My Name Is Bridget: The Untold Story of Bridget Dolan and the Tuam Mother and Baby Home

Journalist O’Reilly’s uneven first book recounts the heartbreaking treatment of unwed mothers and their babies in 20th-century Ireland and of the efforts to make this information public. In 2014, news broke of a mass grave of 796 young children in an unused septic tank in Tuam, County Galway. The remains were linked to St. Mary’s Mother and Baby Home, operated by Catholic nuns from 1925 to 1961. The Catholic Church, which ran most of the country’s medical institutions, including the baby homes, considered unwed mothers and their children sinful and unworthy of humane care; children at St. Mary’s often died from neglect. O’Reilly focuses on Bridget Dolan, who was 26 when she became pregnant in 1946 and was sent away by her doctor and priest to deliver and give up her infant, and other women like her, whose stories are included to show the scope of this scandal. The second half of the book loses energy as O’Reilly turns to Anna Corrigan, Bridget’s daughter from a later marriage, and her efforts to learn what happened to her mother and brothers while they were at Tuam (her mother never spoke of it to her; it’s unclear whether her brothers died or were illegally adopted, and whether, if dead, their bodies were among those in the septic tank). Narrating Corrigan’s investigation after recounting the investigation’s findings deflates the narrative tension, yet the story remains a sobering account of widespread malfeasance, abuse, and mistreatment. Illus. (Jan.)