Bessborough. Surely by now we all know what happened there. Between 1922 and 1998, at least 9,768 women and 8,938 children passed through the mother and baby home, located in an 18th century house and outbuildings near Cork city. The congregation that ran this institution and two others in Ireland was the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. The women were pregnant outside marriage and gave birth to their children there.
Most of the children were adopted, many against the wishes of their mothers, who had to promise never to contact them in the future. In the past 30 years, their stories have emerged, disclosing a harsh, cruel system that treated both mothers and babies with, at best, indifference and, at worst contempt.
Please don’t stop reading. It’s just that a lot of people seem to have tired of this subject, and feel it’s time to “move on”.
There have been three major government reports on industrial schools, Magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes. There have been excellent TV and radio documentaries. Many brave survivors have revealed what happened to them: physical, sexual and emotional abuse and cruelty, and serious, sometimes life-threatening neglect.
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But we have never seen protests to match the recent ones about fuel prices and earlier ones about water charges about the torture (as defined by a UN rapporteur in the case of Magdalene laundries), enforced family separation, compulsory unpaid labour, beatings, verbal denigration, shaming, stigmatisation and punishment of more than 100,000 of our fellow citizens in these institutions.
Is the price of gas and oil or the prospect of a utility tax more important than the trauma still suffered by so many, which continues to the next generation?
Does Ireland fundamentally want to forget that these things happened? Does the Catholic Church, still holding on to vital records of these institutions, want us to forget? Does the State, which was complicit for all those years in what was happening? Do families prefer to obliterate memories of daughters and sisters cast out because of non-marital pregnancy? Do they all intend to make do with State apologies, threadbare redress schemes for which many do not qualify and a well-intentioned Centre for Research and Remembrance which is taking far too long?
Please don’t stop reading.
A few days ago, I spoke to Carmel Cantwell, who is one of the leaders of a campaign to stop 140 apartments being built on the Bessborough site, where it is probable that around 850 children are buried in unmarked graves. Carmel’s mother, Madeleine Walsh, had a son in Bessborough in 1960. She was 17 years old. She had been brought back to Ireland from London – where she had fled when she discovered she was pregnant – by the Crusade of Rescue. This was an organisation that repatriated pregnant Irish women with a view to having their babies adopted.
William died six weeks after birth, despite being born healthy and well. Madeleine watched him deteriorate over three weeks in Bessborough, in what was known by the women there as the “dying room”, pleading with the nuns to get a doctor to look at him. Eventually he was brought to the adjacent hospital, where he died three weeks later.
Madeleine returned to England, where she attempted suicide three times, and ended up in a mental hospital, which she credits with saving her life. She eventually married and had Carmel. She never told anyone of her ordeal in Bessborough, consumed by the fear and shame that our society imposed on women in her situation.
In 1994, Carmel, who had married, decided to move to Cork, as fate would have it, close to Bessborough. Her mother came to visit her new home, and one day went to Bessborough without telling anyone. She wanted to find William’s grave; she was taken to the outskirts of a burial ground by an impatient nun, who did not allow her to enter the plot or to memorialise William.
As her daughter Carmel tells it, when her mother returned from her secret visit, she collapsed and wept bitterly. She was so distraught that she could not articulate the cause. Eventually, she was able to tell her daughter. Thirty four years after the agony of her child’s death, she spoke for the first time to a family member about one of the defining events of her life.
Please don’t stop reading.
Don’t stop reading while there can be no moving on for Madeleine or Carmel. They are caught in a terrible few weeks more than 60 years ago and have no way of escaping. Nor do they want to. That would be to abandon the memory of William, an unthinkable idea.
Where is William? It is very probable he was buried at Carr’s Hill, a local Famine graveyard; but he could be in the tidy plot where Madeleine was taken on that fateful visit; or somewhere else in the 60 acres of land attached to the house where so much suffering took place. No one knows, because there has been no commitment to excavate the site as is being done in Tuam, famously identified by Catherine Corless as containing the bodies of almost 800 babies and children.
Noelle Brown who, like William, was born in Bessborough in the 1960s, is an indefatigable campaigner for the rights of survivors of these institutions, or “affected people”, as many of them prefer to be called. She was subject to forced family separation, and spent decades attempting to get access to her birth records. She wrote a wonderful play about this search, Postscript, and an unforgettable piece on institutions for women and children, In Plain Sight, performed last year in a religious building in Roscrea. She is involved in the campaign to stop these apartments being built on the grounds of Bessborough.
“We are at a tipping point in the history and legacy of what happened in institutions like Bessborough,” she says. “We can literally concrete over the sufferings of those children failed by Church and State, and their grieving mothers. Or we can fully acknowledge what happened, provide justice and show long-overdue compassion.”
One of the reasons many of us turn away from this subject is a feeling of helplessness – what can we do? Now there is something we can do: submit an observation on the granting of planning permission by Cork City Council, without scrutiny from the councillors, for these apartments.
Please now stop reading and go and put in an observation here. Do it before April 21st. Give Madeleine and Carmel some justice.
Catriona Crowe is an archivist and podcaster
