Bessborough campaigners shocked at decision to allow apartments to be built
Michael Bolton
A woman whose brother died six weeks after he was born at the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork has said that she is shocked at a decision to allow apartments to be built at a place where her mother “”last cradled her baby.”
William Walsh was just six weeks old when he died of renal abscess septicaemia in 1960.
His sister Carmel Cantwell, who is the spokesperson for the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home Support Group, says that the nuns at the home failed to get him appropriate medical help
“He was born a healthy baby. He needn’t have died. My Mum knows he was neglected. It took them nearly three weeks to send him to hospital. He became sick on his third day of life.
He was a little fighter. If he had been given an antibiotic when he was three or four days old he probably would have survived. It was pure neglect.”
Madeleine Bridget Marvier was 17 when she was admitted to Bessborough. She gave birth to William two months later.
Cantwell says that she and her 83-year-old mother regularly walk around the grounds of Bessborough.
“I know some horrific things happened there, and it was the most horrendous part of my mother’s life. But she feels at peace there because it is the last place she held her baby.
The one fact that she holds on to is the fact that that is the last place she saw him and the last place she cradled him.
Bessborough has come to mean so much to our family. I have met so many people who feel the same. I think if you start building there it wont’t end with these apartments.
In future, what happened at Bessborough will be forgotten about.”
Cantwell is calling on the Government to issue a Compulsory Purchase Order to protect the site.
Taoiseach Michael Martin attended the annual Bessborough vigil last year and is on the record as saying that Cork City Council should have purchased the land for a memorial site.
Cantwell believes that there can be a collective failure to understand “the trauma involved in this place and what it means and why it must be remembered.”
“This should be a memorial park. A site of conscience..
Nearly 10,000 people have signed a petition asking that the site (be subject) to a CPO. We are going to get that printed off and will present it in person to the Dail.
“Michael Martin has (previously) said that he couldn’t intervene at Bessborough while there was active planning.
He needs to make up his mind. You are either with us or you are not. So many people are in support of us. I don’t know how the support can be ignored.”
Meanwhile, Dublin Social Democrats councillor Noelle Browne, who was born in Bessborough, told 96FM that she was heartbroken at the decision by An Coimisúin Pleanála to allow apartments to be built at the site.
In an interview with the Opinion Line, Ms Browne said that the reality is that children were buried in Bessborough.
“Do we just build on graveyards now? Is that what we do to solve the housing crisis? There are plenty of other places to build.
We will keep fighting. This is not over. This decision today is absolutely horrendous. It is so against who we are as a nation. We understand the rituals around death and burial in this country."
Browne said that in addition to disease, many babies were “left to die” of hunger in Bessborough.
She added that these deaths should be acknowledged.
“Those children do matter. It is our duty to speak their names and never let them be forgotten. This is not right and is against all of who we are.
Bessborough operated as a mother and baby home from the time of its purchase by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary in 1922 until the late 1990s.
In 2021, the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes said that it had been able to establish that 923 babies and infants died in Bessborough between 1922 and 1998.
Despite “very extensive enquiries and searches", the Commission said it had been able to establish the burial place of only 64 children in various city cemeteries.
