Daughter's search uncovers family link to Bessborough's missing children

Mary Donovan had known she had a brother born in a Cork mother and baby institution, but it was six years after her mother’s death before she learned she had twin siblings among the missing children of Bessborough.

“Margaret Mary Donovan, née Finn, was my mother. Everyone said she was the most beautiful woman in Tralee,” says Mary Donovan, sitting in the kitchen of her cosy Co Tipperary home.

Beside her is a picture of her mother, their eyes the same vivid green.

“My mom was born on July 27, 1939, and at the age of 16, in July 1955, she was sent from her home in Tralee, and she was committed, through a court order, to be detained in a reformatory school in Limerick.

“She was ‘wayward’. Those were the grounds of why she was put away at the age of 16.”

That single day had a catastrophic impact upon Margaret Mary Finn’s life, and seven decades later its effects are still being felt.

“In April 1956 she was admitted into St Finan’s mental asylum in Killarney, because she was pulling her hair out.”

Margaret Mary later left St Finan’s, and, because she was under a court order, she was arrested and admitted to the Magdalene laundry in Limerick in October 1956.

“They noticed she was pregnant, and they brought her down to Bessborough in the late night of February 4, 1957. Davy was born at 4.10am, full term, eight and 10 ounces,” says Mary.

Margaret Mary refused to give up Davy for adoption, and her grandmother, Margaret, who had reared her, took Davy in too.

Mary has spent years trying to piece together the events of her mother’s life, a chronology of hard years that warped Mary’s life too.

After Davy was born, Margaret Mary was committed. 

In 1963 she left St Finan’s at the age of 20. She met Jimmy ‘Rattler’ Donovan, a skilled handballer, who had been put in the Pembroke Alms Industrial School in Tralee at the age of 12, after his mother died.

Jimmy and Margaret Mary married four weeks after they met.

Mary knew nothing about her brother Davy until she was 13 or 14.

“Caroline was born in ’64, Ann Marie was born in ’65. She died at nine weeks old, of anaemia. James was born in ’66, I was born in ’68, Michael was born in ’69, Martin was born in ’70. Those were the Donovan children.”

Theirs was a chaotic home environment, and the family suffered extreme poverty. Jimmy became possessive, and violent, and Margaret Mary left him multiple times.

In 1969, at the age of one, Mary was committed to the same industrial school her father had been sent to as a child.

“The older girls minded us, and they potty trained us, and when I was older, I had to mind babies at night and get up during the night and feed a baby,” she says.

She remembers scrubbing floors, “knee-deep in water”, polishing them, repetitively cleaning. She now suffers from severe rheumatoid arthritis.

“I was boarded out as a free nanny, housekeeper to the elite of the elite. I had to mind their children for nothing, and was put back into the institution afterward.

“I was subjected to sexual abuse and molestation for six years.”

Margaret Mary died in 2014, and it was only later that Mary gained access to her mother’s medical and psychiatric files through freedom of information requests.

“Mom’s records show she was in five psychiatric asylums, three Magdalene laundries, and Bessborough twice.

“We didn’t know mom was in a Magdalene laundry. That she had been in Bessborough a second time was a great shock to me.

“I was devastated. I only discovered that in late 2020.”

Twins born at Bessborough

Twins Vincent Joseph and Ann Veronica were born at Bessborough on Tuesday, March 24, 1959. Ann Veronica died the next day, and Vincent Joseph the day after.

The Sacred Heart sisters who ran Bessborough gave Margaret Mary a ‘house name’ during both of her incarcerations in the Cork institution.

“The first thing the nuns took was her name,” Mary says. “The first time, they told her she was Dorothea, the second time, Eva.

“She had the twins in March 1959, and from October 1959 up till March 22, 1963, she remained locked in St Finan’s for four years.

“She was in St Brendan’s in Grangegorman in 1959 as well. 

She was in St Stephen’s Hospital in Glanmire, in St Patrick’s psychiatric ward; she was in Our Lady’s on the Lee Rd in Cork, the Good Shepherd Magdalene laundry in Sunday’s Well, and she was in St Joseph’s in Limerick.

“I do really think the word ‘trafficked’ describes what they did to my mother: she was trafficked from one institution to another to another, back and forth.”

Margaret Mary’s records say she had 13 pregnancies and multiple miscarriages.

Mary has birth certificates for 10 children, the three babies Margaret Mary had in Bessborough, the six she had with Jimmy, and a 10th, Finbarr, who was born in 1972.

“I don’t know where Finbarr is. He was born in September ’72 while she was in a homeless hostel on the grounds of the Good Shepherd in Sunday’s Well. Her maiden name is on his birth cert, Margaret Finn.”

Mary believes her mother never recovered from being institutionalised.

“You might go in normal, but you’ll never come out right, and I don’t think she was ever right after that.”

Memory of 

She has a vivid childhood memory of being allowed, at the age of 12, to go and see her parents one Sunday.

“I went down home, and that’s the first time I ever experienced something was wrong. Mom was in the home on her own.

“The house was very bad. It was just sheer poverty. The doors, the windows were broken, my father was out in the pub. She was sitting in the house on her own, rocking back and forth, and she was foaming at the mouth.

“I’d say ‘what’s wrong, mom?’, and she’d say ‘they’re coming for me’. And I’d say ‘who’s coming for you?’, and she was able to tell me. She said ‘the guys in the white coats’.

“And sure enough, an ambulance pulls up outside the house with the four guys, and I’m standing there as an innocent 12-year-old, and they’re taking her.

“I said ‘where are you taking her?’, and they said ‘we’re taking her to the mental hospital’, and I said ‘what’s that?’, and he said ‘the place in Killarney’. And at that stage, I didn’t know Killarney from anything because I was institutionalised myself.”

She remembers being devastated, crying for her mother, and being told by one of the nuns: ‘She’s gone in there the last 12 years of your life.’

“When she would come to visit us, she’d be starving, the craythur. 

“They’d have on her record that she had no interest in us, and she wouldn’t put her arm around us. But the nuns used to be in the visiting room with us, so we couldn’t tell.

“When I was around 15, when there was a changeover to the new nun, she did come to the parlour door, and they left her in. Before I knew it, she was down in the sitting room. ‘Oh, there’s the babies.’ And she was going over, taking the babies and putting them on her lap.

“And the nun goes to me, ‘you know, you have to tell your mother Margaret Mary she can’t be coming down from the parlour’. I said, look, ‘it’s babies, she just loves babies’.”

Subjected to electroshock treatment (ECT)

Margaret Mary was subjected to electroshock treatment (ECT) and multiple rounds of insulin shock treatment, a dangerous procedure in which psychiatric patients were repeatedly injected with large doses of insulin, causing daily comas over weeks.

“A 16-year-old child, in her innocence, and the signatures on some of the consent forms in her files are not her signature.

“She was locked away for four years, and rapes happened in these asylums.

“I feel the psychiatric hospitals really need researching, I believe there’s many women suffering in silence, afraid.”

The damage has extended beyond Margaret Mary too. Apart from Finbarr, whose fate is unknown, all of Mary’s siblings are dead.

“My brother Martin, the youngest, suffered abuse in the industrial school and lived on the streets for 25 years. He did every county of Ireland, and he was found unresponsive on August 24, 2016, dead at 45.

“James had an awful life too, he died last year; 45 years of solvent abuse finally caught up with him at 58. Caroline died in 2022 at 58. Davy died at 58.

“It’s been horrific. I don’t know where I get my strength from. I think it’s from my mom.

“I know she’s watching over me. I know they’re all watching over me.”

Mary has had her troubles too, suffering a severe eating disorder and becoming anorexic.

“That’s where my mental health started to deteriorate, and more so when I had my son and my daughter.

“I just couldn’t believe how could a baby end up in an institution, and then I started to begin to understand how, because of what they did to my mother at 16. She was never right, she couldn’t be our mom, and I made that promise I would be the best mom to both of my kids.

“My marriage ended in 2000, and my father died in 2004. I saw him take his last breath. It was horrific.

“Mom went into long term care in 1995 in Kilarden House in Tralee after Finan’s closed. In March 2009 she had to go into a nursing home because she got diagnosed with dementia.”

Last winter, Mary was one of four survivors of industrial and reformatory schools who concluded a 51-day hunger strike outside Leinster House, having secured a government-backed package of apology and supports.

The twins, Ann Veronica and Vincent Joseph, are among 859 children whose burial records are missing from Bessborough.

In 2021, the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes reported 923 child deaths relating to Bessborough, with burial records existing for only 64. It said it was “highly likely some children were buried on the Bessborough estate”.

Planning decision 

Last month, An Coimisiún Pleanála cleared the way for the building of 106 apartments on the remaining 60 acres at Bessborough.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin subsequently intervened, calling on Cork City Council to engage with the landowners to “explore all options for the future of the site”.

Although Mr Martin did not say so, it is understood that the State would be willing to support the purchase of the Bessborough grounds, should negotiations prove successful.

Mr Martin said it would be his own preference that the grounds become a site of commemoration.

Like so many survivors and relatives, Mary Donovan says she has been traumatised by the planning decision, and she believes the State must purchase the land.

“Let it become a memorial garden. Put out 923 white little crosses, and for the 19 mothers who are missing also.

“I would love to have a place where I could sit down and talk to Vincent and Ann,” she says.

“They were real people. One lived a day, and the other lived two days, but they left a mark on the world.”