Institutional Burials (Amendment) Bill 2022: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-25 ============================================================ Lynn Ruane (IND), University of Dublin I thank everyone for their contributions. I will try to give responses to the different contributions of today. There are some on a language theme that I cannot help but be stirred by. We have talked about what is normal and what is not normal, and there was a suggestion that the high mortality rates were ordinary at that time in congregated settings and that they were something to be expected, accepted or understood within a particular timeframe. I want to challenge that to the highest degree. First, to go back a few steps, there were hundreds of women who had never chosen to be there. They never chose to give birth in congregated settings. They never chose to have their children taken from their arms and put in rooms with other babies to be "cared for", then put in graves. The congregated settings were not normal, so the instances of high mortality can never be normal. We are only talking about events in our lifetime. We are only talking about people who are still alive today and who cannot identify the grounds in which the remains of their children lie in Bessborough, Sean Ross Abbey and many more. It is not normal. Bessborough was temporarily closed in 1946. In 1944, the Cork county manager and the South Cork Board of Public Assistance made the then Department of Local Government and Public Health aware of the high infant mortality rate in Bessborough but it chose to take no concrete steps. How was it normal if, in the forties, the county manager was saying there was something wrong here and that there was a high infant mortality rate? We cannot rewrite and reconstruct memory. We cannot reconstruct a memory and place it on something that happened in the past and say it was normal, because the records say different. That is not okay in any shape or form. In relation to private burial grounds, there have been many mentions here today of the idea there was no need to keep records of certain burial grounds. I wish to go back to 1888 and the rules and regulations of burial grounds in the late 1800s: A proper registry book (hereinafter referred to as the registry book), made of parchment, or vellum, or other durable material with strong bindings and suitable printed pagings, and ruled in columns with proper printed headings, shall be constantly kept in some convenient place at or near the burial ground, and shall be open for inspection at all reasonable times; but no person except the person having the care and management of the burial ground and in these rules called the registrar, shall be permitted to write in the registry book save as hereinafter mentioned. That is from the conditions on keeping records from the late 1800s. If I had a child in the ground and I could not identify where they were, try telling me that is not manifestly inappropriate. If any of the Senators here today had a Bill with a definition that said something only needs further investigation if it reaches this threshold of manifestly inappropriate, and if they had spent decades searching and asking where their child was buried and nobody could tell them where on that land that child was buried, tell me that is not manifestly inappropriate, but our legislation said it is. Our amendments only enable the Government to increase its level of investigation. It does not demand it. It does not mandate it. It opens that definition of manifestly inappropriate and then we can apply appropriate proportionality within that. It does not rule out memorialisation or investigation. It does not rule out the identification of people's graves. While our amendment and our Bill could have been teased out more on Committee Stage if there were concerns, let it be said here that it does not demand exhumation. It only allows a scenario where if that level of intervention is needed, it is allowed, but it does not rule out memorialisation. I want to be very careful that we will not leave this Chamber with idea that it was normal to have high infant mortality rates because those women, babies and families should never have been put there in the first place. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-02-25/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:41+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-25