“To Question Ever Deeper Who We Were and Who We Are as a People and as a Nation”: A Discourse Analysis of Public Meaning-Making about the Tuam Babies in Letters to the Editors of The Irish Times

The Republic of Ireland had the highest rates of institutionalisation per capita outside of the Soviet Union in the twentieth century through institutional structures including Mother and Baby Homes, Magdalene laundries, and residential schools. A Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation report indicates that 57,000 babies were born in Mother and Baby Homes to 56,000 women between 1922 and 1998. Few publicly spoke about their experiences until recently. When a mass grave of babies born in the Tuam Mother and Baby Home was found in 2014, the topic of Mother and Baby Homes entered public discourse in a new way. This paper explores, through discourse analysis of letters sent to the Editors of The Irish Times, how public meaning-making in the wake of Tuam opened up, as Irish citizens engaged in a sensemaking process in the public sphere of this contested past. The analysis highlights that letter writers struggled with complex emotions raised by the finding of the Tuam mass grave and furthermore, the writers argued that Tuam has implications for the collective narrative of who we are-and were-as an Irish people and as a nation. The analysis captures the efforts of letter writers to negotiate a workable contemporary collective narrative that struggles to acknowledge the horror of the past while living in the Ireland of the present.