Kettle on the Range

I recently gained a dismaying insight into the style of PR that the Sisters of the Bon Secours are engaging in with regard to the Tuam Mother and Baby Home.  An email written by Ms Terry Prone of the Communications Clinic, representing the Sisters, came to my attention, and is now widely available online – the full transcipt is available here, and you can see it in the image below. It was written in reply to Saskia Weber, who contacted the Sisters in relation to a documentary she is making for French TV about the Tuam babies and all of the mother and baby Homes in Ireland.

Email by Terry Prone for Bon Secours

On Tuesday 20th October last, I wrote personally to the Sisters, through their website contact form, to convey my dismay. When my message was sent, a notification popped up on my laptop screen to let me know that I would receive a response shortly.

I await this.

I share what I wrote here:

To whom it concerns

I write to you to convey my great personal dismay regarding an email that I have seen, as written by Ms Terry Prone of the Communications Clinic on behalf of the Sisters of Bon Secours in relation to the Tuam Mother and Baby Home children’s burial ground. The correspondence features an extraordinary falsehood and transmits a dismayingly unprofessional and offensive tone regarding deaths that occurred, and the nature of their final interment, at the facility that the Sisters of the Bon Secours had responsibility for:

•        The statement by Ms Prone that there is no mass grave or no evidence that it exists ( “if you come here, you’ll find no mass grave, no evidence that children were ever so buried)” is of course totally false – indeed, the Bon Secours organisation is otherwise known to be familiar with it. Why is there PR denial of this highly sensitive space on behalf of the Bon Secours?

•       The detail in Ms Prone’s email about famine burials is ill-informed and misleading; infant remains – referred to so shockingly by Ms Prone as “a few bones” – were of course disturbed at the section of ground where children’s burials were interred, and unrelated famine burials are located in an another area. Why is this highly sensitive space dismissed – and in such offensive tones – by Ms Prone?

•      The extremely unprofessional reference by Ms Prone to “a local police force casting their eyes to heaven” sets a dismissive and even mocking tone to what is an extraordinarily painful situation for many people. Exactly to what – and to whom – is this offensive statement attributed?

I trust you are aware that there are many who suffer now whether due to their direct experience of the Tuam facility themselves, or because they are desperate for information about a child who died there? There are deeply upsetting testimonies on the public record, and many more that are known to my mother (Catherine Corless) who receives, with compassion, hospitality and sensitivity, this suffering in her own kitchen and over the phone as those impacted by the Tuam Mother and Baby Home seek support. What support is provided by the Sisters of the Bon Secours? Does not the beautiful mission of the Bon Secours – “the alleviation of suffering” through the “warmth and hospitality, simplicity and courage” of your work – apply to individuals who have an association with the Tuam Mother and Baby Home?

Rather than provide you with offensive, deflective communications as I have seen in the email by Ms Prone, which compounds the difficulty of those affected, I would have expected that PR guidance would have provided your group with professional support to reach out publicly to all affected, in line with your own mission.  Given its responsibility for the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, and its mission of “good help”, are not the Sisters of the Bon Secours in a significant position to be of particular assistance?

Yours sincerely,

Adrienne Corless

My son at the burial ground

It was in early 2012 that Mam called me with news of her findings regarding the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, managed by the Sisters of the Bon Secours from 1925 until it closed in 1961. The whole world knows about it now: the children who died; their number; their whereabouts. My own baby son was about 16 months old on that day. He was asleep in a sling wrapped about me, as I stood in the porch of the old Wexford house I was living in. In silence I listened to what my mother had to say over the phone.

“Are you there?” Mam’s voice queried gently at the other end of the phone when I made no reply. “I’ve upset you now.”  She sounded dismayed.

Still holding the phone to my ear with one hand, I held tightly to my baby with the other. I let the information about hundreds of dead children, and the nature of how their remains were dealt with, seep in. I remember that I opened the front door and stepped into the fresh Spring air to sit on the granite steps outside, rearranging my son in his sling.

I was indeed upset. I had tears springing to the corners of my eyes.

“Oh Mam,” I implored eventually. “I am upset. But not because of you!”

I’m a wimp for this kind of thing; I’ve never even been able to watch a movie without first checking that nobody was going to die or be maltreated.  I turn away from this negativity, I avoid.  But I knew rightaway that it was a finding that had to be told. Mam wrote about it in the Journal of the Old Tuam Society, published later that year, as part of her piece on the Home and the people who were there.

Visiting my parents in Spring 2013, I was sitting with a cup of tea at the kitchen table whilst my son, aged 2 by this time, squabbled with his older sister on the floor near my chair. Beside me, Mam opened her cupboard full of history files and books, and pulled out a plastic sleeve containing a set of A4 pages. She slid it towards me across the table.

“These are the children,” she told me quietly.

“Oh,” I said, lowly. I hadn’t been ready for this, though she’d told me all about it on the phone. She had obtained the list of all of the children who had died at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home.

All the names.

All the associated family addresses.

The ages they were when they died.

And causes of death.

The magnitude of this enormous loss bore down on me, as I read line after line. My shoulders slumped, and slumped again.

“It’s upsetting  you now,” Mam said gently, in echo of what she’d said to me months previous. She moved to take the list away from me.

“No,” I resolved.

I pulled my chair around to the range, opened the door to let the heat out at my legs and, with resignation, I made myself read on. Every page, every line, every child.  With each starkly recorded name, I felt myself think of that child, appreciate him, consider the truth of what she went through.

I knew enough, in spite of all my hand-wringing and avoidance, to know that what has happened has been grim. The testimonies – of inhabitants who survived and of those in the town who know details of what happened – would keep  you awake at night.

796 children are lost but their story lives and demands to be told. A committee came together in Tuam to memorialise the site more appropriately. Fundraising commenced, and I understand that sufficient funds are now in place to commemorate the children with a plaque and to refurbish the area.

Of course the findings were never about a memorial alone, and the situation is not to be consigned to the past. The people who lived still carry  the indignity of what happened to them, sometimes in deeply secretive and corrosive silence. Families of children who died are desperate for the truth of what happened at the Bon Secours facility.

“The Sisters are devastated,” said a Bon Secours sister to Mam when she met her about the news coverage of the findings (she was referring to the media attention).

“The people who come to me are devastated,”  replied Mam.

People who survived the Home and the system that decided their lives have been contacting my mother for years; she listens to every heartbreaking story, and voluntarily helps with the resources necessary to trace lost family.

In a country that supposedly places such a high cultural value on heritage, personal heritages have been either needlessly confused or all-but-erased for individuals who were fostered or adopted from the Tuam and other facilities around the country. There is a strangely enduring bureaucratic discrimination that continues to hamper the search that adopted or fostered people must then embark on to trace birth families (check out the Adoption Rights Alliance website for an insight into the extraordinary challenges that adopted people face).

I manage to explain the situation to my daughter, as best I can. In her beautiful, straightforward, six-years-old world view, there is no problem:

“But Mammy, it doesn’t even matter if the mothers weren’t married! And nobody needs to keep the secrets now.”

“Exactly,” I tell her.

But this is easy for she and I to say; for many, the pain of indignity and grief and the shame  of “illegitimacy”, is palpable, still. The grief of systemically having a son, a daughter, a mother, a father, an entire extended family taken, is breathtaking to consider. This suffering is the experience of vast (as yet, countless) numbers of individuals in this state. Often, it is in secret; for some, it is only now (since the Tuam Mother and Baby Home became highlighted) that they have found the courage and strength to open up to their own children about their experiences.

My daughter at the Tuam childrens’ burial ground

“Suffer us children that Ireland forgot” wrote Michael Hession, who was born at the Tuam Home.

In Tuam, there were 796 children who never got started and who were denied dignity in death, because somehow, nobody was able to speak up for them.

Last week my parents met with James Reilly, Minister for Children and Youth Affairs to make their straightforward plea for the release of all records, for the recognition of all the burial grounds, and for justice for all affected.

No, my mother has not made any retraction in relation to her findings about the Tuam Mother and Baby Home.

No, my mother did not “admit” that anything in her findings was “impossible”.

My mother, Catherine Corless, is as consistent as ever in her presentation of her findings; no retractions, no “admitting” to “impossibilities”.

There is the old kettle on the range that inspired the name for this sleepy little blog, splashed in images from my parents kitchen all over media electronic and traditional as my mother’s research made headlines the word over.

There is my mother herself sitting in her kitchen where she answered telephone interviews and hosted journalist after journalist, representing newspaper, radio and TV, from Ireland, the UK, France and the USA. My mother, who does not ordinarily do crowds of people, or even social occasions if she can help it, or any kind of public speaking, graciously handling intense publicity in the poised, articulate way that she did. She shared generously of her time and her work to speak the story of a group of children whose little young lives were compromised before they were even born, and, after death, whose existence was quietly concealed.

“Kitchen Historian” (image by Philip Boucher-Hayes)

These were the children born in seclusion at the Tuam Mother and Babies Home between the years 1925 and 1961, to mothers that a proudly austere Irish community sought to sequester in the interests of religious mores. These were the children who died there. These were the children who were buried in unconsecrated ground,  in some kind of crypt arrangement in an area of the property associated with sewerage (recent extensive documentary evidence of the nature of this area by Izzy Kimikaze here).

After Alison O’Reilly for the Mail on Sunday broke the story nationally on Sunday 25th of May, there began an incremental media interest, which, almost two weeks later, became a total frenzy in which my mother calmly and patiently repeated her findings, consistently, again and again, to speak on behalf of forgotten babies who had nobody else to speak for them. Meanwhile, my Dad and my brothers took leave from work (granted without hesitation by their employers) to field journalists and photographers on phones, in our house and garden, and in the town of Tuam, whilst my sister sorted emails from her Dublin base and at my parent’s house. I tried to keep up with it all online here in Wexford, mostly at night after the kids were in bed, staying up way past my ideal bedtime.

Then, in a profound moment on Tuesday 10th of June 2014, Minister for Children Charlie Flannagan announced that the government had agreed agreed to establish a Commission of Investigation, with statutory powers, to investigate mother and baby homes. In his speech he commended Catherine Corless for her work in researching Tuam and described her as

“an eloquent advocate for the children who died in the home over a forty year period”.

Yes. Yes to that, I thought.

Then this week I notice that I’m getting notifications to my Twitter account about certain commentators suggesting, nay claiming,  that my mother “retracted” findings,  which I know she did not, so I find myself carving out some time to sit down and write this comment on my blog.

The source for claims about “retraction” appears to be this “correction” (which also seems subsequently to be interpreted by certain commentators as an “apology” which certainly seems inaccurate to me) by the Associated Press:

“In addition, in the June 3 story, the AP quoted a researcher who said she believed that most of the remains of children who died there were interred in a disused septic tank; the researcher has since clarified that without excavation and forensic analysis it is impossible to know how many sets of remains the tank contains, if any.”

I can confirm that my mother was not contacted about this “correction” and the words attributed to her were never spoken by her; they appear to be an interpretation of an Irish Times article by journalist Rosita Boland, which, while it clarified some semantics regarding other journalists’ reporting of the story, also included some misrepresentations of my mother’s position.

The headline

“she now says the nature of their burial has been widely misrepresented”

is itself a misrepresentation – this headline seems to be a reference to the use of that emotive word “dump” which word my mother never spoke in relation to the burials; though the article does clarify this,  it is an exaggeration on behalf of the Irish Times to suggest on that basis that “the nature of their burial has been widely misrepresented”.

That article goes on to claim that:

“Corless admits that it now seems impossible to her that more than 200 bodies could have been put in a working sewage tank”

This is false; my mother says she did not “admit” that anything in her findings was “impossible”; she was as consistent in her presentation to Rosita Boland as she was with any other interviewer.

Indeed – the article is accompanied by a video (which, I wish to say, I think is beautiful), in which my mother states, in direct opposition to the way she was represented in the written article:

“I think it’s quite possible”

So, there is a video accompanying that very article which records that my mother said the word “possible” – not “seems impossible”.

In response to “Confusion” about maps

Futhermore, I’ve already tweeted my response to the detail in the article about cited “confusion” about maps, and can outline it in more detail here.

“But there is confusion about what dates these maps relate to. One map Corless shows The Irish Times is dated 1892. It describes the building on the site as “Children’s Home”, but in 1892 the building was a workhouse. It did not become a home until 1925. Corless had not noticed this until her attention was drawn to it”

There was no confusion about maps or their dates associated with my mother.

The “confusion” referred to appears to be that of the journalist’s, not my mother’s. The copy of the map that they were incidentally looking at amongst my mother’s documents was the edit from the IRISH HISTORIC TOWNS ATLAS NO. 20, TUAM – Map 13 captioned “Growth of Tuam, to 1892, by J.A. Claffey” – the caption, shown below, seems to have confused the journalist. The map under the colour-coding edits by J.A. Claffey on the particular map they happened to be looking at amongst Mam’s documents is itself a revised edition of the Ordnance Survey 1905-6 mapping, Scale 1:2500.

Like any practised historical researcher accustomed to looking at old maps, my mother knows instantly what version of Ordnance Survey map she is looking at, and whether it is an illustrated edit. My mother clarified the date of the base map, but this was not printed in the Irish Times published piece; dismayingly, the newspaper seems to have decided to disingenuously portray an angle of “confusion”.*

The cited “confusion” is a further misrepresentation of my mother’s work and the interview she gave that day to the Irish Times.

With further dismay, I notice the Associated Press seperately referencing and again at the Washington Post, that same misrepresentation about maps as “discrepancies in Corless’ maps”:

“But the newspaper spotted discrepancies in Corless’ maps, and found records showing that the actual septic tank remained in use until the late 1930s, which meant it could not have been used as a burial spot.”

“The newspaper” in question here is the Irish Times and the quoted “discrepancies” are false, as I have outlined above.

(Additionally, it was not the newspaper (the Irish Times) that “found records”as quoted above; those records were in my mother’s possession and it was she who presented them that day in her interview with Rosita Boland.)

And then, a lurid dismissal of the findings by Eamonn Fingleton writing at Forbes as a “hoax” – attributed to that mispresentation in the Irish Times:

“Let’s sum up. The accuracy of the facts I reported remains unquestioned (Professor McCormick and Catherine Corless have been quoted accurately, as can be established by checking out the two Irish Times links included above).”

No, Eamonn Fingleton, Catherine Corless has not been “quoted accurately”. And on point of information there, Eamonn Fingleton seems to have given Dr McCormick a promotion to professorship.

Elsewhere, this:

“Specifically, the AP points to an investigation by The Irish Times in Dublin that revealed discrepancies in maps used by Corless “

An “investigation” accredited to the Irish Times? There was no investigation, but for that cross-examination of my mother by an Irish Times journalist, whose article misrepresented my mother, as I have outlined in three ways above. I personally find it dismaying that the Irish Times represents itself here as somehow swiping information from under my mother’s nose as though it had never been considered before, in order to present it in a strange, inconsistent report with no clear bottom-line other than to slate other journalists’ apparent sensationalising of the situation and to seemingly raise doubt about my mother’s work; in between the lines of which, the gravity of the findings were not disputed.

I reiterate that my mother remains as consistent as ever in her presentation of her findings.

Meanwhile, commentators the world over continue to engage with the details surrounding the situation at Tuam and all of the Mother and Baby Homes whilst we all await news of the Terms of Reference according to which the investigation will operate. I expect continued unsilencing of the very raw and difficult truths of what happened to the children and mothers of Irish Mother and Baby Homes and I wish for this to take place as accurately and as sensitively as possible in what most certainly is and will be  an unprecedented pressure of publicity and media interest on anyone associated.

And meanwhile, don’t forget that the little committee established in Tuam to commemorate the children who died continue to collect funds.

Adrienne Corless, Wexford

“Kitchen Historian” image added 03 July 2014

*UPDATE 23rd July 2014

My mother was contacted three times by the Irish Times – twice by Eoin McVey and once by Rosita Boland – inquiring whether she would like to make a complaint about the misrepresentations as outlined in this post. I can report that she has decided that she does not wish to make a complaint because, as she responded to the Irish Times, whilst she is greatly dismayed at the confused and negative impact that the Irish Times piece – among others – has had on the Tuam Mother and Babies Home campaign, she does not wish for any spotlight drawn personally on her. My ordinarily very private, retiring and self-professed-reclusive mother has already put herself on a public stage to a degree that has been astonishing and even alarming to those close to her for the sake of a cause she feels very strongly about, and I support her decision.

Rosita Boland wrote to me by courier at my address 4th of July (copy of letter can be seen here). She thereafter sent me a short audio clip at my request.

Rosita Boland’s letter to me stated

“Your mother did in fact say to me on June 5th that it “seemed impossible” that 204 bodies of the children registered as having died between 1925 and 1937, could have been put in a working sewage tank. However, you maintain in your blog that “this is false.”  

Regarding the sewage tank being in use or not, my mother’s position regarding whether or not the sewage tank was still working in those years is that this is not clear (it may not have been, meaning children registered as having died between 1925 and 1937 may indeed be in that same former sewage area).  The audio clip does not refer to this section of the interview.  My mother never did claim at any stage that any children who died would have been “put in a working sewage tank”. In this way, I maintain that for Rosita Boland to write “Corless admits that it now seems impossible” (my emphasis) is false because it suggests new information as a result of the Irish Times interview, which is not the case.

If the Irish Times article wished to downplay the widely-reported and unsavoury aspect of the sewage tank, they could have highlighted – simply – that at no stage did my mother’s findings suggest that it was a working sewage tank. As my mother is already quoted in the Connacht Tribune, in one of the first-ever interviews she gave about this sad situation, the entire aspect of the sewage tank “is not nice to think about”.

In connection – once again – with the “confusion” about maps: the short audio clip records my mother saying the words “that must be a mistake” – meaning the date on the map’s caption of 1892 must be a mistake as my mother knew full well that the map represented – the base map as I have explained in this blog post – could not itself be dated 1892 – just before the clip ends.  The audio clip does not reassure me that my mother was misrepresented in relation to “confusion”. Furthermore, though she did know that the map could not of course be dated 1892, if my mother did not immediately recognise what the caption on the map related to and if she did not make this perfectly plain to the journalist in a way the journalist could also understand, I have painstakingly outlined the clarifications in this blog post, in a way that I hope that anyone can now understand. My mother also tells me here today that she went on at that point of the interview to back up her findings relating to the sewage tank to the journalist (using Tuam Herald archival material 1900-1918 containing the minutes of the meetings of the Home Assistance Committee); perhaps the journalist has that conversation recorded also. 

Despite this, and despite my painstaking clarifications above, the position of confusion about maps is still, to date, clearly maintained by the Irish Times journalist and features editor. 

While I found the article by the Irish Times journalist jarring and discomfiting to read, even notwithstanding my personal connection to the story, and I found its headline and tagline (which apparently were not written by the journalist) misleading, I do not accept the charge that “public accusations” – mine or others – about a single newspaper article will damage a journalistic reputation in this instance. I have read many wonderfully-written and interesting articles by this journalist before and after the report on the interview in question here; I simply do not number that article among them.

To date, I have received no correspondence from any other media publications referenced in my blog post above.