This page provides information and updates on the ongoing campaign to preserve the site of the former Bessborough Mother and Baby Home. We are calling on the Irish state to exercise a Compulsory Purchase Order to take control of the Bessborough site and preserve it as a public memorial. We are urging the Government to release all unpublished technical archaeological reports concerning burials at Bessborough, unseal all burial records held within the Commission of Investigation archive and direct the Attorney General to open an inquest.
save bessborough email campaign:
https://clannproject.org/savebessborough/
Clann Project Submission to An Coimisiún Pleanála, 20th March 2026
JFMR and Clann Project Statement on Bessborough Planning Permission, 9 July 2026
We are horrified that An Coimisiún Pleanála has now granted planning permission for a private apartment development at the site of the former Mother and Baby Home in Bessborough, even though 19 mothers and 859 infants associated with Bessborough remain missing. Their burial places are not known and the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation concluded: ‘it is highly likely that burials did take place in the grounds of Bessborough’.
We call on the Government immediately to CPO the site, as requested in a unanimous motion of Cork City Councillors. In the 1970s the State bought 140 acres of the original 200-acre Bessborough estate through compulsory purchase. Today that land contains several industrial/retail parks and part of the N40 road. Many bereaved families are now seeking the compulsory purchase of the remaining 60 acres at Bessborough which are the subject of the planning permission, so that a public park can be created in memory of their disappeared relatives.
These 878 women and children are part of the nation’s disappeared, abandoned in the past and disrespected and actively ignored in the present. Today’s State appears to have washed its hands of Bessborough’s 878 missing children and women, and their many living mothers and other relatives. It is compounding the enormous injustices of the past and perpetuating a situation of mass enforced disappearance.
We demand that the Government immediately unseal all records concerning burials from the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation archive, by emergency legislation if necessary.
Records, testimony and analyses gathered by the Commission on the questions of death and burial at Bessborough remain sealed in the Department of Children, Disability and Equality. Unlike for Tuam and Sean Ross Abbey, the Commission did not publish its archaeological assessment of the grounds at Bessborough.
There is also no time to waste in pursuing the effective investigations into deaths and disappearances that should have happened many decades ago, and that families are still requesting. We call on the Attorney General to order an inquest into the deaths of children and women who were confined in Bessborough, as he has the power to do under section 24 of the Coroners Act 1962.
In 2021, eight independent United Nations Human Rights bodies, including the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, wrote to the Irish Government to emphasise its obligations under European and international law to investigate the deaths of children and mothers who were institutionalised, and to ascertain the whereabouts of the disappeared and return their remains to relatives. The UN bodies asked for information about the Government’s plans for inquests.
The Government must intervene to put an end to this appalling, ongoing injustice.
Please note:
- Our written submissions to An Coimisiún Pleanála in March 2026 are here.
- On 17 April 2026, the Clann Project further submitted to An Coimisiún Pleanála an Observation containing 156 collated Observations, all in support of the appeal by Bessboro Mother and Baby Home Support Group against the grant by Cork City Council to Estuary View Enterprises 2020 Limited on 24th February 2026 of Conditional Permission for a Large-Scale Residential Development at a site located at Bessborough, Ballinure, Blackrock, Cork. The majority of the 156 Observations were from people directly affected by forced family separation and institutionalisation, many of whom have a direct link to Bessborough Mother and Baby Institution. All Observations are on the public file in An Coimisiún Pleanála.