While Veronica Buchannan from Donegal created the delicate “ With The Angels” – a large white dress made from 796 tiny angel cherubs mixed with lace. Each square represents each child who died in Tuam.

Greystones artist Barbara O’Meara curated the design of four large white baby blankets, with 800 squares, and they were pieced together by the Stitched With Love Community. Sure enough, one by one we found a mass of unsung talent who had created everything from installations, to poetry, paintings, graphics, ceramics, and paper art to honour the children who died. Shortly after speaking with Alison, we began to look for other artists who may have created art pieces with the same theme. Her full art show “ (A)Dressing Our Hidden Truths” is now displayed in Collins Barracks in Dublin. (A photo essay by Alison Lowry on this exhibition can be viewed here). Her work was astonishing, she had created babies’ dresses from crushed glass, in response to the mother and baby home scandals. In June 2018, Alison Lowry, a Glass Sculpturer from Saintfield in Northern Ireland, reacted to the story with an exhibition called “ Home Babies”. Horrified, distressed and in disbelief, people around the world reacted to the story in many ways, a sea of protests, marches and vigils got underway, while others turned to art. We never would have known about this story, only for the meticulous work of Historian Catherine Corless and Anna Corrigan, whose two brothers died in the Tuam home. However, they left 796 innocent children behind in a defunct sewage system, where they remain today. When the nuns moved out of Tuam, they went to great lengths and costs to exhume their dead colleagues and re-inter them in Knock. Their unmarried mothers were incarcerated in a religious run institution operated by the Bons Scours nuns, at the request of Galway County Council between 1925 to 1961. The headline “ 800 Babies in a Mass Grave” sent shockwaves around the world, when it was first revealed “illegitimate” children were buried in a septic tank in the west of Ireland. The Stay With Me group art show is an artists’ response to the story of the Tuam Babies, which was first exposed by Journalist Alison O’Reilly in the national media on 25th May 2014.

My Name Is Bridget by Alison O'Reilly