Richard Boyd Barrett: Bessborough, state failure and unmarked graves

First of all just pay tribute to Carmel Cantwell and I see Noel Brown there in the gallery and other survivors and those affected by the crimes that were committed at Bessborough Mother and Baby Institution. I called it a home at the protest last week and I was rightly rounded upon and told it should be called an institution because they were institutions of brutality and oppression that led, that you know traumatised and stigmatised women, brutalised them and of course led to the deaths of hundreds of children, 923 children. A horrific stain and over the next few weeks we'll be celebrating the Irish revolution, the 1916 rising and one of the greatest, in my opinion the greatest Irish revolutionary statues up behind us, James Connolly, revolutionary and socialist, warned that if the country was partitioned it would lead to a carnival of reaction north and south and Connolly was very consciously an advocate for women's liberation and believed that if the Irish struggle for freedom didn't liberate women it would be a hollow victory and when he was warning about the carnival of reaction that would result from partition he was very specifically worried about what would happen to women in a partitioned Ireland where reactionary forces gained dominance in the state and so it's appropriate that Bessborough was set up in 1922, the year of partition, as part of a policy by the new state of outsourcing the care of women and children to the Catholic church who then ran institutions where in one year, in one year, three out of four children died, many of them of starvation. I was reading Donal O'Keefe from the Echoes showed me, sent me an article today about the fact that in 1947 the state chief medical officer, actually his papers have revealed that a threatened investigation by the state into 700 deaths at the time in Bessborough was abandoned if there was a commitment to reduce the number of deaths of children to single digits, right, it's horrendous what was going on so they didn't investigate at the time, deaths continued although they did reduce but the sort of dark stain we're talking about in the history of this state and in its treatment of women and children and stigmatization of women because they didn't comply with a sort of twisted notion of morality and then the actual deaths of children, hundreds of whom still their burial place unaccounted for, it is, it's unbelievable and the idea that we would go from that to prioritizing the interest of property developers, I mean says it all about the carnival of reaction that Connolly warned that we go from this killing of children effectively, starvation of children, buried in unmarked graves, the disappearance of children to property developers profiting and we can't do anything about it even though we're, you know, trampling on the sensitivities of people who've been brutalized in these horrific institutions and I was saying at the protest last week, I was born in a mother and baby home, I went recently with my mother to try and find the place, it was in Highgate, North London, we couldn't find it, now look I've been reunited with my mother and you know the outcome has been a good one but I met somebody at the protest and she said it's okay to mention her name, Sarah, who's from Cork, it was also turned out, she said to me afterwards, she said I was born in the Highgate mother and baby home which we didn't manage to find and like that mattered to me and it matters to her and I got some messages from other people who said we were born in Highgate, we disappeared to England and then sort of quietly brought back to be adopted but like our outcomes were okay but Sarah was born in Highgate and then was in Bespra, so she's out there protesting, you know, sort of a second generation of people affected by all of this, so the thought that we're going to build on this site, that the government won't intervene to make up, to compensate for the failure of this state to hundreds of women and children who lie buried in unmarked graves and the trauma that has inflicted on the survivors and those affected is horrendous, you can do it, as has been said, you could lodge an objection Deputy Coptioner is absolutely right, you should intervene and prevent the crime being compounded for those who suffer in these institutions.