Amateur historian "blew open locked doors" by exposing Irish babies' mass grave

Historian Catherine Corless poses for a photograph at her home, in Tuam, western Ireland March 7, 2017. REUTERS/Peter Nicholls

TUAM, Ireland (Reuters) - Catherine Corless has been haunted all her life by childhood memories of the skinny children from the local Catholic home for unmarried mothers and their babies in the small cathedral town of Tuam in the west of Ireland.

Known locally as the home babies, the children lived in secrecy behind the dark, high walls of the home run by nuns from the Bon Secours order. Some of them attended the same school as Corless, but they were kept apart from the other children.