TUAM, Ireland (AP) — This story begins with a forbidden fruit.
It was the 1970s in this small town in the west of Ireland when an orchard owner chased off two boys stealing his apples.
The youngsters avoided being caught by clambering over the stone wall of the derelict Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home. When they landed, they discovered a dark secret that has grown to haunt Ireland.
One of the boys, Franny Hopkins, remembers the hollow sound as his feet hit the ground. He and Barry Sweeney pushed back some briars to reveal a concrete slab they pried open.
“There was just a jumble of bones,” Hopkins said. “We didn’t know if we’d found a treasure or a nightmare.”
Hopkins didn’t realize they’d found a mass unmarked baby grave in a former septic tank — in a town whose name is derived from the Irish word meaning burial place.
It took four decades and a persistent local historian to unearth a more troubling truth that led this month to the start of an excavation that could exhume the remains of almost 800 infants and young children.
The Tuam grave has compelled a broader reckoning that extends to the highest levels of government in Dublin and the Vatican. Ireland and the Catholic Church, once central to its identity, are grappling with the legacy of ostracizing unmarried women who they believed committed a mortal sin and separating them from children left at the mercy of a cruel system.
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