Excavation crews begin sealing off site in Tuam, Co Galway, before full-scale dig starts on 14 July

Preliminary work aimed at identifying the remains of nearly 800 infants is starting on the site in Tuam, Co Galway, as Ireland continues to wrestle with the traumatic legacy of its mother and baby homes scandal.

Catherine Corless, a local historian who first sounded the alarm about the dark past of the institution run by nuns from the Bon Secours order, uncovered the names of 796 infants who are believed to have been buried there between 1925 and 1961, some in a disused subterranean septic tank. There were no burial records.

On Monday, excavation crews began sealing off the site before the search for remains next month. “There are so many babies, children just discarded here,” Corless told Agence France-Presse.

It was Corless’s work that led to an Irish commission of investigation into the so-called mother and baby homes, to which young women and girls were sent for decades to give birth in, rather than in hospital or at home. Doubling as orphanages and adoption agencies for much of the 20th century, the institutions were run by religious orders with sanction by the state, which overlooked deprivation, misogyny, stigma and high infant mortality rates.

The government made a formal state apology in 2021 after the commission report.

In Tuam, hoarding has been placed around the excavation site, now in the middle of a housing estate. The preliminary work is expected to last four weeks before a full-scale excavation begins on 14 July.

The site was once a workhouse and the search for the infants’ remains could be complicated by the fact that victims of the 19th century great famine are also thought to be buried there.

Daniel MacSweeney, who is overseeing the operation, told RTÉ radio: “It’s an incredibly complex challenge because of the size of the site and the fact that we are dealing with infant remains that we know, at least in the case of the memorial gardens (on the site), are co-mingled.”

The existence of mother and baby homes has been described as a dark stain on Irish society. In 2017, the then taoiseach Enda Kenny described what was revealed ab

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Speaking in the Dáil, the Irish parliament, he did not spare his fellow citizens. “No nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children. We gave them up to what we convinced ourselves was the nuns’ care. We gave them up maybe to spare them the savagery of gossip, the wink and the elbow language of delight in which the holier-than-thous were particularly fluent. We gave them up because of our perverse, in fact, morbid relationship with what is called respectability,” he added.

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