People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd-Barrett said his personal experience of having been born in a mother and baby home informed his decision to oppose a proposed housing development at Bessborough, Co Cork.
Boyd-Barrett went looking for the place he was born in Highgate, north London, with his birth mother, the actress Sinead Cusack, a few months ago but could not find it.
“That’s part of my history and identify and the trauma that my mother suffered – to be, in effect, forcibly separated from her children,” he told a demonstration outside Dáil Éireann on Wednesday, held by survivors of mother and baby homes opposed to a proposal to build 140 apartments on the site.
Planning permission was given last month by Cork City Council to the developer Estuary View Enterprises subject to a number of conditions including an order that the developer carry out extensive archaeological excavations.
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The protest was organised by Social Democrats’ Dublin city councillor Noelle Brown, a survivor of Bessborough, and a long-time campaigner on the issue of mother and baby homes.
Campaigners stated that records show 923 children died in Bessborough between 1924 and 1994, but the graves of only 64 children are accounted for.
Brown said the grounds of Bessborough amounted to a burial site and would be a “violation of those children’s rights to a respectful burial”.
Carmel Cantwell, from the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home Support Group, said the 24-hectare estate should be preserved as a “national site of conscience” not only to remember those who died there, but the 18,706 women and children that were incarcerated there.
Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, who spoke at the event, described the plans as “cruel and obnoxious”.
She added: “Yes, this is about a planning permission. Yes, this is about the desecration of a site, a crime scene perhaps, the holding evidence of the brutality visited on these small, young lives.
“However, it also represents a chapter of our collective history which we were told by those in power would not be a trauma to be revisited on survivors again and again in the present.
“There is no attempt here to be honest with the past or to call out the brutality in a way that really matters and actually honours all of these precious lives.”
Earlier in the Dáil, Social Democrats leader Holly Cairns said “ordinarily if there were any number of children buried somewhere there would be a criminal investigation. There would never be a question of just concreting over it.”
She added that protesters “want the Government to act before it is too late to acquire the grounds and conduct a long-overdue forensic investigation”.
Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan said he empathised with and acknowledge the pain Bessborough survivors feel that the site is to be developed “in a way they feel does not give recognition to the terrible actions that went on there previously”.
However, the Government could not interfere with planning applications and he suggested survivors should proceed by way of an appeal to Cork City Council.
On the question of the State buying the site, he said “unless there is specific, strong cartographic evidence as to where bodies are buried, we could find ourselves buying a vast site for the purpose of carrying out excavations that could take an interminable period of time”.
He said the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Bay Homes carried out a cartographic and landscape assessment of possible unrecorded burial arrangements in Bessborough and a site survey.
“It concluded that it is likely that some of the children who died at Bessborough are buried in the grounds, but it was unable to find any physical or documentary evidence of this.”
