For decades, Irelands mother and baby homes were shrouded in secrecy. Some say the veil still hasnt lifted pozzy

Like other women who gave birth at the Tuam mother and baby home in Ireland, the nuns didn't forbid O'Flaherty's mother from seeing her newborn son again, they just didn't tell her who her baby was, or that he was in the same building. The very same home where she was required to stay for 12 months after giving birth.

'My mother could have picked me up, but she couldn't have necessarily known,' O'Flaherty told CNN.

The boy would stay in the home for another five and a half years. He doesn't remember his time inside; his first memory of it was from the day that he left.



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Today, at 71, O'Flaherty retraces the steps he took that day with a group that's become like family.

They walk in front of an unassuming patch of grass, a square bit of land flanked by a children's playground on a housing estate. Behind them, a Virgin Mary statue hangs on the site's gray walls, a perimeter of aging stone punctuated by green vines that climb over the parapet. In the corner, a tiny pair of children's shoes are attached to the wall in memoriam.

Below their feet lie the bodies of hundreds of babies.

Any of the group walking there today could have been among them. But they were the fortunate ones.

They are the survivors.

Bound together by being born into one of Ireland's most notorious mother and baby homes -- church-run institutions where unmarried women were sent to deliver their children under a veil of secrecy, silence and shame for decades -- the Tuam Mother and Baby Home Alliance believe that their stories are at risk of being wiped from history.

In February, a commission set up to investigate what happened in those homes will release its final report. The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes and Certain Related Matters has heard testimony from survivors for more than four years. But activists say while it has operated under the pretext of transparency, it follows a pattern of the state muzzling the victims. And as the state edges closer to passing a bill that could prevent other survivors' testimony from being made public, those activists say the time for survivors' voices to be heard is paramount.

The commission would not answer any of CNN's questions but said that 'the Commission's final report is scheduled for completion in February 2020. Your questions will be answered in that report.'

'I felt like a slave'

Life for children like O'Flaherty, born at the Tuam home which operated from 1925 to 1961 and was run by the Sisters of Bon Secours, was plagued by malnutrition, neglect and trauma.

Mortality rates for children were far higher than national averages, with 802 child deaths recorded during the 36 years it was in operation.

The picture was similar in other homes around the country. In County Cork's Bessborough Mother and Baby Home, infant mortality rates peaked in 1944 at 82%, according to records from the Department of Local Government and Public Health which were unearthed by Irish journalist Conall Ó Fátharta -- who has extensively reported on the mother and baby homes.

Children who survived were either adopted, fostered, or sent to industrial schools -- workhouse-style, church-run institutions where abuse was rampant.

When O'Flaherty was 5, he was moved to a foster home where he lived for 10 years. There, he says he was subjected to daily abuse. 'I was like a whippet, skin and bone,' he remembers, saying that 'there wasn't a day that wouldn't go by that I wouldn't get a clip across the ear.'

While O'Flaherty knew that his foster family weren't his biological parents, he hadn't been given any further details as to who his mother or father were.

'I was treated low caste. You weren't in the same genes as they were,' he added.

When he turned 15, O'Flaherty was sent to another foster family, as his first foster father was no longer entitled to receive state payments for housing him.

The conditions at the next home, on a dairy farm, were even worse.

O'Flaherty slept in an 8-by-4-foot shed, away from the rest of the family. He never ate at the same table with them and toiled the land from dawn until dusk.

'I felt like a slave,' O'Flaherty said. 'You wouldn't do to an animal what was done to me.'

He believes his life took a positive turn when he joined the army at age 24, finally learning what it felt like to be in a family. But he still had no idea who his birth parents were. He came to learn that the army acquired that information when it ran checks on him before accepting him.

He is among many survivors of the mother and baby homes who have found themselves blocked when they try to find out information such as who their parents are, their medical records, and their experiences in the homes.

It took numerous freedom of information requests, a chance encounter with a priest who had connections to many families in the community, and the help of a social worker before O'Flaherty and his wife, Ann, were able find some of his records and to track down his mother, Patricia.

Patricia had been sent away from the parish a week after returning from Tuam just 12 months after she gave birth. The local priest there had told her family that she had brought shame on them and the community.

When they reunited in 1998, Patricia told O'Flaherty that there had never been a day that went by that she hadn't thought of him.

The mothers were required to sign a consent form after delivering, with many saying that they were coerced into giving up their children, only to later be denied information on them when they approached state bodies.

About nine months after mother and son reunited, Patricia succumbed to cancer.

O'Flaherty's experience has pushed him to call on the government to 'stop the secrecy.'

But he and his wife, Ann, say that those calls are falling on deaf ears.

Grim discoveries

The last mother and baby home shut its doors in 1998, but it wasn't until 2014 the secrets of Tuam started to be unearthed.

Galway historian Catherine Corless filed extensive freedom of information requests and found death records for 796 children -- many of them infants -- who had died at Tuam, but for whom there were no burial records.

Her work found that children had been buried in what is now thought to have been a series of chambers located inside a decommissioned sewage tank near the home. The revelation was the catalyst for the 2015 commission that was launched to 'provide a full account of what happened to women and children' across 14 mother and baby homes and four 'county homes' from 1922 to 1998.

Since then, the commission has released five interim reports, with grim details in each.

In March 2017, an interim report said that 'significant quantities of human remains,' had been found in Tuam.

The Archbishop of Tuam responded, saying he was 'horrified' by the discovery.

'I was greatly shocked, as we all were, to learn of the extent of the numbers of children buried in the graveyard at the mother and baby home in Tuam.'

The most recent report in April also found that the bodies of more than 950 children who died in some of Dublin's mother and baby homes between 1920 and 1977 were sent to university medical schools for 'anatomical studies.'

In the case of Cork's Bessborough home, the commission was only able to establish the burial place of 64 children out of more than 900 who died.

At the time, Ireland's Taoiseach or prime minister Leo Varadkar said: 'We inherit a deep shame for what was done back then, and we must now endeavor to learn, to atone and to put things right.'

When Ireland's Minister for Children Katherine Zappone sent a letter to Pope Francis last year asking if 'the church will accept its responsibilities and make reparation for its party in a very shameful chapter of Irish history,' he responded by saying that he wished to 'assure you of my prayerful solidarity and concern for this sad situation and I pray in particular that efforts made by the Government and by the local Churches and religious congregations will help face responsibly this tragic chapter in Ireland's history.'

Many hope the commission's final report, due in February, will bring that atonement.

But the way in which the commission has carried out its work has led survivors and human rights defenders to believe that the state is still doing its best to perpetuate secrecy around institutional abuse, as it has been accused of doing in other cases, like the Magdalene Laundries -- Ireland's mainly Catholic-run workhouses where generations of women were forced to work without pay from 1922 until 1996.

The government's 2013 McAleese report, which drew on testimony from survivors of the laundries, found that there was 'direct state involvement' in compulsory labor and servitude of the women, and said that 'for too long, they have been and have felt forgotten.'

The survivors were issued an apology by then-prime minister Enda Kenny, who said at the time: 'On behalf of the State, the government and our citizens deeply regret and apologise unreservedly to all those women for the hurt that was done to them, and for any stigma they suffered, as a result of the time they spent in a Magdalene Laundry.'

But key to the report's findings, was the omission of some survivors' testimony, which had detailed physical abuse and torture as a feature of the laundries, according to advocacy groups.

Today, the McAleese report's archives remain sealed off from the public. The government said last year that there were 'no plans' to reopen them.

Now, activists worry the Mother and Baby Homes Commission could follow a similar pattern.

The Commission has refused to give survivors a transcript of their own evidence and has also rejected survivor requests for their testimonies to be publicly available, referencing that the commission is operating under the terms of the Commissions of Investigation Act 2004.

That Act, states that in general, evidence is to be given in private, 'unless a witness requests that all or part of his or her evidence be heard in public and the commission grants the request.'

The commission has told at least one survivor that if they wish to see their testimony they can return to the commission where they can view it 'in the presence' of a staff member.

Survivors have also been denied access to any personal information that the commission might hold on them, which could aid them, as it did O'Flaherty, in discovering what happened in their past.

In one letter to a survivor who had asked for information, the commission responded that it was necessary and proportional to withhold her personal records in order 'to safeguard the effective operation of the Commission and the future cooperate of witnesses.'

'My body remembers'

Teresa O'Sullivan has suffered from ear problems she attributes to her time at Tuam. She says that at the least, survivors are due their medical records.

O'Sullivan was born at the home in 1957 to a 16-year-old mother who had become pregnant by a young man from England who was on holiday in Ireland.

Her mother traveled to England to continue the relationship, and took a job set up by an agency associated with the Catholic church. But by the time her pregnancy began to show, she says, it was reported to the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society of Ireland, who sent her back to Ireland -- and to Tuam.

Like O'Flaherty, O'Sullivan's mother was unable to spend any time with her as