For the Lost Children of Tuam, a Proper Burial at Last

Resolution, finally, is near. Ireland passed a law this summer allowing for a mass excavation that will be among the most challenging of such projects ever undertaken.

But a wary Ms. Corless, having prodded the government through years of bureaucratic dodges and delays, said that her work would end only when the country provides justice to the hundreds of children it long ago forsook. Her determination is driven in part by what forensic archaeologists found all those years ago:

Small skulls. Tiny bones. A single blue shoe.

On a fair Tuam day in October 2016, a small excavator’s claw took its first swipe, peeling away the topsoil from a corner of a seven-acre site seeded with misery.

A massive, slate-gray building once loomed here. Built as a workhouse in the 1840s, it received the famine poor during the Great Hunger; became a military barracks and execution site during Ireland’s civil war in the early 1920s; and served for 36 years as a mother-and-baby home before being demolished in the early 1970s.

The government-funded institution was enveloped in clouds of shame conjured by Ireland’s repressive, Catholic-dominant society. This was where mortified families and offended parish priests sent unmarried pregnant women to give birth. The children they were forced to leave behind would be put up for adoption, fostered out or sent to industrial schools.

Now forensic archaeologists were using small trowels to clear the sorrowful earth with surgical care. They had been hired by a new government entity, the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, to determine whether there were burials on the grounds, as alleged by a local amateur historian, Ms. Corless.

As a child, Ms. Corless often passed the home’s forbidding walls on her way to school, where “home babies” sat in the back, shabby and silent. Then, as an adult poring over historical documents and burial records, she developed a ghastly theory: that the home’s managers, the Sisters of Bon Secours, had buried children on these grounds, including in a defunct sewage system.