Despite decades of promises and apologies, the church and state are attempting to pave over historic abuse on the site of the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork.
At least 923 children died at Bessborough between the 1920s and 1990s. Infant mortality in the 1940s reached 82 percent. 859 of these dead children have no burial record at all, and the location of their graves are still unknown. Remarkably, the state has not even attempted a ground radar examination of the site to find any remains. This despite multiple eyewitness accounts describing babies being buried around the site.
Yet on 9 July, An Coimisiún Pleanála granted permission to Estuary View Enterprises to build an apartment complex covering the site of the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home, rejecting two appeals and 160 objections.
Traumatic emotional and physical abuse, illegal adoptions, illegal vaccination trials, the deaths of 923 children, forced confinement of women and girls. With this decision the state has added further insult to the list of injuries inflicted on survivors. The last mother to lose her baby in the Home pleaded against this: “It brings back the pain, the fear, the grief and the humiliation […] Do not bury our history beneath concrete.”
An Bord Pleanála has promised a single forensic archaeologist will oversee construction. If any remains are discovered then they promise an immediate halt to construction in that area, and a proper examination for further remains.
Such guarantees are not worth the paper they are written on. As with countless other cases of the Church’s crimes, the state’s investigations in Bessborough have ignored evidence and hidden information behind privacy laws. The fact is if construction goes ahead it will shatter any hopes of an investigation, let alone a proper burial.
In 2021 Micheál Martin apologised for the deaths of 9,000 children and the traumatic experiences of over 110,000 mothers and children who were interred across Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes. In fact, as Minister for Education in 1999 he paved the way for the first apology by Bertie Aherm for the state’s role in facilitating the Church’s crimes. Of course, all empty words. Over two decades – and many public apologies – later and still nothing has fundamentally changed.
Amid the backlash calls have been made for the state to purchase the site which Martin has vaguely hitched onto, asking “Cork City Council to engage with the landowners at Bessborough with a view to exploring all options for the future of the site.”
This would mean putting the state’s money – including an added fee now that planning has been granted – into the pockets of developers who sought to slab over a burial ground with concrete.
No amount of official apologies can change the reality of what the Irish capitalist state is. It has shown time and again that its first duty is to business – including the housing developers, and, incidentally, also religious orders like the Bon Secours, which run the largest private healthcare business in Ireland – and to protecting itself. This also means concealing its own complicity in the crimes committed by the Church, sometimes by allowing a pile of concrete to literally bury those crimes forever.
The full truth and justice will not be uncovered nor granted by the state that helped bury it and commit those crimes in the first place. It will have to be dug up and won by the struggle of workers and youth in their fight against the Irish establishment.
