Bessborough's ‘sacred ground’ may be infant burial site

Children in Bessborough were forbidden from entering an area of “sacred ground”, an elderly survivor of the Cork mother and baby institution has claimed, and he now believes it was an unofficial burial ground.

Joe Quinn, a 90-year-old Cork resident who was born in Bessborough, said he can recall being taken for a walk when he was four years old and being told he could not go into one woodland area, which he now believes was used for burials.

[/url]That area is behind the hedge on the driveway into the grounds of the former institution, and is now the site of a disused playground, to which Mr Quinn brought The Echo.

“I was taken out for a walk in the fields there. Now I can’t tell you if it was a nun or someone working there, but they took me out for a walk. That was 1941, before I ever left there, and something caught my attention over on my left,” he said.

“When you’re a youngster, something always attracts you, so I broke away and was told ‘Oh no, no, you can’t go there, that’s sacred ground.”

He was fostered out, and at the age of 26 he moved to London, where he and his wife lived until her death.

They had five children, two of whom survived, and Mr Quinn is now a great-grandfather.

He moved back to Cork after his wife’s death, and he says the memory of being told to stay away from that patch of ground near his birthplace remained with him all of his life.

He became involved with the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home Support Group, regularly cleaning the area around the folly, to the east of the convent building, which was, according to one 1950s Ordnance Survey map, a children’s burial ground.

“If children were buried in different parts of the grounds, I wanted to let people know what I remembered from my time there,” Mr Quinn said.

“There was always something in my mind about that incident, and I didn’t want to take it with me to my grave.”

Mr Quinn’s claim follows accounts by two unrelated people who said they had decades ago witnessed burials on two different parts of the former institution’s grounds.

With the burial places of nearly 900 people associated with Bessborough unknown, campaigners say the building of apartments on the grounds — planning permission for which was recently upheld — must not go ahead.

In 2021, the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes found that with burial records missing for 859 Bessborough infants and 19 women missing, it was “highly likely” some burials occurred on the institution’s grounds.

Earlier this month, Terry Meyer, who was born in Bessborough in the 1950s, told this newspaper that when she was four years old, she had witnessed the burial of a child on ground to the east of the convent building.

Separately, Pat Mulcahy, a Blackrock native in his late 80s who played on the Bessborough estate as a child, claimed he had seen — in the mid-to-late 1940s — a disturbed grave containing “three or possibly more” partially covered small corpses. The area where Mr Mulcahy recalls seeing that grave was north-west of the institution’s hospital and chapel buildings — roughly the same area that Mr Quinn was told was “sacred ground”.