Looking Back: Uncovering the Secrets of an Irish Home for Unwed Mothers

0:00Today on State of the World, uncovering the secrets of an Irish home for unwed mothers.

0:09You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories, up close, where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. As we say goodbye to 2025, we're looking back at some of our favorite international stories of the year. NPR London correspondent Lauren Frayer, what's your most memorable story of the year? So, Greg, my most memorable story was from a reporting trip to Ireland. Last summer, I went to cover the start of excavations at a mass grave there under a former Catholic church-run home for unwed mothers. This is actually one of Europe's biggest mass graves, the remains of nearly 800 infants and toddlers.

0:51It's kind of like you can't think of anything worse, allegedly buried by nuns over a period of decades in the mid-20th century. and forensics experts used to working in war zones are now excavating this grave. I went to visit on the day the digging began, but I ended up discovering a sort of startling personal link that I have to this story. I was there, I posted on social media my location, my cousin saw it, my cousin who is adopted from Ireland, and she has discovered through DNA testing that she has relatives in this same town where I was. And all of a sudden we put two and two together and we realized that my cousin was born in one of these mother and baby homes and adopted into my extended family in New Jersey.

1:37She could have been one of these babies whose remains I was covering. And we have now been investigating her adoption together. Wow. I'd love to hear some of those personal details. But first, let's listen to that story from Ireland. And just a warning, some details in this report may be disturbing. This is me, and this is me making my holy communion. Anna Corrigan pages through family photos. She grew up in a Dublin tenement. An only child. I was born on the 1st of September 1956, so I'll be 70 next year. With a happy childhood. And it wasn't until she was in her 50s that she discovered a family secret.

2:18This is John's birth certificate. He was born on Friday, 22nd of February 1946. Two older brothers born before her mother got married. Her mother died in 2001 without ever mentioning their existence. But when Corrigan started researching her family tree, she found documents showing her mother had spent time in one of Ireland's mother and baby homes, where single women went to give birth. This is the actual slip that was written to admit my mother to the home. To the matron, please admit Bridget Dolan, 26 years of age. Now this was 1940s Ireland. Altar boys shower rose petals and a special place is reserved for women wearing hooded clothes.

3:08There was no sex ed. Birth control and abortion were illegal. And children born outside of marriage were seen as illegitimate. Corrigan scours old photos for any hint of the secret her mother kept. And as you can see, the grip my mother has holding me, and what was going through her mind after losing two children? Taken away, dead, adopted. Corrigan's search for her missing brothers has brought her to a town called Toome in County Galway, where a mother and baby home closed in 1961 and was demolished about a decade later.

3:48Beyond this metal fence, it's just a scrubby, muddy ground, a flagpole. And I can see a tall stone wall behind it, which used to encircle the home. It's now covered in moss. It was a prison. And if you look out, all you've seen was a high wall all around. You've seen nothing. PJ Haverty was one of the babies born on the other side of that wall. And he still lives down the road. He's 73 now. I was born in the mother and baby home. They didn't want any bonding between the baby and the mother. You couldn't hold the baby and rock it. She lived there for 12 months. And when the 12 months was open, then they opened the door and told her to get out.

4:26Decades later, PJ found letters his mother had written to nuns who ran the home, begging for custody of him. And then she gets a letter from the nuns demanding money. She wrote back to the nuns. And this is your mother's handwriting? Handwriting. The nuns refused and demanded she make monthly payments instead for his care. She used to come down every so often and she'd give them the money and she was hoping that she'd get to see me, but no. And then the final day she came down and the nuns said, you don't need to come here anymore. He's gone. He was sent to foster care on a farm outside town just before his seventh birthday.

5:03One day he was milking cows there when a stranger pulled up to ask directions. The lady in the passenger seat rolled the window down, and she looked up, and a big smile. She said, could you tell me where Hansberry's are? They were the foster parents. I said, and the house is down the back there. I said like that to her. And as we were walking along, the smile and the look that she was doing at me, I got scared. Because I thought then, did I let the cows out in front of them? So when I turned down... That was your mom? That was my mother. Haverty's birth mother told him that was her decades later when they finally reunited.

5:37What am I being here? Yeah, that's the first time we met in 1977. That's you and your mom. Yeah. Same smile. Same smile, that's what everybody says. He visited his mother several times in London, where she lived out her days and where she died in 2011. PJ was her only child. Thousands of other children never made it out of that mother and baby home. And in 1975, local boys were playing on the grounds of the home when they fell down a hole into a disused septic tank filled with tiny skeletons. And the fate of those other children became known.

6:22Did you grow up in this house? No, I grew up in the house. I meet Ellen on a rain-slicked street behind where the skeletons were found. She didn't want to give her surname because of the shame, she says, has brought her and her community. We always knew there's a mass there every year. Everybody knew it was consecrated ground. We were told when we went out to play, do not go in the baby's graveyard, stay out of the baby's graveyard. And no, it was fine. We all knew what it was and you didn't go in, you respected. We're Catholics, so you don't mess on consecrated ground. Everyone knew, she says.

6:51Throughout the 1980s and 90s when she was growing up, All the neighbors knew there was a mass grave of infants behind their homes. But out of respect for the Catholic Church, nobody did anything.

7:10Until Catherine Corliss started nosing around. You have a whole research library here. This is only a tiny part of it. And what was your profession before this? I was a secretary typist. Corliss is an amateur historian who went to school with kids born in the home. Just vaguely remember them. They sat at the back of the class. They were skinny looking and they did have sores sometimes on their faces and hands. And more or less, I think we were told not to go near them or we'd pick up the disease or whatever. Corliss always wondered what happened to those kids. She too heard rumors about a mass grave and decided to chase them up.

7:52In 2012, she asked a clerk at City Hall for death certificates of anyone who died in the mother and baby home during its years of operation from 1925 to 1961. She was expecting one a year, maybe. And she said there are hundreds. No, I kind of got a cold shiver. Hundreds, I said. Yes, she said. I said in the home itself. Yes, she said. Eventually, a few weeks later, she made sort of a list for me. A list of 796 children who died in the facility. And this is the printout? That's the printout. They're from age infants up to four years old. She spreads their death certificates across her kitchen table, next to a papier-mâché model she's built of the sprawling facility where they died.

8:41Measles, diphtheria, hoop and cough, some of them boils all over the body. There was a lot of children in Ireland at the time, before penicillin, they were dying with. But the home had a rate of four times higher than the death rate of children and infants in Ireland of those diseases. Why would the nuns not take them to a hospital, I ask? And why are there death certificates but no burial records? There's a Catholic cemetery right across the road. It's blatantly obvious. They had no regard for those children because they were illegitimate. And it didn't seem to matter. They didn't bother bringing them to the cemetery across the road, and they just hid them.

9:18And then when that sewage system became defunct in 1937, that's when they started putting them into that tank. And it was a way of hiding, I suppose, all the deaths, all the babies that were dying. After Corliss published her findings in a local history journal, the Irish government ordered an investigation into several mother and baby homes across the country. In 2017, the Irish Taoiseach, or Prime Minister, called the tomb home a chamber of horrors. In 2018, Corliss was named one of Ireland's People of the Year. The actor Liam Neeson is making a film about her now. And in 2021, the Catholic Order of Nuns that ran the tomb home issued an apology, saying they were part of a system that didn't live up to their Christianity.

10:08At a dark stone cathedral that still towers over this town, the daily mass is sparsely attended, and nobody is willing to talk to me about any collective responsibility. Thank you, darling. We don't know anything. A nun who didn't want to give her name because she's not authorized to speak for her order, the Sisters of Mercy, tells me she thinks the clergy have been treated unfairly. Because these children, there's a lot of misinformation about it. These children, they were very well cared for as best they could. They didn't have the resources. You know, today people would say, like, children have too much.

10:54and families.

10:58Excavations are now underway on a mass grave of children who died here with nothing, led by forensics experts who normally work in war zones. Among those who've given DNA samples is Anna Corrigan, the Dubliner who thought she was an only child and is now searching for two brothers. She's located their birth certificates, but only one death certificate. So her brother, William Dolan, born in 1950. He's not on the list of the 796. So are they digging for him in June? In your heart of hearts, what are you hoping for? Well, I believe he was adopted stateside. Do you even know if his name is still William?

11:38No, it wouldn't be William. Anyone that was adopted would give him a new family name. She believes her brother may have survived and been sent to the United States for adoption, like thousands of Irish babies from this era. Some of those adoptions were legal, but many were private, arranged by the nuns. Names were changed, and money also changed hands. And if anybody knows anything about William Joseph Dolan, born 1950 in Galway. Through DNA testing, biological relatives are only now finding each other. And so standing on the edge of this one mass grave, Corrigan tells me this is only the tip of the iceberg.

12:21That was NPR's Lauren Frayer. And Lauren, you told us at the beginning that there was a personal connection to this story your cousin adopted in New Jersey. Tell us a little bit more about that. Yeah, so thousands of children born in these Irish mother and baby homes were adopted by Catholic families in the U.S., including my own. And it's only now with DNA testing and the popularity of genealogy that Americans are able to map their biological family trees and realize their connections to this chapter of Irish history. So my cousin in New Jersey has now found two half sisters in Ireland. I actually met one of them when I was there covering this story.

12:59She's also found a possible half brother in Australia. She's getting help from Irish social services. And we're now investigating the circumstances of her adoption. A lot of adoptions in the sort of mid to late 20th century in Ireland were illegal and money changed hands. My cousin and I are sort of searching together for her birth mother. We've uncovered some of these papers. I'm sort of going through some birth certificates and genealogy documents that she's found, and I just thought I might read you. This is actually a transfer of custody form, and this is a document signed by her birth mother.

13:36And I'll just read you a little bit of it. I hereby relinquish full claim forever to my child and surrender said child to Sister Barbara, superioress of the Sean Ross Abbey in County Tipperary, Ireland. I undertake never to attempt to see, interfere with or make any claim to the said child. And there are thousands of women in Ireland who, you know, in this case, she was 19 signing this document. Yeah, the language in that document, Lauren, is just so stark and so absolute. I can only imagine the frame of mind that a 19-year-old new mother would have to be in to sign something like that. Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at her handwriting, her signature on this document, and sort of a picture emerges of this young woman.

14:25She may have been a survivor of rape or incest. Her own mother actually was born in a mother and baby home. So there are multiple generations of this family were born in secret in these homes. And, you know, my family's doing this research, but thousands of other American families are doing the same. Well, I look forward to hearing more. I look forward to reporting more and hopefully we'll bring you another chapter of this. This NPR's Lauren Freyer. Thanks so much, Lauren. Thank you, Greg.

15:02That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening.