Official finding Christian institutions & contexts Catholic Tuam, County Galway, Ireland · 2021

Ireland: the Mother and Baby Homes Commission identifies 978 child deaths connected to the Tuam home, where a state inspector recorded infant mortality of up to 34%

Record class

Institutional event

Evidence status

Official finding

Authority role

the Sisters of Bon Secours, the religious congregation that ran the Tuam Children's Home, the local authorities that paid the congregation a capitation rate for each mother and child

Organization

Tuam Children's Home (St Mary's), Tuam, County Galway, Sisters of Bon Secours, Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes (Ireland)

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

Unmarried mothers were placed with a religious congregation because they had given birth outside marriage, and it was that congregation which held custody of them and of the 978 children the Commission identified as having died in or in connection with the home it ran.

Institutional obedience or isolation
Religious marriage or family control
Sacred sex, purity, or sexual-energy claim

Scope decision

A statutory commission's finding, not a criminal proceeding: no individual was prosecuted in relation to Tuam and none is named here. The mortality percentages are those a Department inspector recorded at the time, as reproduced by the Commission, and are rates of death among births and admissions rather than a finding that any particular death was unlawful. The Commission's national finding for all eighteen institutions it examined — roughly 9,000 child deaths — is held separately in this archive, as is the Bessborough institutional finding; this record covers the Tuam home specifically. The burial of children from this home is dealt with in the Commission's separate burials report and its Fifth Interim Report rather than in the chapter relied on here, and no claim about burial locations is made in this record. The Commission separately records, in its addendum to the burials report, that it did NOT find that infant remains sold to Galway Medical School were those of children from the Tuam home, and considered it highly unlikely on the dates that any were former residents; that non-finding is noted here so the record is not read as asserting it.

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2021-01-12 · final report published

Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, Ireland (statutory commission established under the Commissions of Investigation Act 2004). The Commission identified 978 deaths of children who were in the Tuam Children's Home, run by the Sisters of Bon Secours: 802 children died in the Tuam home itself, 80 at the predecessor institution at Glenamaddy, 80 in the Central Hospital in Galway and 8 elsewhere. It saw General Register Office records for 972 of them. The children who died included 108 recorded as 'legitimate', deaths among whom peaked in 1936; deaths of children born to unmarried mothers peaked in the 1940s. On conditions, the Commission set out the figures given by the Department's inspector Miss Litster for successive years ending 31 March: 54 deaths against 159 births and admissions in 1943 (34%), 42 of 169 in 1944 (25%), 36 of 153 in 1945 (23%) and 39 of 143 in 1946 (27%). The rate had appeared to be falling but rose again: in the half-year to 30 September 1946 there were 21 deaths against 66 births and admissions, an infant mortality rate of about 32%. The Commission recorded that a list of the causes of death for the year ending 31 March 1946 was said to have been appended to the inspector's report but was not in the file provided to it.

Documented coercion mechanisms

an institution to which unmarried mothers and their children were consigned because of the religious and social opprobrium attached to birth outside marriage
custody of mothers and infants held by a religious congregation under a capitation arrangement with the state
conditions in which a state inspector recorded infant death rates between 23 and 34 per cent

Cited record

Sources

statutory commission of investigation commission final report Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, Final Report, Chapter 15: The Tuam Children's Home (Ireland, 12 January 2021).: The Commission's institutional chapter on Tuam, read directly from the Irish government's published PDF. Paragraph text establishes that the Commission identified 978 deaths of children who were in the Tuam home, comprising 802 deaths in the home itself, 80 at Glenamaddy, 80 in the Central Hospital Galway and 8 elsewhere, with GRO records seen for 972; and that 108 of the children who died were recorded as 'legitimate'. Paragraphs 15.96 to 15.97 reproduce the Department inspector's year-by-year figures — 34%, 25%, 23% and 27% for the years ending 31 March 1943 to 1946, and about 32% for the half-year to 30 September 1946 — and record that the appended list of causes of death was not in the file provided to the Commission.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis: https://assets.gov.ie/static/documents/chapter-15-the-tuam-childrens-home.pdf Corpus classification: statutory-commission-of-investigation; evidentiary role: commission-final-report.
Retrieval: 2026-07-28 · Preserved; Bound by Fear research cycle 2026-07-28 (Commission chapter retrieved from assets.gov.ie and read via pdftotext; every figure checked verbatim before drafting)

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