Giving new voice to silenced children of Tuam
Lifestyle - Testimonies from the survivors of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home form the basis of a new production from drama students at NUIG that mixes drama, music, poetry and memory as it explores a dark period in Irish history. These stories were gathered as part of the Tuam Oral History project, an ongoing initiative to ensure that what happened to the babies of Tuam, and to their mothers, is never forgotten or repeated. Those involved, including survivor, Christine Carroll tell JUDY MURPhY about the project.
Watching Nochtaithe, a new performance piece based on the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, which was created and performed by drama students at NUIG, was a deeply emotional experience for Christine Carroll from Headford.
This powerful piece – a response to the testimony of people who lived in the now infamous Mother and Baby Home – brought back memories for Christine, one of the children raised in this institution.
“When I saw it first, I didn’t know how I felt,” she says honestly. Nochtaithe premiered online on Saturday as part of this year’s Bealtaine Festival, celebrating creativity and age, but Christine and other survivors of the Tuam institution had seen it in advance to ensure they were happy with the finished work, which has been months in the making.
“It brought up a lot of issues,” says Christine, who is grateful to the students and to Dr Miriam Houghton of NUIG’s Drama and Theatre Studies Department, who led the project, for staging this work.
“I’m glad they’re telling the story, so this doesn’t happen to anyone anymore,” she adds. Christine is referring to the abuse that she and so many others suffered at the hands of the Bon Secours nuns who ran the Tuam Mother and Baby Home from 1925 until it closed in 1961.
It “was never a home” to Christine and the other vulnerable children who lived and – in many cases – died there.
“What the students are doing shows my daughter and granddaughter what we went through,” says this smart, humorous woman who still bears the scars of what was done to her.
One especially poignant scene of Nochtaithe was filmed in the Quad at NUIG and featured the female performers amid a series of wooden cots, evoking the institution’s single mothers and their pain at being separated from their infants. The pristine cots caught Christine’s eye.
“Ours weren’t spotless like that,” she says of the cots in the institution. “And if someone got measles, we’d all be put in together,” she adds, referring to a practice which maximised the chance of children getting infected to develop ‘herd immunity’.
Nearly 800 children, mostly babies, died in Tuam during its 36 years in existence and measles was listed as a major cause of death.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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