Tuam: Where the Infants Sleep in Sewer Water on Mosher Mag

Tuam.

A small town in County Galway, Ireland.

Quiet. Green. Catholic to the bone.

The kind of place where lace curtains flutter behind glass like ghosts. Where the GAA field is sacred ground. Where the Angelus rings out on radios at 6pm sharp, even if no one really listens anymore.

But beneath Tuam’s soil lies a silence older than any prayer. A silence not born of reverence, but of shame. A silence sealed in concrete and mass graves.

The kind that hums under playgrounds and septic tanks.The kind that can't be scrubbed out with holy water.

From 1925 to 1961, Tuam housed what was politely called a Mother and Baby Home, run by the Bon Secours Sisters, nuns with clean hands and darker secrets.

The Bon Secours Sisters, those good Catholic nuns, wore habits of white and black but dealt in shadow. Their tools were not just rosaries and rulers, but record books forged in silence.

This was no refuge. No sanctuary.

It was a purgatory, carved into everyday life.

A place where unmarried women, “fallen,” “immoral,” “unfit," were sent to give birth out of sight.

Shamed. Hidden. Forgotten. Discarded by families and parishes.

Most were teenagers. Many were raped. All were erased.

These were women stripped of name and voice, reduced to sinners in smocks, their punishment softened only by the lie that this was God’s will.

They scrubbed floors. They bled alone. They laboured in silence. Their babies were taken. Some left through the front door. Most never left at all.

But the real horror wasn’t above ground. It was buried in the back, beneath what was once a functioning septic tank.

That’s where they found them.

796 children.

Not in coffins. Not marked by crosses.

Just bones in the mud.

Babies. Toddlers.

Little bones curled in foetal positions. Tiny skulls tucked into the dark like seeds that would never bloom.

They were dumped, in a space meant to carry waste.

Some were wrapped in cloth. Some not even that.

Some babies were lucky.

Some infants were deemed marketable.

The healthy ones. The pink ones. The photogenic ones.

They were sold off in orchestrated international adoptions.

Primarily to American families.

The Church handled the paperwork. The State looked the other way. Fees changed hands.

These babies were treated like high-value exports, Irish linen with lungs.

Mothers were told the child had “gone to a better life.”

Some were coerced to sign. Others were lied to outright.

No follow-up. No consent. No way back.

Those babies became American. And the Church’s pockets grew heavy.

Not every child was sellable.

Some were sick. Underweight. Born too soon. Born too broken.

And there’s no profit in fragility.

So they were left.

To die of pneumonia. Gastroenteritis. Malnutrition.

All preventable. All untreated.

It wasn’t just neglect. It was a calculus.

Too weak to live, too useless to sell. So they were erased.

Quietly. Efficiently.

One less liability. One more body for the tank.

The Church had records.

Death certificates, clinical, cold.

But no burial logs. No maps. No crosses. No grief.

Just entries in a book:

Female, aged 3 months. Cause: Marasmus.

Male, aged 1 year. Cause: Whooping cough.

But here’s the thing:

Babies don’t starve in countries with milk.

They don’t die en masse in peacetime unless someone lets them.

They died of “natural causes,” said the Church.

But that’s the thing about nature, it doesn’t erase babies in bulk.

If history is a grave, Catherine Corless is the woman who unearthed it.

She’s no radical. No revolutionary.

A local historian. A farmer’s wife. A practicing Catholic.

But when she asked where the children of Tuam were buried, nobody had an answer.

She found the death records, nearly 800 of them.

But no graves. No headstones. Just an empty patch behind the old home. Paved over and played on.

And so she dug. Metaphorically at first. Then literally.

And in 2016, excavation teams uncovered what the whispers had always known.

Bones. Infant bones.

Layered. Rotting.

Packed into wet earth beneath a tank built to carry human waste.

Chambers not meant for the dead.

The headlines broke.

The BBC ran it. The New York Times. Al Jazeera.

Suddenly, Tuam was not a town. It was a crime scene.

And the Irish government?

It did what Ireland always does:

Soft apology. Slow inquiry. No accountability.

The Bon Secours Sisters issued a press release.

Full of sorrow. Full of Scripture. Empty of ownership.

No arrests. No convictions. No names.

The State promised exhumation. A memorial. A reckoning.

Years later, most of the remains are still in the ground. Still waiting.

Tuam wasn’t an accident. It was part of a network.

Dozens of homes. Thousands of children.

The Irish government handed women to the Church like cattle.

Priests whispered. Neighbours gossiped. And the nuns obeyed.

It was one node in a vast machine.

Magdalene Laundries. Other mother and baby homes. Industrial schools. All part of a coordinated architecture of control.

Where shame was currency. And the Church was bank, judge, and executioner.

Women were institutionalised for decades. Children were trafficked. Abuse was ritual. And the State didn’t just allow it. It enabled it.

Paper trails exist. But still, survivours are denied access to their own files. Their own origins. Their own names.

Cloaked in “privacy concerns.”

Translation: “We still protect the perpetrators.”

The story of Tuam is not just a story of dead children.

It’s the story of a society that made the Church its god and sacrificed its daughters on the altar.

It’s the story of how purity culture becomes mass murder.

Of how obedience cloaks abuse.

Of how silence buries the truth as efficiently as cement.

The building is gone now.

The playground was bulldozed.

The earth has been fenced off.

But Tuam remains.

Tuam is a wound beneath the skin of Ireland.

Tuam is every institution that still protects abusers.

Tuam is every politician who says, “Let’s not dwell on the past.”

Tuam is every priest still welcomed at the altar.

And Tuam is in every survivour’s heartbeat. In every name not spoken, in every grave unmarked, in every mother who still looks for a face in the crowd, wondering if her child somehow lived.

But memory? Memory is louder. Memory doesn’t obey.

Tuam is not just a grave. It’s a wound that bleeds history.

Say the number: 796.

Say the place: Tuam.

They deserve names. They deserve graves. They deserve the truth.

But until the State and Church reckon with what they buried, the earth will keep whispering.

If there’s a God in Ireland, let it be justice.

Let it be every unmarked grave finally marked.

Let it be every survivour finally heard.

Let it be every stolen child finally found.

Until then: We carry them.

796 children. 796 indictments. 796 small, silenced lives.

But we say their number. We name their truth. And we keep digging.

For the freaks, by the freaks.

Thanks for reading. Stay strange.

✦ moshermag.com