In 1975, two young boys in Toam, Ireland ages 10 and 12, were exploring the grounds of the

abandoned Toam mother and baby home next to a housing development.

They hopped over the wall and being curious kids. They did some poking around.

And underneath the large concrete slab,

they found something shocking.

Tiny human skulls.

A lot of little skulls, other bones, and the remnants

of what these children were wearing when they died.

They told their parents and their parents and other locals who would hear about it assumed it was a famine grave.

From when over a million Irish died between 1845 and 1852 and mass starvation

caused by the loss of years worth of potato harvest due to blight.

Or perhaps it was a grave for years worth of stillborn babies

from the former home for so-called fallen women.

They were wrong.

What it really was was physical evidence of one of the greatest and least talked about tragedies

in modern Irish history. The Tuam home was an Irish mother and baby

home, which might sound pleasant in name, but for thousands of mothers and babies, it was

anything but pleasant. It was a house of horrors and it was one of many. Ireland

had over a dozen of these homes and there were places for Irish communities to send

young single mothers to be hidden away in shame and to be punished for their sins of sex outside of marriage.

At these homes, women and girls were routinely physically and verbally abused by nuns

and forced to do a year's worth of hard labor or more to quote pay for their sins and

...