Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines the role of death in the unraveling and refashioning of political and spiritual belief in contemporary Ireland. I explore continued public contestations over a mass grave, discovered in 2014, behind an institution that incarcerated unmarried mothers.

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines the role of death in the unraveling and refashioning of political and spiritual belief in contemporary Ireland. Ethnographers working in contexts of mass grave exhumations and missing dead have long argued that uncertainty about whether the disappeared are dead or alive, and the absence of human remains, complicates traditional death practices and mourning rituals. I extend that argument by considering how that ambiguity becomes the grounds for staking out new political claims.

In 2014 a mass grave was discovered in a disused sewage tank in Tuam, Ireland. The remains are believed to belong to some of the 796 infants and children who died at an institution that incarcerated unmarried mothers between the 1920s and 1960s, and to have been buried clandestinely by nuns working in the service of the State. The formal investigation that the discovery prompted is only the most recent in the Irish government’s response to a series of Church-State abuse scandals. The Commission’s report, which largely dismissed survivor testimonies, the religious orders’ refusal to make a financial contribution to redress, and the decade-long delay in exhumation of the mass grave has inflamed public distrust in the institutions that have long organized Irish society. Drawing upon my ethnographic fieldwork, I explore the way that survivors and relatives of those disappeared profess distrust in both the word of the Church and the word of the law, while appealing to notions of divine and democratic justice that transcend or bypass the authority of Church and State.