Hundreds of babies buried on Tuam mother and baby home site may never be detailed

Hundreds of children buried on the site of the Tuam mother and baby home may never be individually identified, unless the Government commits to a multimillion-euro forensic investigation.

Hundreds of babies buried on Tuam mother and baby home site may never be detailed

That is according to the expert technical group advising the Government about managing the site.

Its findings came just a week after the Mother and Baby Homes Commission admitted it will be “difficult to establish the facts” surrounding the burials of children who died in all of the homes it is investigating.

The technical group said the issue of DNA and potential identification is highly complex and comes with “high expectations”.

The commingled nature of the remains meant it was “particularly challenging” to isolate the remains of a single individual.

“In a collective interment scenario, a collective identity is potentially all that is possible,” states the report.

The technical group said it was important that communication with families and stakeholders be “managed effectively” and expectations of outcomes of any future work must be set at “realistic levels”.

“It must be stated that it is possible that what is desired to be known about those interred here may never be fully realised,” it says.

The expert technical group has outlined and costed a range of options open to the Government. They are:

  • Memorialisation, with no further investigative work involved. The site would be returned to its original state and managed as a memorial;
  • Exhumation of known human remains and re-interring elsewhere, but with no further forensic analysis;
  • Forensic excavation and recovery of known human remains. This would include use of an approach known as ‘humanitarian forensic action’ with the recovery and analysis of all remains from the identified chambers;
  • Forensic excavation and recovery, with further evaluation/excavation of other areas of potential interest. It would include an extensive programme of non-intrusive investigative work, which would then inform decisions as to what further areas of the site (if any) might contain human remains;
  • Forensic examination of the total available area, with a full examination of the memorial garden, playground, and car park area formerly occupied by the home. It would be the most intrusive option available, aimed at exhausting all potential for further relevant human remains.

The options range from least costly to the most expensive. For example, option one would take six months to a year and cost between €100,000 and €500,000 while option five would take one to two years and cost anywhere from €3m to €5m.

Galway County Council is to facilitate a structured consultation process to determine the views of all relevant parties, including affected families. The authority will report back to an inter-departmental group within three months which will then propose a course of action for consideration by the Government.

Anna Corrigan of the Tuam Babies Family Group said a range of academics had said it was possible to fully identify the remains in Tuam and the fullest possible examination of the site was the only option that should be pursued.

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