Campaigners renew call for CPO of suspected children's burial site at Bessborough

The 'Little Angels' memorial plot in the grounds of Bessborough House in Blackrock, Cork. Picture: Laura Hutton/RollingNews.ie

Campaigners have renewed calls for the compulsory purchase of a suspected children’s burial site on the former Bessborough mother and baby home estate in Cork after it was afforded certain zoning protections in the new city development plan.

The Cork Survivors and Supporters Alliance (CSSA) said the privately owned site won’t be fully safe until it is in public ownership.

“We are calling now on the developer to search their conscience and we’re calling again on the local authority or the state to CPO this specific site to secure it in perpetuity,” spokesperson Maureen Considine said.

CPO means compulsory purchase order, where bodies such as  local authorities can take land without the consent of the owner, but providing compensation in return, on the basis of common good.

Ms Considine was speaking after city councillors zoned as a landscape preservation zone the small area of land near the Bessborough folly that is identified as a "childrens’ burial site [sic]" on a 1950s Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi) trace map.

While such a zoning doesn’t rule out residential development, it means it will only be considered where it safeguards the value and sensitivity of the particular landscape.

Councillors applauded members of the CSSA and some women who gave birth in Bessborough who sat through the five-and-a-half-hour council meeting to see the zoning made official.

For some, it marked the end of a 50-year-long journey.

Ann O’Gorman, who believes her baby daughter Evelyn was buried on Bessborough lands, said she was happy and proud to see the land protected.

“Evelyn and the babies can rest peacefully now. God is good and he was on our side,” she said.

The zoning designation passed almost unnoticed — it was among a batch of some 170 uncontested amendments to the development plan that were agreed and adopted as a group.

However, Cork City south east Independent councillor Lorna Bogue formally acknowledged the women in the public gallery.

“There is one particular line in this section that some women here have waited for for five hours today, but 50 years before. This is democracy at work and it’s thanks to you that this land has been rezoned,” she said.

She thanked her fellow councillors for listening to the women, for standing up for them, helping them, and welcoming them into City Hall.

Lord Mayor and Fianna Fáil councillor Colm Kelleher echoed those sentiments.

Independent councillor Lorna Bogue: She thanked her fellow councillors for listening to the women, for standing up for them, helping them, and welcoming them into City Hall.

“You can see that we are united and delighted that we were able to do this for you this evening. This is the people’s house, so it’s your house,” he said.

This specific site at Bessborough was at the centre of a controversial planning application for apartments, which was shot down following a Bord Pleanála oral hearing last year.

In its ruling last May, the board said it would be premature to grant planning before establishing the presence, and the extent of, any such burial site.

The final report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation was unable to account for the burial places of some 859 infants who died at Bessborough or in hospital after being transferred from Bessborough between 1922 and 1998.