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A playground for the living built over the bones of the dead

15 0
yesterday

There’s a scene in The Lost Children of Tuam, Frank Berry’s enraging, devastating film, in which Catherine Corless, played by Monica Dolan, goes back to the housing estate built on the former site of the mother and baby home in the Galway town where 796 children died without a burial record.

She stands in the playground erected shortly after the housing estate was finished in the 1970s and wonders aloud about it. Isn’t it, she asks, a very big playground for the size of the housing estate?

Because of Corless’s tireless and painstaking work, we now know the dark secrets that lay somewhere underground, beneath its smooth tarmac surface. A playground for the living built beside the bones of the dead. A supersized playground to cover a colossal stain on our consciences. Something special for the living children to atone for what this society allowed to happen to 796 dead ones.

Several times in the film someone expresses incredulity that the Bon Secours nuns, in whose care babies died at a rate of one every 16 days, despite it being a nursing order, would not have marked those babies’ graves. It seemed inconceivable that a religious order would allow children to be buried in chambers constructed in a disused sewage tank and not put up so much as a plaque or a tiny cross in their memory.

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© The Irish Times