A personal note: My Grandfather told me about this same sort of things he discovered back in the 1920's! This isn't a rare thing!
In nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent, I covered stories of mass graves in far-flung locations in Eastern Europe and Russia. The thought of them has remained lodged in my memory.
But never did I expect to be covering a mass grave from modern times on my own doorstep; I thought Western and Northern Europe was immune from such horrors.
Yet that is exactly what I came across in January this year in the small Irish town of Tuam in County Galway, an ugly place with its rundown streets and council estates.
SQUALID: Children in the 'care' of the Sisters of Bon Secours in 1924
On a grey, rainy afternoon, I was taken to a patch of land in the centre of one such estate. Surrounded by houses built in the 1970s, on the edge of a scruffy playground, I found a plaster statue of the Madonna on a pile of stones, incongruously sheltered by an old enamel bathtub. Beneath it were the bodies of nearly 800 babies.
