Qualla: Bessborough Mother and Baby Home

Bessborough Mother and Baby Home: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AugusteBlanqui, CC BY-SA 4.0. On arrival the women were given new names. They were told not to speak of their pasts. They were set to washing laundry for local businesses and scrubbing the floors of the building they could not leave. Between 1922 and 1998, 9,768 women and 8,938 children passed through Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Blackrock, County Cork. More than 900 of the children died there. Their bodies were buried in unmarked graves. The Irish state's Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, whose final report ran to thousands of pages, gave Bessborough a chapter of its own.

Image: AugusteBlanqui | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bessborough Mother and Baby Home: What Bessborough Was

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AugusteBlanqui, CC BY-SA 4.0. Bessborough House had been the home of the Pike family before the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary took it over in 1922 - the year the Irish Free State came into being. For most of the next seven and a half decades, the order ran the building as an institution for u...

Image: AugusteBlanqui | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bessborough Mother and Baby Home: The Children Who Did Not Survive

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AugusteBlanqui, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the 1920s and 1930s, the infant mortality rate at Bessborough often exceeded 30 percent - more than three times the national average. In 1943 it spiked to 75 percent. Three of every four babies admitted that year died there. The reasons were not mysterious. Crowded wards, poor...

Image: AugusteBlanqui | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bessborough Mother and Baby Home: Adoptions Across an Ocean

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AugusteBlanqui, CC BY-SA 4.0. Some of the children who survived Bessborough did not stay in Ireland. The Commission's report documents forced adoptions - mothers pressured or denied any meaningful choice - and adoptions of Irish children to American families in exchange for cash donations to the religious ord...

Image: AugusteBlanqui | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bessborough Mother and Baby Home: The Lives Inside

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AugusteBlanqui, CC BY-SA 4.0. Survivors who spoke to the Commission described daily life in detail. The new names. The order not to speak of fathers or families. The hard labour - laundry, often, for businesses that paid the home for the work the women did unpaid. By the 1980s, the work had diversified to pot...

Image: AugusteBlanqui | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bessborough Mother and Baby Home: Reckoning

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AugusteBlanqui, CC BY-SA 4.0. Bessborough became a national story after the bodies of children were discovered in a former septic tank at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway. The 2014 revelation triggered the Commission of Investigation. Its 2021 final report covered eighteen instituti...

Image: AugusteBlanqui | CC BY-SA 4.0