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Conall Ó Fátharta, who has carried out extensive research into Ireland’s mother and baby homes, said it was shameful that survivors of Bessborough Mother and Baby Home had to take to the streets to try to stop development on the grounds of the site in Blackrock in Cork.
“We know 19 mothers and 859 infants associated with Bessborough died and remain missing. We still don’t know where they are buried. The Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation concluded: ‘It is highly likely burials did take place in the grounds of Bessborough.’
“Yet it came to this conclusion without having carried out an extensive investigation of the Bessborough grounds. It did no geophysical survey using ground-penetrating radar. No test excavations. It had archaeologists walk the grounds and look at maps.”
Ó Fátharta’s comments come after Taoiseach Micheál Martin last week posted on social media that he had asked Cork City Council to engage with the landowners “with a view to exploring all options for the future of the site”.
In February, Cork City Council granted planning permission to Estuary View Enterprises to build 140 apartments on land at Bessborough. Last month An Coimisiún Pleanála substantially upheld the decision on appeal, granting planning for 106 apartments on the site.
Ó Fátharta said the Government should act on the motion passed unanimously on July 13th by members of Cork City Council supporting the wishes of many of the bereaved families that the State acquire the remaining 60 acres at Bessborough.
“This land should be preserved as a public memorial and place of remembrance,” said Ó Fátharta, who began researching Bessborough while working as a journalist with The Irish Examiner.
“The question here is: why won’t they do it? They have done it before. In the 1970s, 140 acres of the 200-acre site was CPO’d to build a road and retail park. If the State can act to build roads and a retail park, why can’t it act in the interests of the women and children of Bessborough?”
Ó Fátharta said for the Government to say that it cannot interfere with a planning matter was to ignore the fact that Bessborough was much more than a planning matter – it was also about human rights obligations to investigate deaths, find remains and return them to relatives.
Ó Fátharta said that when he began investigating Bessborough in 2009, he found that girls, who were as young as 13 and had been raped, were being sent there into the 1980s and unmarked burials were taking place there as late as 1990.
“I obtained records showing there was an infant mortality rate as high as 82 per cent in Bessborough in the 1940s, and that the State privately admitted that it feared a ‘public scandal’ over deaths as early as then. These are facts.”
He said the Government should publish all records from the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation archive concerning burials at Bessborough as it had done in the case of mother and baby homes at Tuam in Galway and Sean Ross Abbey near Roscrea in Co Tipperary.
The Government should also direct the Attorney General to facilitate an inquest into the deaths of the 19 women and 859 babies under Section 24 of the Coroners Act 1962 as families had waited decades for effective investigations into these deaths, he said.