Cork City Council agrees to protect Bessborough 'children's burial site' from development

Catherine Coffey O'Brien, Maureen Sullivan, Ann O'Gorman, Mary Dunlevy, Maureen Considine, Phil Kinsella and Sheila O'Byrne.

For some, it’s taken more than 50 years to see the site protected, so to have to sit through a five-and-a-half-hour local authority meeting to finally see it happen was worthwhile.

Bessborough campaigners were applauded by Cork’s city councillors on Tuesday after the politicians agreed to afford a level of protection to a sensitive site on the former mother and baby home estate in the new city development plan.

Councillors have designated an area of land near the Bessborough folly, identified as a ‘children's’ burial site’ on a 1950s Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi) trace map, as a landscape preservation zone.

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

Many Bessborough mothers and their supporters from the Cork Survivors and Supporters Alliance (CSSA) watched the meeting from the public gallery in City Hall as councillors spent five hours debating various contested zonings and amendments.

They had to wait until the very end of the meeting to see the specific Bessborough site being dealt with.

In the end, it passed almost unnoticed - a virtually anonymous line of text in a batch of around 170 uncontested amendments to the plan which were to be effectively rubber-stamped as one group.

They were, as expected, adopted as a batch.

The significance of the move in relation to the Bessborough site would have passed without the knowledge of many following the proceedings were it not for Cllr Lorna Bogue’s intervention following the formal adoption process.

She stood to formally acknowledge the women in the public gallery who had sat through the long meeting to witness it and explained what had happened.

“There is one particular line in this section that some women here have waited to hear for five hours today, and for 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 Cllr Colm Kelleher also addressed the women directly and echoed what Ms Bogue had said.

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

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

Lord Mayor Cllr Colm Kelleher with Cork Survivors & Supporters Alliance members, Maureen Sullivan, Mary Dunlevy, Catherine Coffey O'Brien, Ann O'Gorman, Maureen Considine, Phil Kinsella and Sheila O'Byrne.

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 board said it made its decision having regard to the fifth interim report and the final report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, which was unable to account for the burial places of some 859 infants who died at Bessborough between 1922 and 1998.

Various submissions were made by developers in relation to the Bessborough estate during the drafting of the city development plan.

But councillors agreed unanimously to change the zoning of this specific area of land to the northwest of the Bessborough folly as landscape preservation zone.

Retired OSi cartographer Michael Flynn, who gave evidence to the oral hearing last year on behalf of the developers, said he was satisfied the label 'children's burial ground' referred to a nearby smaller area next to a graveyard for nuns.

But OSi expert mapper John Clarkin, who gave evidence on behalf of the CSSA, told the hearing that he believes the placement of words indicates the actual location of the burial ground.

Just last week, OSi said there is an “alternative interpretation” of the historic maps of Bessborough which could suggest that children were buried away from this site.

But the agency said it can’t be more definitive about the precise location of the burial site and that a definitive view can only be determined by information beyond its available records.