The Lost Children of Tuam review – deeply serious retelling of Ireland’s devastating tragedy

Monica Dolan is superb as the amateur historian who uncovered the horror of mass graves at a mother and baby home in this Liam Neeson produced drama

The children were never lost; if a baby goes missing, the police get called, social services become involved. The babies born at the mother and baby home run by nuns in the town of Tuam in County Galway were discarded: up to 796 tiny bodies thrown away, some in an old sewage tank. The amateur historian who uncovered the horror of the mass graves at the St Mary’s mother and baby home is Catherine Corless, superbly played here by Monica Dolan. Produced by Liam Neeson, and based on a 2017 New York Times article, The Lost Children of Tuam is a painful, devastating film. It feels scraped clean of anything unnecessary that might trivialise, fiction-ise or movie-ise what happened at St Mary’s, home to thousands of unmarried women and children between 1925 and 1961.

“It gets me out of the house,” Corless says when she starts a course in local history. She turns detective after becoming interested in the children from St Mary’s, and what she uncovers is that babies died at a rate of nearly one a fortnight at the home – from whooping cough, measles, malnutrition and other childhood illnesses. Eventually, she obtains nearly 800 death certificates, but cannot find burial records for the babies. There are no graves.