A voice from the Tuam Home Part 3

FOR the past two weeks, The Tuam Herald has published a series of articles based on the memoirs of Julia Devaney (1916-1985), who spent almost 40 years in the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, first as a child resident and later as an employee.
These articles have covered topics including Julia’s own life story in the home and her subsequent marriage; the mothers who had their children in the home and cared for them until they had to leave when their child was a year old; the children, and how they were looked after in the Home; fostering of the children out to local families, and adoption by USA-based couples; the harsh discipline in the Home; and the religious sisters who ran it.
In this final instalment, we give Julia’s perception of how the residents of the Home were seen in the town of Tuam, and her description of the physical reality of the Home and the lives of the children there.
We stress that these articles are a distillation of over 40,000 words recorded on tape by Julia. All words within quotation marks are Julia’s own.
* Some names have been changed to protect identities.

Dealing with the town
“THE nuns would tell us not to be talking to local people in case they would be asking questions about the Home. We were totally cut off from the outside world. I always felt that the outside world had an edge on us, that they looked down on us.
“You’d feel you couldn’t cope with the outside world. One time a Home girl saw a sign in McTigue’s [drapers] window that said 'Gifts for the Home’ and she was all excited, thinking that McTigues had gifts for us.
“Families outside used the home as a threat on their children, that if they didn’t behave, they would be sent there. Mrs T said that she used to say it to *Tommie. One time he was up at the stables with a stallion, and she got an awful fright and she came up to the stables to him and said 'Put on your coat and cap right now, I am bringing you straight to the Home’ and [her daughter] went down on her knees and said 'Oh Mammy, please give him one more chance!’
“The people who called with deliveries were all nice. The bread van would often give the girls a cake for themselves. People didn’t know what to make of the Home, you’d see them running past the Home in the evenings, they thought the place was haunted.
“Mrs Joyce down town was very nice, but the crowd that would gather at McCormack’s corner would jeer at us, they’d nudge each other saying that we were 'one of the Home ones’.