Cillín exhibition: 'These fathers did this, they came at night and did this solitary act here'

An exhibition at West Cork Arts Centre focuses on some of the unconsecrated burial grounds where fathers would have interred the bodies of unbaptised babies

Left: A cillín at Uillinn Lacken, Co Mayo. Right: Tommy Weir, the artist behind the Cillín project. 

It might be hard to believe now but it wasn’t long ago that the concept of limbo was a tenet of Catholic teaching, with generations of Irish children educated that babies who died unbaptised still bore the stain of original sin, and were thus condemned to this netherworld between heaven and hell. 

These babies were buried in unconsecrated plots, often adjoining graveyards, but also in unmarked rough ground, known as a cillín, meaning ‘little church’ in Irish. More than 1500 of these have been catalogued across Ireland, but there are many others which are not registered.