A pensioner who survived the Tuam mother and baby home found out he had a sister two months ago, after his DNA matched her remains.
Paul Ford, 79, said he doesn’t have many memories of the home, located in County Galway in Ireland, adding that he was ‘brainwashed’ during his time there.
The institution – which was run by nuns – operated in the area between 1925 and 1961 and housed unmarried women who were pregnant, usually at the request of their families.
But it was later found that the bodies of 796 babies and young children had been disposed of in a disused sewage tank.
Nearly a decade after the horrific scandal came to light, a full excavation of the area to recover the remains has begun its preliminary stage, with the full excavation to begin next year.
Paul’s sister, Ellen, was born in 1942 and died aged two, before being buried in the mass grave. But until just two months ago, he had no idea she existed.
He told BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour: ‘I’m going to take her and going to bury her [with] her mother and if I don’t, my family knows and my family will do it for me.’
Paul Ford said he doesn’t have many memories of the Tuam mother and baby home, adding that he was ‘brainwashed’ during his time there
Paul was born a year after his sibling’s death, but his biological mother never told him about Ellen after she was sent to the home and ‘punished’ for being a pregnant woman who was not married.
‘Every morning when [my mother] went to mass, she lit two candles,’ Paul said.
Paul was around five years old when he left the Tuam mother and baby home and went to live with his new foster family.
He said: ‘My foster family were a lovely family, I was one of the lucky ones and they did everything they could for me.
‘They clothed me, fed me and I went to school.’
However, Paul was illiterate up until the age of 13, when he decided to teach himself how to read and write.
After he moved away from the institution, Paul said his peers called him a ‘homebird’ – a derogatory term for people who had come from mother and baby homes.
‘I remember when I was going to mass as well a few of them [tried] to take advantage and they started prodding me and stabbed me,’ he said.
He said that other members of society would ‘look down’ on children who had come from the Tuam home.
The site of the mass grave containing the bodies of 796 children pictured in 2014
A man holding an umbrella stands by the gravestone dedicated to almost 800 babies and children at the site in Tuam in 2014
A girl is pictured putting a teddy bear down alongside a bouquet of flowers at the site in 2014
Paul decided to seek assistance to help him look for his birth mother. Upon tracking her down, he was told he would have to wait a week before contacting her but it ‘felt like 10 years’.
‘I quizzed her about my father but she wasn’t forthcoming for some reason.
‘There was one time where I brought my two sons [to go and see her] and on our way out, one of them, who was around six, said ‘I know where I got my brown eyes from’.’
His mother stayed in the institution ‘her whole life’ and spent her time folding sheets, Paul says.
Tuam Mother and Baby Home was set up in a former workhouse that housed destitute adults and children since the 1800s famine era.
The building was turned into a home for mothers and babies in 1925 and was run by an order of Catholic nuns named the Bon Secours Sisters.
In 1961, Tuam was shut down after it was seen to have fallen into a state of disrepair and the remaining residents were transferred to similar homes.
However, in 1975, two young boys discovered skeletal remains while playing in the area, with locals attributing it to bodies from the famine era.
In 2012, Catherine Corless wrote about the poor living conditions inside the Tuam mother and baby home and published a journal, detailing the poor living conditions.
Reports found how infants suffered malnutrition and neglect, which caused the deaths of many, while others died of measles, convulsions, TB, gastroenteritis and pneumonia.
Carmel Larkin (R) and historian Catherine Corless (L) are pictured in 2019
A year later, Catherine attempted to collate the death certificates of nearly 800 children who died at the Tuam home, before it started to gain media attention worldwide.
She also told the BBC today: ‘A woman who got pregnant in the village was absolutely frowned upon, whispered about, talked about.
‘The priests were called the house and told the family that she could not stay in the village like that, being pregnant.
‘So he would arrange for the woman to be whisked off to a home and even after they gave birth and spent a year in the home, they couldn’t even come back to the village.
‘Because many a time, and I quote some people, they were told she was a temptation, a bad influencer, a ‘loose woman’.’
Catherine said she exposed the story to the media because ‘local people wouldn’t listen’ to her.
Speaking of the treatment of the babies and children, she said: ‘They were treated like… I wouldn’t even say treated like animals because you treat your animals better.
‘To put down all these beautiful babies and toddlers, wrap them out and put them down in a sewage facility and forget all about them it’s too horrific, I had to be a voice for them.’
Catherine herself encountered some of the children from the home and said she remembers them being ‘pale and skinny and not dressed very well’.
She added: ‘I remember the most of all, they were all huddled together at the back and we were told not to talk to them, mix with them or play with them.’
A source close to the investigation told the Irish Mail on Sunday at the time: ‘No one knows the total number of babies in the grave.
There are 796 death records but they are only the ones we know of.
‘God knows who else is in the grave. It’s been lying there for years and no one knows the full extent or total of bodies down there.’
The Bon Secours Sisters apologised in 2021 and said they had ‘failed to protect the inherent dignity’ of women and children in the home.
Daniel MacSweeney has been appointed the Director of Authorised Intervention at Tuam, and is in charge of running the current excavation operation.
