When Mary Donovan’s mother passed away six years ago, she had no idea the search for answers about her family would lead her into one of Ireland’s darkest chapters. What started as a daughter trying to piece together her mother’s past eventually uncovered something devastating: her mother had been trafficked through Bessborough Mother and Baby Home, and somewhere out there, Mary had twin siblings among the home’s thousands of missing children.
Bessborough, the notorious Cork institution run by the Sacred Heart Sisters, has long sat at the centre of Ireland’s mother and baby home scandal. Thousands of unmarried women and girls were sent there over decades, their babies taken, sold, or buried in unmarked graves. The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes confirmed that 923 children died at Bessborough between 1922 and 1998, with the burial location of the vast majority still completely unknown.
For Mary, the reality of what happened to her mother only came into focus slowly. Piecing together records, testimonies, and what little documentation survived, she came to understand that her mother had not simply been a resident of the home. She had been trafficked, moved and processed through a system that treated young Irish women as little more than a problem to be managed and monetised.
The twins her mother gave birth to at Bessborough are among the children who simply vanished into that system. Whether they were sent abroad through illegal adoption channels, died within the home, or are still alive somewhere without any knowledge of their origins, Mary does not yet know. It is a question that has consumed her since she first uncovered the connection.
Her story is far from unique, but it puts a sharp human face on the ongoing failures around Bessborough specifically. Unlike some other mother and baby homes, Bessborough has never had a proper archaeological investigation of its grounds. Survivor groups and families of the missing have been pushing for years to have the site excavated, arguing that the remains of hundreds of children are likely still buried there in unmarked, undignified conditions.
The Irish Government has faced sustained criticism over the pace of progress on this issue. Legislation around the Birth Information and Tracing Act, which came into effect in 2022, gave many adoptees and former residents new rights to access their records. But for families like Mary’s, where the paper trail is thin and the institution itself kept unreliable records, legislation alone does not fill the gaps.
Survivors and advocacy groups have pointed out that the Sacred Heart Sisters, who ran Bessborough, have not been fully cooperative in handing over all relevant records. The congregation has acknowledged past failures in general terms but critics argue that meaningful accountability has never truly arrived.
For the children who were sent from these homes to the United States and elsewhere, often through informal or outright illegal arrangements, the search is even more complicated. Many were given new identities with no documentation connecting them to their Irish origins. Some have spent their entire adult lives not knowing they were born in Ireland at all.
Mary’s search has connected her with a wider community of people doing similar work, adult adoptees, children of former residents, and researchers who have dedicated years to mapping what actually happened inside these institutions. That network has become a lifeline, sharing records, making connections, and pushing each other forward when the bureaucratic walls feel impossible to scale.
What drives her, she has said, is straightforward. Her mother deserves to have her full story told. And her siblings, wherever they are, deserve to know they exist.
The Bessborough site in Cork remains a live and deeply contested issue in Irish public life. Calls for a full excavation continue, and the question of what the Irish state and the religious congregations who ran these homes truly owe to survivors and their families has not gone away. For Mary Donovan, and for the many others still searching, it is not a historical question. It is happening right now.