DUBLIN - Excavations begin on Monday of an unmarked mass burial site at a former mother and baby home in western Ireland, suspected of containing the remains of hundreds of infants and young children.
The planned two-year probe by Irish and foreign experts in Tuam comes more than a decade after an amateur historian first uncovered evidence of a mass grave there.
Subsequent 2016-2017 test excavations found significant quantities of baby remains in a subterranean disused septic tank at the location, which now sits within a housing complex.
Catholic nuns ran a so-called "mother and baby" institution there between 1925 and 1961, housing women who had become pregnant outside of marriage and been shunned by their families.
After giving birth, some children lived in the homes too but many more were given up for adoption under a system that often saw church and state work in tandem.
Oppressive and misogynistic, the institutions -- which operated nationwide, some not closing until as recently as 1998 -- represent a dark chapter in the history of once overwhelmingly Catholic and socially conservative Ireland.
A six-year enquiry sparked by the initial discoveries in Tuam found 56,000 unmarried women and 57,000 children passed through 18 such homes over a 76-year period.
It also concluded that 9,000 children had died in the various state- and Catholic Church-run homes nationwide.
Records unearthed show as many as 796 babies and young children died at the Tuam home over the decades that it operated.
Its grounds have been left largely untouched after the institution was knocked down in 1972 and housing was built there.
Ireland's Office of the Director of Authorised Intervention (ODAIT) will undertake the excavation, alongside experts from Colombia, Spain, Britain, Canada and the United States.
It will involve exhumation, analysis, identification if possible, and re-interment of the remains found, its director Daniel MacSweeney told a recent press conference in Tuam.