The Lost Children of Tuam: How one woman's fight for justice led to a national reckoning for Ireland

In the glass-half-empty world of 2026 it can often feel as if things are getting worse and there is not much we can do about it. Actual accountability is frustratingly rare. The people and institutions that have been inflicting harm for years seem able to avoid the most basic reproach or censure, inoculated from scandal by a noxious cloud of power, privilege, influence and affluence. It is – not to put too fine a point on it – a huge bummer. 

Which is why there is something life-affirming about a film like The Lost Children of Tuam, which takes a horrifying subject and shines a determined, unwavering light on it. The hero of the story – although it’s clear she would never describe herself as such – is self-taught Irish historian Catherine Corless (played by Monica Dolan), who grew up in rural Galway near the town of Tuam.

We first meet her as a 50-something in 2010; she has signed up for evening classes and is embarking on a local history project.

One potential topic dates from the 1970s, when two young boys discovered a cache of human bones in the grounds of the defunct St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home, a shelter for unwed mothers run by Catholic nuns. The local council claimed the unmarked remains must date back to the Irish famine of the 1840s.

But as Corless digs deeper into the official records, she discovers compelling evidence that the bones were discarded after the construction of St Mary’s in 1925. 

So begins a laborious process of checking if each death certificate from the home can be paired with a confirmed grave. Some officials are happy to help. Other institutions, notably the Bon Secours order that oversaw St Mary’s, stonewall her requests. Talking to locals about what they might remember from the era is also inconclusive (as one pensioner ominously remarks, those were “very different times”).

But Corless, whose mother was labelled illegitimate and raised by foster parents, is determined to bring the truth to the surface, even though her supportive husband Aidan (Andrew Bennett) is concerned about her being immersed in so much trauma.

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The results, painstakingly pieced together on the family’s kitchen table, reveal both an alarmingly high mortality rate at St Mary’s and a damning absence of any burial records. At first, it seems unthinkable that 200 babies could die in care and simply be discarded. Ultimately, the death toll over the course of the home’s 36-year history is revealed to be four times the original estimate.

By this time Corless is a campaigner for justice as much as a historian, and we share her frustration as she waits for someone with authority to acknowledge and act on her research. But when a newspaper splashes with her findings, it triggers a chain of events that eventually leads to a national reckoning with how Ireland’s unmarried mothers were marginalised and shockingly mistreated in the not-so-distant past.

Director Frank Berry’s unobtrusive staging, paired with the film’s time-skipping structure, underlines the sense that these things don’t happen overnight and life goes on in the meantime. While her desire for justice could seem compulsive, Corless fits in her research work around her day-to-day life.

We have become so used to obsessional heroes on screen who are willing to sacrifice everything to achieve their goal that seeing someone methodically work towards something monumental while still keeping up with chores on the family farm is inspiring. Surely we could all do more to steer the world towards righteousness.

The emotive subject of Ireland’s historical attitude to ‘fallen’ women has previously been explored in fictionalised dramas such as Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002) and Netflix’s Small Things Like These (2024). With its methodical pacing and focus on procedural detail, The Lost Children of Tuam – produced by Liam Neeson,
and undoubtedly a better use of his star power than another creaky action movie – feels like a quieter but no less essential companion piece. It is summed up by Dolan’s understated but very moving lead performance as a woman who refused to look away after stumbling on a horrifying truth.

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