What strikes me is the ordinariness of the forenames. The Patricks, the Julias, the Marys, the Peters, the Johns, the Mauds. Not names you associate with children. Names you associate with people who have lived a full life, a life they never got to life.
You could say they were old people’s names. Martins who became Matties; Sarahs who became Sallys; Johns who became Jacks. Run a finger down the list of the names of those who died in the Tuam Mother and Baby Homes from the 1930s onwards and you are overwhelmed by the fact that they existed... and then they didn’t.
They had names that didn’t belong to babies, but grown people. Serious names for people who would be at the heart of the community and not the fringes. People who would have made a difference to Galway and Mayo and beyond, wherever their kin were from.
We mourn for the fact that they never got to become the people they could have, to be pillars of the community, singers, storytellers, good neighbours, bad neighbours, abstainers, non-abstainers.
They should be in their dotage now, living out the twilight years in the loving embrace of family and friends. Their names should be read slowly out on the radio death notices while people around shushed others to catch the details. Their smiling picture taken at a family wedding should be staring out from rip.ie, complete with condolences and sympathies from those who had the good fortune to cross their path in life.
They should be waked through the night, they should hear the soft shuffle of the neighbours’ shoes in their last days. They should be given the comfort of lying for one last time in their own homes; a space cleared in the good room, for the murmuring and the mourning.
They should be spoken about in terms of endearment as tear-stained ham sandwiches and dry Madeira cakes are passed around in the room where their casket stands.
Their deaths should have been normal, from illness or old age. Their lives and their passing, moving like ships in the night through the benign straits of life. They should be having funerals, nice, respectful, and dignified. With their names engraved subsequently into limestone, to bear testimony that they had been born, they had lived, they had contributed and that when they could give no more, they faded from life like the setting sun. That they had seen out a life of matter, of import, of giving and receiving.
This they were denied. And so they were left, forgotten, without names or marker, without honour or dignity.
Catherine Corless gave them life by giving them names. When Catherine allowed us in 2017 to print the names of those babies, the reaction was overwhelming. It put flesh on the bones; it ran blood through them, ridding them of their pallid lifelessness. It gave them enough soul to shout out that they mattered and that their lives mattered. It sent a message to their families that they were worth pursuing.
From the end of this year for a period of almost two more years, the focus will be on Tuam as the excavations and exhumations take place.
These Tuam babies, and indeed all of those who lie interred in other places across the country, deserved more than their country gave them. Now is our chance to put some of that right.
To Catherine Corless, I hope that her heart rests easy now; that her worry that this might never happen will dissipate; that she can enjoy her own life with her family having created a legacy that will never be forgotten. Her story is one of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. We can all play our part by highlighting the wrongs we see and by trying to put them right.
I hope one day that there will be a Catherine Corless bursary in NUI, Galway or the Atlantic Technologicial University to encourage other local historians to effect social change in the way that she has. To get us all thinking about how we can override the established rhetoric.
History is a wonderful concept, especially recent local history and that is why this newspaper features so much of it every week. It is a compass we use to find ourselves on the map of human geography. It tells us where we are but, more importantly, what we must be. The actions that were taken this week were inspired by Catherine; let her work be a guiding force in ensuring that time no longer plays a part in covering up our shameful past.
