The Mother and Baby Homes Commission and the Department of Children and Youth Affairs (DCYA) have refused to say whether all the infant burials discovered in unmarked graves in a Cork city cemetery will be investigated.

The Adoption Authority of Ireland (AAI) has said it was “not aware” that a formerly accredited adoption agency owned an unmarked grave in which children were buried as late as 1990.

Adoption campaigners have queried why the Mother and Baby Homes Commission has taken three years to issue a public call for information relating to the burials of children who died at the Bessborough home.

Children from the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home, some of whom died as late as 1990, are buried in unmarked graves in a Cork City cemetery.

The HSE has refused to say why concerns about infant deaths and possible trafficking from Bessborough in Cork and the Tuam Mother and Baby Home were not reported to the then health minister.

Minister for Children Katherine Zappone says she will know within weeks how a proposed broadening of the Commission of Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes will look, as she noted: “The dead do not lie.”

The Tuam mother and baby home should not be treated as an individual scandal, but as part of a national trafficking network that commodified people, says Conall Ó Fátharta.

A senior HSE social worker revealed in 2011 that Bessborough Mother and Baby Home files contained information on the “quasi-illegal deportation and adoption” of children to the USA, Britain, and Australia.

The religious order that ran the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home reported significantly higher numbers of infant deaths to state inspectors than it recorded privately.

When news broke that 796 children were listed as having died at Tuam Mother and Baby Home last year — it made global headlines.

Religious order reported to the State that 353 babies died in Bessborough, but its own register showed 80 fewer deaths. A report found a system of ‘human trafficking’ in which ‘women and babies were considered little more than a commodity for trade’. Conall Ó Fatharta reports

Concerns that death records were falsified in Bessborough Mother and Baby Home so children could “be brokered in clandestine adoption arrangements” at home and abroad were raised in an internal HSE report in 2012.

A previously unpublished report by the HSE in 2012 examined Bessborough’s own records. The in-depth findings and conclusions are damning. Conall Ó Fátharta reports

A former mother superior at Bessborough Mother and Baby Home has said its adoptions were not forced, that mothers were well-fed, and that its high historic death rates could be explained by lack of access to antibiotics.

As the Church plans to discuss erecting a memorial to the 800 babies and children in a mass burial site in Co Galway, the Adoption Rights Alliance has called for a public inquiry into all deaths of babies, children, and mothers at mother-and- baby homes around the country.