Tuam Babies and Kerry Babies: Clandestine Pregnancies and Child Burial Sites in Tom Murphy's Drama and Mary Leland's The Killeen

Abstract

This article focuses on strictures pertaining to reproduction and childbirth in Tom Murphy's On the Outside (1959), On the Inside (1974), and Bailegangaire (1985), and Mary Leland's The Killeen (1985), and the relevance of such to clandestine child burials. Murphy was born in Tuam in 1935 in the vicinity of St. Mary's religious-run institution for unmarried mothers (1925–61) – on the site of which the unregistered remains of numerous infants were recently uncovered – and emigrated in 1962, a near overlap with St. Mary's years of operation. The research that uncovered its mass grave was spurred by an inaccurate local memory of the site as a ‘lisheen’/‘killeen’, or unconsecrated burial site for stillborns. This folk response to Catholic doctrine, that the unbaptized could not be buried in consecrated ground, was practiced into the 1950s in alternative ‘sacred’ sites. The lisheen circumvented the doctrinal rigidities that produced Tuam's carceral infrastructure and its mass grave, but metropolitan unfamiliarity with this poorly-documented custom may have factored in the false accusation that led to 1984's ‘Kerry Babies’ trial. Alertness to such contexts make audible previously muted references within Murphy's oeuvre to the hidden histories of vulnerable women's bodies and those of their secretly birthed, concealed, miscarried, or stillborn babies.