burial. As a result of the article, a Children’s Home Graveyard committee was established last year. It’s secretary, Teresa Killeen Kelly, spoke about the Committee’s work after Mass at Tuam’s Cathedral last year and asked for donations for the plague while passing out copies of Corless’ article.

No one disputes the fact that bones were found behind the building as the property became a popular play area for local children after the Home closed in 1961. As Corless recounts in her article, two boys were playing on the grounds in 1975 when they decided to look under an old concrete slab where they found several small skulls.

The boys, Barry Sweeney who was 10 at the time, and his 12 year-old friend Frannie Hopkins, reportedly “ran for their lives” and told their parents what they had found.

On St. Patrick’s Day of this year, Sweeney was drinking in a local pub when he told someone that he was one of the boys who found the bones. He received a phone call from Corless a few weeks later.

“There were skeletons thrown in there,” Sweeney said. “They were all this way and that way. They weren’t wrapped in anything, and there were no coffins.”

How many? “About 20”, he said, adding that there was “no way there were 800 skeletons down that hole. Nothing like that number. I don’t know where the papers got that.”

There also appears to be a discrepancy about the septic tank.  According to maps that predate the existence of the home, an old workhouse had a septic tank behind the house but it wasn’t labeled as such. The site of a tank was only discovered on later maps but some of these appeared to be improperly dated. For instance, an 1892 map showed a building with a septic tank as the “Children’s Home” even though it was a workhouse at the time as the home wasn’t founded until 1925.

However, Corless is sure that a sewage tank operated on the site in the early part of the 20th century, but it would only have taken up a third of the space of what is now known as the unofficial graveyard for the babies. Corless believes that Sweeney and Hopkins discovered the former sewage tank which she had previously referred to in her article as a crypt.

Even if it was a sewage tank, there was no way that 796 babies could have been buried there because a public sewage program came into existence in 1937, at which point only 204 children would have died – and there’s no way that 200 bodies could have fit into a sewage tank.

This is why she never would have told anyone that the bodies of 800 babies were dumped in a septic tank.

“That did not come from me at any point,” she said. “They are not my words.”

But that didn’t stop the press from jumping to conclusions.  Reporters took the total number of deaths – 796 – and combined it with the boys’ story of skeletons found in what some believed was a septic tank, and ran with it, subsequently broadcasting the news around the world.

“Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers” reported The Washington Post.

“800 skeletons of babies found inside tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers” read the New York Daily News.

At this point, the Sisters of Bon Secours have expressed their great “sorrow” over the findings at the Home and are cooperating fully with an inquiry opened last week by the Irish government.

Corless is also more than happy to assist them and says that the bodies of the children may have to be excavated in order to get at the truth.

“Our intention in setting up this committee was not excavation,” she says, “but I would welcome the truth.”

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