A forensic team has started the process of excavating the site of a former “mother and baby home” in Tuam, Ireland, in a search for the remains of nearly 800 babies and children.

The ghastly operation will take place where the home – which closed over 60 years ago – once stood after it was revealed that as many as 798 children died there between 1925 and 1961.

As per The Guardian, Catherine Corless, a local historian in County Galway, Ireland, was the first to sound the alarm about the harrowing past of the institution. Corless’ research uncovered the names of 798 infants who are believed to have been buried at the home, some in a disused septic tank.

Excavation crews began sealing off the site yesterday (June 16), ahead of digging for the remains next month.

“There are so many babies, children just discarded here,” Corless told Agence France-Presse.

Corless alleges that many of the youngsters who died at the institution were discarded in a septic tank referred to as “the pit”. Just two of the suspected 798 children were officially buried in a nearby cemetery, with the rest presumably lying in a mass grave without a coffin or gravestone, and with no record of their burial.

Corless first published her findings in 2014, though research at the site of the former “mother and baby home” dates back to 1975, when two 12-year-old boys discovered the aforementioned septic tank, said to have been filled with human bones.

So-called “mother and baby homes” were facilities to which young women and girls pregnant out of wedlock were sent to give birth in, rather than in hospital or at home. They acted as orphanages and adoption agencies for most of the 1900s and were ran by religious orders.

Speaking to Sky News, Corless, whose tireless work led to an Irish commission of investigation into the homes, said: “I’m feeling very relieved.”

“It’s been a long, long journey. Not knowing what’s going to happen, if it’s just going to fall apart or if it’s really going to happen.”

Ireland reportedly had at least 10 such institutions, taking in around 35,000 single women across the decades. Heartbreakingly, moms were often separated from their children or their babies were forcibly put up for adoption.

A 2021 inquiry unearthed an “appalling level of infant mortality” in such homes across the country, with around 9,000 children dying across 18 institutions.

The Sisters of Bon Secours, a religious order of Catholic nuns who operated the Tuam home where excavations have now started, offered their “profound apologies”. Corless, though, still has trouble fathoming how such depravity could have taken place.

“The church preached to look after the vulnerable, the old and the orphaned, but they never included illegitimate children for some reason or another in their own psyche,” she said.

“I never, ever understand how they could do that to little babies, little toddlers. Beautiful little vulnerable children.”