Gareth O'Callaghan: Tell us what's going on at Bessborough — we have a right to know

Irish Examiner

31-05-2025

'It is important to say you were in this world, you mattered, you were something, you were a human being.'
These are the words of historian Catherine Corless, the tireless investigator who uncovered the shocking truth involving the deaths of 796 babies and children at the Bons Secour Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co Galway, since it opened 100 years ago. On average, a child died every two weeks between 1925 and 1961 — when the home closed.
Death certificates were identified for each child, but there were no burial records. In 2017, investigators found 'significant quantities of human remains' in underground chambers near the home, confirming the bodies were those of premature babies and children up to the age of three who had been disposed of in a disused septic tank.
Historian Catherine Corless at the Tuam Mother and Babies site.
Five years ago, taoiseach Micheál Martin called Catherine Corless a 'tireless crusader of dignity and truth'.
The Office of the Director of Authorised Intervention, Tuam announced recently that a full exhumation will commence at the end of June, followed by a dignified burial of the bodies that have laid in the sewage facility for over half a century.
In November 1922, Bessborough Mother and Baby Home opened its doors in the better-off sleepy suburb of Blackrock in Cork. Just like Tuam, Bessborough became an omen in holy Catholic Ireland of what unmarried women who became pregnant could expect.
According to Derek Scally, in his book The Best Catholics in the World, 'the Catholic state encouraged their own families and wider society to view them as dirt: a homogenous group of dregs, easy women and prostitutes'. They were guilty of 'crimes' against the moral institution of Catholic conformity.
In most cases, these terrified women had nowhere to go. They were thrown out and exiled by their parents, escorted to a mother and baby home often by a nurse and the local gardaí. If they took the boat to England, they risked being tracked down by a group of fanatics called 'The Crusade of Rescue' and hauled back to Ireland, into the clutches of the nuns. An unmarried pregnancy was a life of hell.
To this day, there remains an eerie sense of perdition around Bessborough, even though it's been 26 years since the last woman and child were discharged from the home. I first strolled around its grounds between covid lockdowns, and returned many times since then; not out of morbid curiosity, but more to do with my own research over the years.
It didn't take long to find what I was looking for, namely a small patch of grassy land close to what's called the castle folly, where it's believed some of the infants born here are buried. It had been demolished in 2019 on the orders of the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, but was in the process of being rebuilt on the orders of Cork City Council.
Was it a coincidence that they had ordered its destruction only weeks before the fifth interim report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation revealed how out of the 923 babies who died at Bessborough, or in Cork hospitals where they were transferred to during its history, only 64 burial records exist?
I was back in Bessborough recently. Areas of interest that were once easy to access are now fenced off.
I may have been trespassing, but surely such a misdemeanour pales compared to the probability that what I was standing on was a mass grave of human remains that cruelly continues to be ignored by the State
I take a stroll beyond the nuns' graveyard to a patch of land that an old map I'm holding calls 'Children's Burial Ground'. I stand still and take in the bumpy uneven ground beneath my feet, feeling that sense of skewered energy again. There's something here, I can't help telling myself. All the while, I feel I'm being watched; but there's no human life to be seen, just the sound of South Ring Road traffic in the distance.
According to the report, 'The Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary told the commission that they did not know where the children who died in Bessborough are buried.' However, the commission describes information provided by the nuns in an affidavit as 'speculative, inaccurate and misleading'. In January 2021, at a time when it was feared that planning permission would be granted for construction on the site of where many of these babies are believed to be buried, taoiseach Micheál Martin stated that 'there needs to be first of all an examination, and the proper robust identification of the burial sites of all children.'
So what happened? If the Commission of Investigation could confirm the number of children who died in Bessborough, then it also knew their names, ages and causes of death.
If that's the case, then the government also knows their names. So what else do they know that we're not being told?
Just like Tuam, there are people around Cork who wish this scandal would just go away — the same people who would prefer to see apartments built on hallowed ground. Catherine Corless was told on more than one occasion to drop her research; and as for the bodies of the infants, to 'just leave them there'. Am I right to suspect that individuals connected in some way over the years to Bessborough are being shielded? Is the State obliging them by postponing indefinitely a full land investigation?
Identifying baby burial sites should be a priority, the taoiseach said four years ago. So why hasn't he made it his priority? The minister for justice could order the land to be excavated immediately, so why doesn't he? Tell us what's going on. We have a right to know. Bessborough was a profitable business. The Order wasn't short of money. Locals were paid handsomely to help with its upkeep, to provide for its residents' day-to-day needs, most likely even to bury its dead.
Huge sums of money changed hands in exchange for the babies who were in big demand by couples who wanted to adopt. An experimental 4-in-1 vaccine drug was even tested on 25 babies in the home in 1961, paid for by the Wellcome Foundation pharmaceutical company, without parental consent being sought.
US therapist Elvin Semrad describes the greatest source of human suffering as 'the lies we tell ourselves'. It's easy to blame the nuns, but culpability stretches far and wide. Ireland's mother and baby homes were a reflection of a nation's twisted conscience, of how a State viewed its women and children. Turning a blind eye came quite naturally. If exhumation finally returns the lost dignity to Bessborough's missing babies, then we have no choice but to acknowledge our shameful heritage, just as much as Tuam must.
It's easy to say it's all in the past, instead of accepting that the past belongs to each of us, all of it. Bessborough is all our faults. We permitted the atrocities because we had notions about ourselves.
We were a pitch above 'fallen women', pure and perfect in the moral stakes — our self-concept based on hypocrisy. And what about the fathers? If the babies' names are published, then the fathers who are also to blame become accountable. Is that another reason for years of heel-dragging? There are almost 900 babies missing in Cork, but how many people are interested in finding them?
Make no mistake — many individuals profited in their own significant way from the Bessborough scandal over the years. Their families know who they are. In the words of Bob Dylan: 'All the money you made will never buy back your soul.'