Apartment plan at Cork Bessborough site to be raised in the Dáil

The Dáil is to hear statements this afternoon on the former Bessborough mother and baby institution, following the decision by Cork City Council to grant planning permission for 140 apartments on the site.

In Februrary, Estuary View Enterprises 2020 received planning permission to demolish almost a dozen buildings at Bessborough to make way for the apartments.

Last week, a protest held outside Leinster House heard that the site is “not an empty field waiting to be filled”.

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

In Februrary, Estuary View Enterprises 2020 received planning permission to demolish almost a dozen buildings at Bessborough to make way for the apartments.

Objection

Labour Party city councillor Peter Horgan has lodged with An Coimisiún Pleanála an objection against the development, joining the 700-strong Bessborough Mother and Baby Home Support Group which has separately objected.

“I would encourage as many people as possible to lodge observations about the development to An Coimisiún Pleanála’s website,” Mr Horgan said.

“It’s vital that we get as many people’s views lodged with the commission, as quickly as possible.” 

Separately, a Cork TD has said research by The Echo which established that in 1947 the State abandoned a threatened investigation into nearly 700 deaths at Bessborough showed that complicity between Church and State “went right to the very top”.

The threat of investigation had come after so many children died there in a single 12-month period – 102 between 1943 and 1944 – that it negatively affected the national infant mortality rate.

Defended 

In 1945, the State chief medical advisor, Dr James Deeny, had sacked the Bessborough superioress, a decision privately defended by taoiseach Éamon de Valera after Church criticism.

Under the new Bessborough superioress, Mother Rosemonde, the infant death toll fell significantly and in an August 1947 letter to Mother Rosemonde, Deeny said the State would call off an investigation so long as the death rate there remained low.

Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire, Sinn Féin TD for Cork South Central, said the revelations were shocking.

“That the investigation was shelved demonstrates what we have long known, that, ultimately, this was part of an entire system that mother and baby homes, Magdalene laundries, county homes, industrial schools, they were all part of the same apparatus which the imprimatur and the complicity of the State up to the highest level,” he said.

“It’s a dark stain on our history here in Cork and across the country, but this is more proof of it, and that it went right the very top.”