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Over the past decade, revelations of the scale of historical infant and child mortality and unmarked, improper burial at Ireland\u2019s Mother and Baby Homes (state-funded, religious-run\u00a0institutions for unmarried mothers and children that operated from 1922 to 1998) have sparked public outcry, memorialization, and calls for forensic investigation.\u00a0At this year\u2019s commemoration at one such institution\u2019s graveyard, Bridget, a mother in her eighties, was too emotional to read aloud the poem she had selected for the day, Yeats\u2019 \u201cThe Stolen Child,\u201d in which faeries lure children of this world to a better one in a changeling metaphor for death. Against the neat, modest headstones of the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, she recounted her own story instead: working in the labor ward without pay or any notion of the \u201cfacts of life,\u201d and giving birth to William, a son who died. Her child is not buried there. In fact, nobody knows where the children are buried. But nobody believes, back then or now, that faeries have them.<\/p>\n
From the audience, as an anthropologist-in-training afraid her fieldwork would amount to nothing, I was thrilled to hear a cultural-historical reference on the nose enough for me to easily interpret (ventriloquize?). The\u00a0fantasy of Romantic Ireland<\/a>\u00a0denied again, against the reality of deprivation and Catholic morality during a difficult twentieth century. One mother\u2019s real life, narrated in her own words, replaces a beautiful metaphor before the crowd. Good material for an essay like this one.\u00a0<\/p>\n Instead of that essay, I reflect here on the problematic my response in this anecdote highlights: balancing\u00a0the patterned resonance of history and the total singularity of each life, in attempts to name and redress harm done at Mother and Baby Institutions (\u201cM&BIs\u201d) and in ethnographic work.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCredit: <\/span> \t\t\t\t\t\t \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tThe memorial garden at the Tuam children\u2019s burial ground, referencing 796 deceased resident children with missing burial records.\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n The institutions widely known today as Mother and Baby Homes were one subset of quasi-welfare institutions that made up Ireland\u2019s post-independence social care infrastructure. Following the dissolution of the Poor Law and associated Poor Law Unions (administrative areas for the implementation of the former, each with its own workhouse ) with the emergence of the Irish Free State after 1922, \u201ccounty homes\u201d inherited the mandate to administer to the destitute and sick on a regional basis. In alignment with the Irish Free State\u2019s embrace of Catholic morality and identity as a counter to England\u2019s colonial influence, a range of state-funded but religious-run institutions would fill the gaps in state care over the course of the rest of the twentieth century to come. Different religious orders with charitable missions in nursing, teaching, and the care of the poor received grants or capitation payments to run industrial schools for poor, orphaned, or otherwise disadvantaged children; \u201chomes\u201d for unmarried mothers and their unborn or young children, who were socially stigmatized; and orphanages.\u00a0Some orders ran for-profit laundries in association with \u201cMagdalene asylums\u201d that forced institutionalized \u201cfallen women\u201d to work without pay. Since the 1990s, the open secret of poor conditions, neglect, physical and sexual abuse, and forced labor in many of these institutions has become no secret at all.<\/p>\n The infant and child death that took place at M&BIs in particular was thrust back into public consciousness after a local historian, Catherine Corless,\u00a0published<\/a>\u00a0her finding that 796 children who had died in \u201cthe Home\u201d in Tuam, which closed in 1961, lacked burial records. She further suggested, based on records, building plans, and local knowledge, that a subset of them might have been buried in a Victorian-era sewage containment structure on the grounds, a hypothesis later\u00a0confirmed<\/a>\u00a0and qualified in a survey and test excavation led by archaeologist Niamh McCullagh and colleagues. When information about the disturbing nature of the unmarked common grave hit the international press in 2014, a scandal was born. In years since, through survivors\u2019 and family members\u2019 support networks, an official commission of investigation, and a burgeoning memoir genre, the M&BIs have taken their place\u00a0alongside industrial schools and Magdalene Laundries as sites of contested memory in what historian James Smith has called Ireland\u2019s \u201carchitecture of containment<\/a>.\u201d In Tuam, excavation is now imminent. Survivors, family members, and advocates continue to work for further investigation and redress connected to other M&BIs, like Bessborough, the institution referenced above, where the remains of over 800 children are missing.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCredit: <\/span> \t\t\t\t\t\t \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPoetry by P.J. Haverty posted at the Tuam children\u2019s burial ground.\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Who is responsible for the deaths and burials of so many innocents? Upon my various visits to the Tuam Children\u2019s Burial Ground, poetry mounted to one extant stone wall called out the nuns for taking away children who are now \u201cangels in heaven,\u201d as baby shoes, toys, and rosary beads, soaked with rain, surrounded the Virgin Mary in her grotto in the corner. Church apologetics, and to a lesser extent the final report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, suggest that society as a whole was at fault. This statement might seem at first glance to be in line with an account that considers history and cultural conditions. But many people affected by M&BIs reject the diffusion of responsibility this explanation implies; its vagueness does not hold the state and church accountable for systemic but specific actions. The question for me, as an anthropologist, then becomes: how do my interlocutors parse recurrence and exception as they talk about what happened at the M&BIs and advocate for, or participate in, forensic intervention or other forms of redress? How shall I?\u00a0<\/p>\n As an observer, it is easy to desire resonance with history that offers something in the way of an empirical structural explanation, or poetic parallel structure. At the site where the Tuam M&BI once stood, it\u2019s not too hard to find it, in bits and pieces. When I spoke with another early Tuam whistleblower, she quoted for me the words of a local man who, as a boy in the 1970s, had stumbled upon a hole in the ground that appeared to contain hundreds of tiny bones, \u201clike something out of the National Geographic.\u201d The remains were thought to be those of famine victims, from the building\u2019s time as a workhouse, blessed and covered up again. There are, indeed,\u00a0burials from famine times<\/a>\u00a0that have been excavated within the boundaries of the former grounds. Another partial comparison is with\u00a0cill\u00edn\u00ed,<\/em>\u00a0or killeens, separate burial grounds historically used primarily for stillborn and unbaptized infants, whose burial in consecrated ground was proscribed by the Catholic Church. The analogy fails because, of course, the children of the Tuam institution were often older, certainly baptized, and born during decades when this practice had begun to die out. Their burial is better understood as a common or mass grave. But some mutual influence persists: one Tuam-affiliated support group organizer, Catriona, spoke to me at length about the work she was doing to mark and honor her own family\u2019s\u00a0cill\u00edn, alongside her efforts towards awareness and redress with survivors of the institution. Over a networking coffee, an archaeologist who maps cill\u00edn\u00ed in several Northern counties told me that in fact it had been the Tuam children\u2019s burial ground that inspired her research in the first place. Another map can be drawn\u2014has been drawn, at least in part, by historians\u2014linking class and nation and church and gender across the decades in a way that might explain both the context of famine and children\u2019s burial grounds and the conditions for what happened in Tuam. Lest I misrepresent the domain of historical and structural explanations, they are alluded to also by women like Elizabeth*, whose sibling died in the Tuam institution, in her indictment of institutions that \u201cran on the blood, sweat, and tears of the innocent poor.\u201d These conditions are important. But then, how do you \u201cexplain\u201d a child\u2019s death? Visiting from America, where the great famine and rules about burial in consecrated ground are referenced more often as history than memory, how much right do I have to gesture at attempts to do so?<\/p>\n I find some examples in the way various survivors, relatives, and their advocates have narrated their experiences and opinions in our conversations. They prioritized the singularity of a child\u2019s life and social relationships without losing sight of broader social-historical conditions by refusing to treat history as something entirely past\u2014or, indeed, to see these events as falling under the remit of historical and archaeological sciences. Two examples will suffice. First, when the government office tasked with the Tuam excavation initiated an early DNA sampling campaign for elderly and sick presumed relatives of children in the grave, the genetic kinship analysis provisions of the 2022 Institutional Burials Act became an object of contention. Catriona, Elizabeth, and Mary, who was born in the Tuam institution, told me about their frustration with the exclusion of cousins from the list of relatives eligible to provide samples. This exclusion was suspected of signaling an inappropriate delimitation of which family members \u201ccounted,\u201d a failure to fully invest in identifying the children by using the latest technologies, or both. Whether or not this was originally an artifact of technical limitations, an oversight, or an otherwise intentional exclusion, my interlocutors\u2019 response to the decision prioritized the relational obligations of family and government participation in the present over procedural precedent. A similar priority was evident in my conversation with Julie, who works closely with relatives of the deceased and survivors in her professional capacity. After expressing her conviction that the planned forensic intervention was necessary despite not expecting that every child would be identified, she\u00a0redirected attention to\u00a0truths that neither forensic science nor historical research can address in the first place:\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoebe Whiteside<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.anthropology-news.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/image003-856x642.jpg\")
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoebe Whiteside<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n![\"Poetry](\"https:\/\/www.anthropology-news.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/image002-856x642.jpg\")
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