The horrors of the mother and baby homes were so unspeakable, and the shame they brought on the Catholic Church and the Irish State so unforgivable, that telling their story poses an obvious challenge. How to chronicle the evil of the homes while respecting the victims and without exploiting their experiences for shock value – as the BBC did with its dire drama, The Woman in the Wall?
The solution offered by the powerful and unflinching Stolen (RTÉ One, 9.35pm) is to get out of the way and let eyewitnesses speak for themselves. Mary Moriarty recalls a child uncovering human remains near her home in Galway. Her housing estate was built close to a long-shuttered religious institution – her address, it turned out, was above an informal graveyard to which the nuns would convey dead babies.
“A neighbour came in and said there was a boy out the back and he a skull on a stick,” she remembers. “I looked at it and realised it was a real head. It had teeth.”
Even more upsetting testimonies follow over the 100-minute documentary by Margo Harkin. When Anna Corrigan sought information about two of her brothers listed as dying at an institution, the details she received were incomplete. One document describes her older brother, John, as “miserable and emaciated”. He died in 1947 at 16 months. Her brother William is said to have died at seven months. “There is no death certificate,” she says. “There is an element of criminality to it.”
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The cruelty to which children were subjected is hard to comprehend. Some 9,000 babies and children died in institutions run by nuns from 1922 to 1998 – five times the national average infant mortality rate. Artist Alison Lowry observes that, at one point, one in every 100 people in the State was incarcerated in some manner of institution. “That’s close to Stalin levels.”
Much of this would have remained buried were it not for Galway historian Catherine Corless, who uncovered a mass grave adjacent to the Tuam mother and baby home, where 796 infants died between 1925 and 1961. “It took one story to open everything,” says journalist Alison O’Reilly. “The story of the Tuam mother and baby home.”
With the horrors of Tuam threatening Ireland’s international reputation, the government established a commission of inquiry. Meanwhile, victims began to come forward. Colleen Anderson describes being sent to America for adoption – the family was physically abusive, and she left at 15 – and how she discovered her mother had been raped and forced to give her up.
The same tactics were used on Terri Harrison after she became pregnant. She went to London but describes being forcibly conveyed back to Ireland. “They were waiting for me in my aunt’s home: two nuns and a priest … As far as I was concerned, I was abducted from one jurisdiction and brought back to another against my will.”
Your heart breaks, too, for Michael O’Flaherty, separated from his birth parents, denied an education and essentially fostered out as slave labour to farmers. “I don’t know how I survived … sleeping in the shed,” he says.
The only place Stolen really falls is in the use of poetry to express the suffering of the mother and their children – a pretentious flourish that feels redundant given the articulate fashion in which survivors relive their experiences.
There is one awful final twist. In 2021, the government published its report into the homes. But the evidence of witnesses who had opted to give their testimony in a non-adversarial setting was not included in the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation’s final findings – and it is by no means clear that this had been adequately explained to them at the time.
Betrayed by the State since infancy, they had been let down once again by a report that many regarded as a whitewash (incredibly, it asserted that there was “little or no evidence of enforced adoption”). Four years on, survivors remain justifiably aggrieved. “Let’s stop protecting the church,” says Noelle Brown, born in Cork’s notorious Bessborough mother and baby home. “They are criminals so far as I am concerned.”
