Also Known As:

The Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, St. Mary's Mother and Baby Home or simply The Home.

Previously a workhouse ( built in 1841) and military barracks (during the Irish Civil War), the Order of Bon Secour Sisters led by Mother Hortense McNamara took over the site in 1925.

The nuns were trained nurses and midwives. Thousands of unwed pregnant women were sent here to give birth and were forced to work without pay as penance.

The Home closed in 1961, most of the occupants being sent to similar institutions.

In the 1970's a chamber was found on the grounds filled with childrens skeletons. It was thought to be a "famine" grave or a grave for unbaptised babies. A prayer was said by a local priest and the chamber was covered over.

In 2012, a local historian published an article documenting the deaths of 796 babies and toddlers at the "Home" during its years of operation. The research led to a conclusion that almost all had been buried in an unmarked and unregistered collective grave.

NOTES

This is a record of children who died in the home. It is yet to be determined exactly where they are buried.

Most of the babies listed are assumed to have been born in the orphanage, but it is not certain.

In late 2015:

A remembrance to the children of Mother and Baby Homes was erected on the corner of Essex Street and Exchange Street, Temple Bar, Dublin, Ireland.

Two walls on a plot of public land in the middle of a busy intersection. The yellow walls are covered with hundreds of children's names, their ages and the year they died. Below the names are small squares of silvery material, like small coffin plates.

These children died in mother and baby homes in Ireland and are of the children whose names are known.

A sign on the site reads:

SOMEBODYS CHILD

IN PERPETUAL MEMORY

This public place was chosen as an appropriate location to make visible the Irish children disappeared by a cruel Catholic state.

With names and coffin plates we call back to the present-from pits and watery graves from Tuam to Castlepollard, from Sean Ross to Bessborough- the babies and children buried in the dead of night with no priest, no cleric, no ritual, no mother beside them.

Every living creature deserves to be grieved, deserves the ceremonies that value their existence. Today at this spot we recall the grave injustice that befell those children unlucky enough to have been so "othered" as to be denied the rights normally bestowed by decent society. We stand here not on the shoulders of giants or extraordinary deeds, but in mourning that neither love nor kindness was afforded to these children, not at their birth and not at their dying.

Somebody misses them still, while they remain hidden in forbidden places guarded over by authorities who continue to deny closure to the living and the dead.

We commit, for evermore to remember these children as our own flesh and blood.

Our very own brothers and sisters. Family

I gCuimhne Bhuan

R I P

March 2017-

Recent news articles from around the world report:

Authorities in Ireland have excavated the human remains of an undisclosed number of young children.

The Irish minister for children and youth affairs announced in a statement that the commission investigating the site "revealed that human remains are visible in a series of chambers that may have formed part of sewage treatment works for the home."

The commission recovered juvenile remains for forensic analysis. The remains found are between 35 fetal weeks to 2-3 years of age. From carbon dating it has been determined that the samples are from the time the home was in operation between 1925 and 1961.