Commemoration for women and children of Bessborough

THE ninth annual Bessborough commemoration will take place tomorrow at the folly on the grounds of the former Cork mother and baby institution.

The annual event began in April 2014 as a vigil at the gates of Bessborough, and has grown over the years as the survivor community has become more active.

Between 1922 and 1998, the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary ran Bessborough as a mother and baby institution, and during that time 9,768 mothers and 8,938 babies were admitted.

According to the final report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, some 923 children died at Bessborough or after being transferred from there.

Burial records exist for only 64 of the children who died in the care of the Bessborough institution or after transfer from it, meaning that the records and remains of 859 children are missing.

Recent years have seen repeated calls from members of the Bessborough Support Group for a full investigation into deaths and burials associated with the former institution.

One of the organisers of tomorrow’s commemoration is Rochestown resident Carmel Cantwell.

In 1960, Ms Cantwell’s mother, Bridget, a pregnant 18-year-old from Co Tipperary living and working in London, was sent back to Ireland, to Bessborough, by a group called The Crusade of Rescue.

To preserve the illusion that Bridget was still in London, her letters home were posted from Bessborough to London, and from there back to her family in Tipperary, who remained unaware she was pregnant.

While Bridget was in labour, the nuns gave her an injection, and she later developed a large abscess where she had received the injection.

Bridget was not told what the injection was for, but she recalls hearing two nuns squabbling, with one accusing the other of not sterilising the needle.

Bridget’s baby William — the nuns insisted she call him the more Irish-sounding “Gerard”, but to Bridget he will always be William — was born healthy, but when he was three days old, he became suddenly poorly and was taken from his mother, who also became deathly ill.

For over a fortnight, Bridget begged the nuns to bring William to a doctor or to take him to hospital, and eventually they did, to St Finbarr’s Hospital, but it was too late.

William was six weeks old when he died. Still desperately ill, Bridget was told he had already been buried. His death certificate says he died of septicaemia.

Three decades later, on a visit home to her daughter Carmel, Bridggot up the courage to visit Bessborough and ask to see William’s grave.

She was brought to the nuns’ graveyard, and told her baby was buried in the empty quadrant by the Bessborough folly.

A further two decades later, in 2014, appalled and empowered by the Tuam Babies scandal, Bridget and her daughter Carmel placed a memorial on the spot she had been told was William’s burial place.

In 2019, the fifth interim report of the State commission on mother and baby homes was published, and it was scathing in its criticism of the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, describing the information the nuns had given the commission as “speculative, inaccurate, and misleading”.

The report also contained distressing details clearly identifying William and showing that he had, in fact, been buried, over half a century earlier, in a pauper’s grave in the overgrown Famine graveyard on Carr’s Hill.

When Bridget, who is 81 now, and not in the best of health, can get to Cork from her London home, she visits Carr’s Hill, searching the treacherous, broken ground in vain for any trace of the final burial place of her beautiful baby boy.

Tomorrow’s commemoration begins at 2pm by the folly in Bessborough and will feature a number of guest speakers, including Dr James Gallen, author of Transitional Justice and the Historical Abuses of Church and State.

Daniel Loftus will talk about his online work, Project Infant, and Laura Whelan will be displaying the dolls created by mothers and supporters of the Bábog Project.

Deirdre Wadding, a mother in Bessborough in the 1980s who featured in Deirdre Finnerty’s book Bessborough, will discuss her own experiences.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Cork adoption support group Know My Own, and broadcaster PJ Coogan, one of its founders, will be MC.