IRELAND
Sunday Independent
Ralph Riegel
Published 08/06/2014
THEY were made to scrub the hard, cold floors on their knees with a toothbrush, and to cut the huge lawns with only a scissors.
Mothers at the Bessborough mother-and-baby home in Co Cork, privately referred to as “a secret penitential jail”, were refused all social contact with the outside world, and not allowed to even speak with each other.
Former inmates believe up to 3,000 children are buried in unmarked graves at the country’s largest mother and baby home.
John Barrett, who was born at Bessborough on July 17, 1952, told the Sunday Independent: “If there are 800 babies buried in a single plot in Tuam, I can guarantee you that there are thousands buried at Bessborough. I would estimate from my information that there are probably between 2,000 and 3,000 children buried there.”
The infant mortality rate at Bessborough in the late Forties was 55 per cent – meaning burials would have been taking place on a weekly basis.
The young women were routinely forbidden from attending the funerals of their babies and, in one case, a woman who lost her baby received nothing more than a pair of his shoes as she was sent home.
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