Tuam's nuns have been unfairly demonised

In 2014, when news broke that 796 children had died in the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam and there were no burial records even though death certificates existed, it opened up an ongoing process that produced a government Commission of Investigation, a sustained and sometimes savage attack on the Bon Secour Sisters who had responsibility for the home and at present an ongoing excavation at the site to establish the facts.

The Commission Report spread responsibility for the limitations of the Mother and Baby Home between the Bon Secour Sisters, the Irish State, Galway County Council and the families of the mothers and babies, including the fathers of these children. The report was subjected to severe criticism with much of the criticism being directed by the public and the media at the Bon Secour Sisters and by association the Catholic Church.

It led to what Michael Duggan writing in The Tablet (February 6, 2026) described as ‘an avalanche of stories of children being starved to death and of dead babies being dumped in their hundreds into septic tanks’. It was, he said, ‘perhaps the single most notorious example of the institutionalised cruelties and depravities of Catholic Ireland’ with the Bon Secour Sisters being subjected to sustained and sometimes savage attack. Michael Duggan, in that same article, has introduced a new voice that suggests the Tuam story so far might need amending.

Alice Litster (sometimes spelled ‘Lister’) was a Protestant whose journey in life took her by way of a Catholic education into active involvement in political and social affairs to a scholarship in University College Dublin. During the War of Independence, she joined the civil service of the first Dáil and became an inspector for the new Department of Local Government.

By 1932, in the words of Michael Duggan, Litster’s responsibilities as an inspector had expanded to include Mother and Baby Homes and, as perhaps the first critic of the system to emerge from the ranks of the civil service. She was, in Duggan’s words, ’a particularly notable critic of some Mother and Baby Homes and sometimes advocated temporary closure'. However, Litster’s focus was not on individual institutions but on issues in Irish society – like the negative attitude to unmarried mothers and their children – that led to societal difficulty and division. Litster denounced a system that marginalised Irish women and turned their offspring, in her words ‘into infant martyrs of convenience, respectability and fear’. In short, Alice Litster was on the right side of history.

Why then, Duggan asks, has there being such reluctance - ‘evasiveness’ is the term Duggan uses - about reporting on what Litster said and did about the Tuam Mother and Baby Home. As an instance of this peculiar reluctance, Duggan is critical of the UCD historian, Diarmaid Ferriter in his book, The Revelation of Ireland (1995-2020) which contains, in a segment on the breaking of the Tuam story in 2014, a paragraph specifically about Litster’s work. Why, Duggan asks, did Ferriter not report ‘what Alice Litster said she found behind the high, grey, workhouse walls of the Tuam (Mother and Baby Home)’, even though her 1947 Report on the home was the most comprehensive inspection of the institution seen by the Commission of Investigation, which devoted about four pages to it in their own final report?

Remarkably, Litster’s Report provides a rough survey of the condition of the 271 children in the home, with just under 90 per cent ‘healthy’. She also commented positively on the care provided by the Bon Secour Sisters: ‘The infants (she said) received ‘great care’ and the sisters were ‘careful and attentive’.

Ferriter accepts Litster’s importance as an authoritative and credible witness – ‘authoritative’ because of her position and experience and ‘credible’, due to her independent-mindedness and her Protestant background – but strangely Ferriter doesn’t extend his commentary to relaying the detail of Litster’s praise of the Bon Secour Sisters and the high standard that Litster reports was evident in their care. In the circumstances, as one of the foremost historians in Ireland, the absence in Ferriter’s account of this necessary context and balance is strange in the light of the overwhelmingly negative media assault the Bon Secour Sisters were enduring at the time.

What Ferriter himself called ‘the urgent uncovering of the truth’ about the Tuam babies was badly served by his inexplicable omission of the detail of Litster’s testimony in favour of the Sisters. Indeed it is both insufficient and impermissible to simply refer in passing to credible contemporary accounts by credible witnesses that run counter to the accepted wisdom of the day as if they were little more than mere footnotes on the sidelines of history.

The imperative of context and balance in researching and analysing all the available data – especially in the context of a tsunami of emotional engagement that is clearly and overwhelmingly one-sided and demonstrably unfair to the legacy of the Bon Secour Sisters – is a necessary requirement for legitimate historiography. And Duggan lists others who are equally guilty of the same evasiveness – including an Irish Times piece commending Litster’s ‘fearless and fastidious reports’ and the praise the then Minister for Children, Roderic O’Gorman heaped on Litster.

Litster had reported for four years on the high mortality rate in Tuam during the worst (death) years (1942-47) and she had argued for an inquiry into possible causes of the death rate. She did not believe that the children were ‘poorly fed’ or under-nourished as ‘excellent diets were available’ to the children.

Duggan concludes: ‘Litster wanted an enquiry into the possible causes of the death rate. However, she did not believe that the children were poorly fed or under-nourished. It is not here that we must look for the cause of the death rate.' 

Her colleague, Dr Florence Dillon, shared Litster’s assessment: ‘The children are well cared (sic), weekly charts being kept in case of non-thriving infants [and] also case histories.'

Dillon and Litster agreed that the cause of infection that led to the deaths was due to haphazard admissions of entire families. Permission was sought by the Sister in charge to build an isolation unit in order to stem the infection and the death rate but it was not granted by Galway County Council.

It is ironic to say the least that, in Duggan’s words, ‘the nuns of Tuam have become a by-word in Ireland for the infliction of horror-film levels of cruelty and neglect. Yet here is Litster (who bears all the hallmarks of a credible witness) calling the Bon Secour Sisters careful and attentive, showing them pressing for improvements, and praising how they fed and looked after the children. The evidence about the Tuam nuns from official inspection (and other sources too), all of it in the public domain, is sometimes more conflicting than it seems the public is encouraged to know.’ 

Alice Litster must be turning in her grave.

And what of the elderly Bon Secour Sisters who watch in silence as their lives and their reputations are so unfairly rubbished? The evidence to date from the official body now carrying out a full excavation of the Tuam site is that it will depict a fuller and clearer and truer picture than media, politicians and even historians have so far managed to achieve.