A decades-old search for justice by 71-year-old Annette McKay has once again drawn attention to one of Ireland’s darkest historical chapters — the tragic fate of nearly 800 infants discarded into a septic tank at St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway. Run by the Bon Secours Sisters from 1925 to 1961, Tuam was just one of several institutions where unmarried mothers were hidden away, often separated from their babies. Hundreds of these infants died under suspicious or undocumented circumstances and were secretly buried in mass graves.
For McKay, the truth emerged only after she became a mother herself. Her own mother, Maggie O’Connor, broke down upon seeing her grandson in 1983, revealing a painful secret — her first child, born in Tuam in 1943, had been declared dead without explanation or ceremony. “She was just dumped,” McKay said of her sister Mary Margaret. “I won’t rest until she has the burial she deserves.”
Recent forensic work has begun on the Tuam grounds, pushed by families and campaigners who demand justice and dignity for the dead. In 2015, an official inquiry confirmed that women were often forced into childbirth in secrecy, with their babies either taken away for adoption — many sent abroad — or buried without names, records, or funerals.
McKay refuses to place her mother’s name on her headstone until Mary Margaret is buried beside her. “Ireland must confront this shameful history,” she said. “Only then can true healing begin.”