Bessborough planning decision shocking for mother and baby home survivors
Cork City Council granted permission to Estuary View Enterprises for apartments at Bessborough despite three previous refusals relating to the estate and concerns that it may contain the unmarked graves of hundreds of children. Picture: Shipseybarry
The granting of planning permission for 140 apartments on the site of one of Ireland’s most notorious mother and baby institutions last week sent shockwaves through Cork’s survivor community.
Cork City Council granted permission to Estuary View Enterprises for apartments at Bessborough despite three previous refusals relating to the estate and concerns that it may contain the unmarked graves of hundreds of children.
There were two objections to Estuary View’s application, one from Carmel Cantwell on behalf of the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home Support Group (BMBHSG), and the other from Labour Party councillor Peter Horgan.
In hindsight, perhaps alarms should have sounded last July when An Coimisiún Pleanála refused an earlier Estuary View application on grounds of unit mix, discounting its own planning inspector’s concerns around possible burials.
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In its latest application, the developer said it had consulted with the Cork Survivors & Supporters Alliance (CSSA), and understood CSSA had no objection to the proposed development.
CSSA represents more than 50 families. It does not oppose development at Bessborough, but has called for the compulsory purchase for memorialisation of land beside the Bessborough folly, identified on a 1950s Ordnance Survey map as a children’s burial site.
BMBHSG, however, has more than 700 members and is implacably opposed to any development at Bessborough until the estate has been forensically examined.
Between 1922 and 1998, the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary ran Bessborough as a mother and baby institution, during which time 9,768 mothers and 8,938 babies were admitted.
In 2019, historian Catherine Corless told me it was only when people saw in the newspapers the names of the 796 babies who died at the Tuam Home, that they realised they were real children.
Afterward, I made a Freedom of Information request to the General Register Office (GRO) for the death certificate details of all children relating to Bessborough. That request yielded the details of 816 children known to the State as having died at or after transfer from Bessborough.
In 2021, the Mother and Baby Homes Commission reported 923 child deaths related to Bessborough, 107 more than were disclosed to the GRO. Burial records exist for only 64 of those 923 children, and the commission concluded it was “highly likely” some were buried at Bessborough.
The GRO data shows a clear break between Bessborough pre-1945 and post-1945. Of the 816 deaths notified to the GRO, 659 occurred before 1945.
Nora Cronin was five months old when she died on December 30, 1922. The first baby certified as dying at Bessborough, her cause of death was listed as “gastric convulsions”.
However, and not on the GRO data, John O’Brien, of Bessborough, died of tubercular meningitis at 10 months in Cork District Hospital on November 3, 1922.
Between 1922 and 1930, 81 babies were certified as having died at Bessborough, an average of nine per year, with an average age of 32 weeks. The leading reported cause of death, accounting for 31 deaths, was marasmus (severe malnutrition).
Between 1931 and 1940, 267 children died there, their average age at death 13.5 days. Marasmus accounted for 72 deaths.
Between 1941 and 1950, 364 children died, 311 between 1941 and 1945, their average age at death 13 weeks. Congenital illnesses accounted for 102 deaths, gastroenteritis accounted for 41, and marasmus 38.
In 1940, Ireland’s infant mortality rate was 6.5%. Bessborough’s was 82%.
As Conall Ó Fatharta reported here previously, a June 1941 government report found the matron, Mother Gleeson, had no qualifications in supervising maternity care.
A subsequent 1943 report by Alice Litster found that, of 27 babies in the nursery aged between three weeks to nine months, only eight were breastfed and only three fully.
“The greater number were miserable scraps of humanity, wizened, some emaciated and almost all had rash and sores all over their bodies, faces, hands and heads,” she wrote.
In 1945 Dr James Deeny, State chief medical advisor, found in Bessborough: “Every baby had some purulent infection of the skin and all had green diarrhoea, carefully covered up.” Deeny ordered the home closed, and sacked Mother Gleeson and Bessborough’s medical officer, Dr O’Connor.
Bessborough reopened under Mother Rosemonde in September 1945, and conditions improved dramatically, with annual infant deaths dropping permanently to single figures.
Bessborough remained a cruel place, according to June Goulding, a midwife there from 1951. In her 1998 memoir she wrote that women were denied pain relief during labour.
Between 1931 and 1975, the occupations of the parents of deceased babies were recorded. Of 676 children, 628 were “child of domestic servant” and 35 were “child of farmer’s daughter”.
Five were “child of schoolgirl”.
On Wednesday, August 10, 1994, a two-day-old baby girl named Zoei Bonny died at St Finbarr’s Hospital, Cork. Zoei’s cause of death was certified as “Bilateral pneumothoraces due to arterial ventilation”.
Of the 816 Bessborough babies whose deaths were disclosed to the State, Zoei was the last.
Carmel Cantwell is a member of BMBHSG. Her brother William was born in Bessborough in 1960 and died weeks later. He was buried in the Carr’s Hill Famine graveyard, but this information was kept from his mother for 59 years.
“There is so much unfinished business at Bessborough, and the grounds were not exhaustively investigated to find the burial places of the missing children,” Ms Cantwell says.
“In all, 859 children are unaccounted for. For this reason, no one should ever touch what remains of Bessborough.”
BMBHSG and councillor Horgan say they intend to appeal the council’s decision to grant planning.
On Wednesday, January 13, 2021, the day after the Mother and Baby Homes Commission published its final report, the published on its front page the names of the 816 Bessborough babies whose deaths were disclosed to the State.
BMBHSG will hold a vigil at 1pm on Sunday, March 8, at the Bessborough gates.
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