Bessborough survivor says children were barred from ‘sacred ground’ he now believes was burial site

Joe Quinn, who was born in the Cork mother and baby home and spent his early childhood there, says children were forbidden from entering a wooded area he now suspects may have been used for burials

Bessborough survivor Joe Quinn, by the area he was told was 'sacred ground'. Picture: Donal O'Keeffe

Children in Bessborough were forbidden from entering an area known as “sacred ground”, an elderly survivor of the former Cork mother and baby home has claimed — and he now believes it may have been used as an unofficial burial site.

Joe Quinn, 90, who was born in Bessborough and spent his early childhood there, said he remembered being taken for a walk at the age of four and being told he could not enter a wooded area he now suspects was used for burials.

That area is behind the hedge on the driveway into the grounds of the former institution, and is now the site of a disused playground, to which Mr Quinn brought the Irish Examiner.

“I was taken out for a walk in the fields there. Now I can’t tell you if it was a nun or someone working there, but they took me out for a walk, that was 1941, before I ever left there,” he said.

“When you’re a youngster, something always attracts you, so I broke away and was told ‘Oh no, no, you can’t go there, that’s sacred ground'.” 

He was fostered out, and at the age of 26 moved to London, where he and his wife lived until her death in 2005. They had five children, two of whom survived, and Mr Quinn is now a great-grandfather.

He moved back to Cork after his wife’s death and says the memory of being told to stay away from that patch of ground near his birthplace remained with him all of his life.

He became involved with the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home Support Group, regularly cleaning the area around the folly, to the east of the convent building, which was, according to one 1950s' Ordnance Survey map, a children’s burial ground.

“If children were buried in different parts of the grounds, I wanted to let people know what I remembered from my time there,” said Mr Quinn.

“There was always something in my mind about that incident, and I didn’t want to take it with me to my grave.” 

Mr Quinn’s claim follows accounts by two unrelated people who said they had decades ago witnessed burials on two different parts of the former institution’s grounds.

With the burial places of nearly 900 people associated with Bessborough unknown, campaigners say the building of apartments on the grounds — planning permission for which was recently upheld — must not go ahead.

In 2021, the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes found that with burial records missing for 859 Bessborough infants and 19 women missing, it was “highly likely” some burials occurred on the institution’s grounds.

Earlier this month, Terry Meyer, who was born in Bessborough in the 1950s, said when she was four years old, she had witnessed the burial of a child on ground to the east of the convent building.

Separately, Pat Mulcahy, a Blackrock native now in his late 80s who played on the Bessborough estate as a child, claimed he had seen — in the mid-to-late 1940s — a disturbed grave containing “three or possibly more” partially covered small corpses.

The area where Mr Mulcahy recalls seeing that grave was north-west of the institution’s hospital and chapel buildings, in roughly the same area Mr Quinn was told was “sacred ground”.