DONNA HANVEY says she knows Milltown Cemetery in west Belfast like the back of her hand. At least once a week, she makes the trip past the faded Victorian headstones at the cemetery gates, down past the bare field in which the city’s cholera victims are buried and beyond the graves of the Long Kesh hunger strikers towards a wooden fence that marks the cemetery boundary.
It’s here where she stops at the unmarked grave of her brother Michael Patrick, who died in infancy over 40 years ago. Unlike the families who lay flowers at the neat row of headstones marking the infant graves at Milltown, Hanvey makes do with hanging a wreath on the fence separating the cemetery from the Bog Meadows nature reserve. She points out her brother’s resting place – a spot of marshy land amidst closely-packed trees and long tufts of wild grass. According to the cemetery register, this single, anonymous plot is a mass grave, containing the remains of 77 people.
Hanvey’s brother was one of a generation of mostly unbaptised babies in Belfast, who, due to poverty or social taboo, were buried in church-owned land outside the sanctified ground of the cemetery between the 1940s and 1970s. Last year, Hanvey and several other families learned that 37 hectares of this “poor land” were sold off by the Catholic Church to the Ulster Wildlife Trust, the owners of the Bog Meadows, under the terms of a 999-year lease drawn up in 2000.
Those familiar with the history of Milltown say the transferral of the land now means the nature reverse could contain several thousand graves. The trustees of Milltown Cemetery say an “administrative error” caused a boundary to be drawn incorrectly and that the land containing the graves should never have been leased.
Almost nine years after their relatives’ graves were sold, families say they are still waiting for this error to be corrected. “It’s horrific when you sit down and think about what has done,” says Eileen Strong, a founder member of the Relatives for the Milltown Babies group. “This kind of thing would never happen anywhere else, it really wouldn’t. We were always taught never to say no to a priest but it’s about time someone stood up to the church.”
SINCE OCTOBER, Hanvey and Strong have led a weekly protest outside the gates of Milltown. As well as calling for an official church apology for leasing the land, the group aims to shatter the historical taboos surrounding the deaths and burials of infants. “There must be hundreds of mothers, fathers, aunts or uncles out there who know about one of these children,” says Colette Walsh. “We want people to come forward and talk to us. They have nothing to be ashamed of.”
A teenage mother in the 1960s, Walsh gave birth to a stillborn son with severe brain damage and says she was treated “like a piece of dirt” by hospital staff. A sheet was placed over the baby as she gave birth, meaning Walsh never saw her son, and his body was then taken away for medical tests.
As was common at the time, the male members of her family took responsibility for the child’s burial. Walsh was not told, and did not ask, where exactly her son was buried. “That was the culture at the time,” she says. “You were expected to get on with your life and put it behind you.”
After deciding to consult the record books at Milltown, she found an entry for a nameless baby, identifiable only by her married name in the adjacent column. She then discovered that the plot of land in which her son was buried had also been leased to the Ulster Wildlife Trust. “What angered me is that no one was ever consulted about this,” she says. “No one thought of the grief and hurt that this would cause the families.”
Following an agreement made last week, a team of archaeologists has been commissioned to carry out tests on the land using special radar equipment. Photographs of the soil will be taken to identify specific areas in the Bog Meadows where earth has been moved to dig graves. The UWT has since signalled it will transfer any established graves back to the church once an accurate map of the burial sites is made. Yet the likely scattered nature of the burial sites could make defining a new boundary particularly difficult, meaning the Ulster Wildlife Trust risks losing a sizeable chunk of its rich urban habitat.
This could really open a can of worms,” says Kelly Muldoon, a spokesperson for the UWT. “We purchased this land in good faith and have been co-operative with the families and the trustees of the cemetery. But ultimately this was a mistake made by the church and we feel it is their responsibility to resolve the matter.”
FAMILIES HAVE accused the charity of insensitivity after it warned that the clearing of trees from grave sites could disturb birds’ nests. Legal restrictions on nature reserves means that no structural changes to nesting sites can take place after the month of February. With the initial phase of radar tests yet to begin, the Milltown campaigners fear they will be forced to wait another yet another year before their loved ones graves are returned.
Local priest Fr John McManus has met with the families on several occasions and conducted a vigil service at the cemetery boundary at Christmas. “We’re coming out of what we can only regard as a mistaken theology of a hundred years ago,” he says. “People have been carrying the grief and burden of losing a child for decades and it’s important we get this right.”
Braving the driving rain at their most recent protest, the families are sceptical that their aims will be met. “If both sides say they want to resolve the situation, then why has it taken the church and the Ulster Wildlife Trust so long to do anything?” asks Walsh. “But they can rest assured that we’ll not be going anywhere until we get our babies back.”