Belonging: One Woman’s Search for Truth and Justice for the Tuam

When Catherine Corless began researching the Tuam Mother and Baby Home in Galway in 2010, she could not have known where her interest in local history would lead her. Uncovering no less than 796 missing burial records of children born there, the stark truth of their place of rest became clear: a disused sewage tank on the old home site, where two boys had once stumbled upon bones.

Determined to know more, Catherine’s painstaking research led to an ongoing quest for justice as, often against fierce resistance, she brought to light a terrible truth that shocked the world, impacted the Vatican, and led to a Commission of Investigation in Ireland.

Part memoir – of identity, childhood and Catherine’s search for her own mother’s lost story – and part detective story, Belonging is an unforgettable and deeply moving account of one woman’s forensic crusade on behalf of the lost babies of Tuam.

Catherine Corless is married to Aidan, and they have four children, Adrienne, Alan, Alicia and Aaron, and nine grandchildren.

Her quiet, secluded life – rearing a family, farming, gardening, and enjoying her pastimes of art, crafts and family history research – changed drastically in 2014, after some research she had done into the Bons Secours Mother and Baby Home at Tuam was picked up by media and exposed worldwide.

Her research revealed the harshness, cruelty and discrimination of the mothers who gave birth there, and their offspring. It also revealed the terrible secret of 800 babies who had died at the Home from 1925-1961, whose remains had been laid in a defunct sewage tank. Resulting from this revelation, the Irish government was pressurised into setting up a Commission of Investigation into all Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland, whose final report was issued in January 2021.