'I got to meet my birth family, give others same chance' - Bessborough survivor

Mary O’Shea was born in Bessborough in 1935 and ‘adopted’ by a Cork couple in 1942, around the same time the infant mortality rate at the home reached 75%. Here she recounts her memories of an early childhood spent in a mother and baby home, her reaction to the State apology, and her anger over plans to build on the Blackrock site

Mary O’Shea sits at her kitchen table looking at her birth certificate. It lists her place of birth as Bessborough. Her surname is left blank.

Rows and rows of cots, neatly lined up, filled with babies. Many of them crying but no mothers to comfort them. 

That’s my lasting memory of Bessborough. I slept among those babies in a narrow little bed for the six and a half years I spent in the home. There was just me and another boy of a similar age — all the rest were babies.