In an interview on the eve of the long-awaited excavation, Catherine Corless declared with unyielding arrogance that science would finally “confirm the babies were ‘wilfully neglected and denied basic nutrition’”—a statement published in the Irish Daily Mail on 15 June by Nicola Byrne. Despite every shred of credible evidence to the contrary, and in direct conflict with the conclusions of the Commission of Investigation, Mrs. Corless persists in her delusional narrative that children at Tuam Children’s Home were deliberately starved to death.
This spectacle of self-delusion is destined to become one of the most spectacular crashes in Irish history. Here we have a self-styled crusader—who has neither the medical training nor the historical acumen—confidently dismissing established expert opinion. She eagerly anticipates a future scientific vindication of her absurd claims, yet she does so without a modicum of wit or foresight. Should the exhumations at Tuam expose the truth, she will not merely be proved wrong; she will be revealed as the most dangerous fantasist ever to grace Irish public life—only rivaled, perhaps, by England’s own self-appointed Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins.
Hopkins was no ordinary witch-hunter. He was a state-sanctioned sadist, a Puritan racketeer, and a misogynist with a business model—whose reign of terror in the 1640s inflicted suffering far beyond the graves of the women he destroyed. The startling parallels between Hopkins’s England and today’s Ireland are indeed astonishing.
I’m especially looking forward to the day when the dimwitted sycophants within those smug institutions are publicly unmasked—the ones too lazy to check the facts, too vain to admit error, and all too eager to bestow accolades on a fantasist simply because her delusions echo their own petty prejudices. They weren’t merely deceived; they were complicit—applauding mendacity that soothed their fragile egos while the truth lay rotting in the government’s commission reports.
Allow me one final, salient point to provoke reflection: out of the 796 death certificates unearthed for the children of Tuam, 79 belong to those born of married parents—a fact that both the media and Mrs. Corless desperately wish to keep hidden. It undermines the politically convenient myth that starvation only visited children born to unmarried mothers.
So, which side of the fence will you be on when the day of reckoning finally dawns?
EJ
For reference, here is the full text of the article.
‘Babies in Tuam starved to death’
The official excavation of notorious mother and baby home finally begins tomorrow and Catherine Corless, the local historian who revealed the mass grave, has a shocking belief about how the children died…
The Irish Mail on Sunday15 Jun 2025By Nicola Byrne
THE historian and campaigner who uncovered the horror of hundreds of babies buried in a mass grave said forensics will prove the children were ultimately starved to death.
Catherine Corless was speaking ahead of the excavation of the site tomorrow, more than 11 years after the Irish Mail on Sunday broke the story about existence of the grave containing the remains of 796 babies at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway.
In an interview on the eve of the long-awaited dig, Ms Corless said she is confident science will finally confirm the babies were ‘wilfully neglected and denied basic nutrition’.
The children all died and were buried on the site over a 36-year period. Measles, influenza, gastroenteritis, meningitis, whooping cough and tuberculosis were listed as some of their causes of death.
But Ms Corless, who tirelessly tracked down death certificates for every infant, believes the underlying cause of each death was severe longterm hunger and neglect. The illnesses, she said, were just symptoms of this.
‘The report did not show the awfulness, the cruelty’
‘I know some of the death certs say undernourishment and the nuns could say that was because they were sick and they couldn’t eat,’ the historian and researcher told the MoS at the site of the former home this week.
‘But the presence of rickets in the bones will show severe long-term food deficiencies. These children were starved; they had no proper nutrition. That’s why they couldn’t fight illness. I’m hoping that this malnutrition will show up in the little bones.
‘They can’t explain that away. It would be wonderful if the forensic side of it worked.
‘We know well that the babies died from neglect and hunger, there’s no doubt at all about that.
‘It will bring solid proof to what I’ve been saying. Because I have records and everything like that, but to get the raw truth from the bones, that would be fantastic.’
Ms Corless said the forensic evidence uncovered by the exhumation will tell the truth in a way that the government-appointed Commission of Investigation into mother and baby homes did not. The work, which begins tomorrow, is expected to last at least two years.
‘I hope this would be a chance to put some of that right because science will not lie,’ Ms Corless said.
‘When I saw that final report of the commission in 2021, I was nearly too angry for words. I was choked after all those people going up there and telling their stories, many of them for the first time and they don’t even include them.
‘These people gave their heart and soul, but they picked a few sentences out of it that suited them.
‘The report didn’t show the awfulness, the cruelty, the babies with the pot bellies. I hope this exhumation will show that.’
Research carried out by Ms Corless shows that, as far back as 1934, the extraordinary number of deaths at the home had been brought to the attention of the Dáil.
In that year, TDs were given a report from a public health official which said: ‘One must come to the conclusion that they are not looked after with the same care and attention as that given to ordinary children.’
Thirty children died in the home in 1934, but in several other years the death toll was more than 50.
Ms Corless said her greatest hope now is that the remains of the children will finally be reunited with their families.
‘I would be hoping that they will get their own little relative back, that they can piece the parts of the skeletons together. And then I’d be hoping that they’d be able to place that child in a white coffin.
‘That was my intention all along. The number one thing was always to take them out of the sewage system. That’s the big thing that they’re doing now. They’re not going to leave them there.’
Ms Corless spent years trying to find out what happened to the remains of hundreds of children who died at the mother and baby home after she found there were death certificates for 796 infants, but no burial records.
Fears of a mass grave were first reported in this newspaper and soon made international headlines. In October 2016 the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation began test excavations at the site in Tuam, later finding ‘significant quantities of human remains’ in 17 underground chambers.
Article Name:‘Babies in Tuam starved to death’
Publication:The Irish Mail on Sunday
Author:By Nicola Byrne
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End Page:30