Shining a light on a dark chapter in Irish history

GORT’S Donal Haughey has shone a light on one of the dark chapters in Ireland’s recent history with his new documentary Oileán na Marbh/Island of the Dead, which has just been broadcast on TG4.

The documentary explores the story of the forgotten stillborn and unbaptised children who lie in unmarked graves in children’s burial grounds or cillins, having been refused burial in consecrated grounds.
These cillins exist all over the country and, in recent years, the Donegal community of Carrickfinn has gathered to commemorate a local children’s burial ground, on Oileán na Marbh. In doing so they ensure the short lives of the infants will be remembered by future generations. The film recreates the journey of one of the babies and allows the viewer to explore a dark topic.
Speaking to The Clare Champion, Donal said many woman suffered greatly because of the practice. “It’s yet another skeleton in the national cupboard. It’s another wrong hushed up. A lot of people think that this practice stopped in the 1940s and ’50s, but it didn’t, it continued on. There’s thousands of these women alive today. These people have lived with a sense of shame that has clouded their lives.
“Today, women still experience stillbirth, babies still die, but at least nowadays they are buried in family graves whereas before, because of the church’s teaching on limbo, these children were seen as unfit for burial in the graveyard. Because of that, a mother suffered a double whammy, which I talk about in the programme. There’s the physicality of losing a child, there’s that pain and that’s added to the pain that you’re not going to see that child in heaven because it’s in limbo, it’s nowhere. Subsequently, if you talk of island of the dead, or even Knocklawrence which is on the Clare/Galway border, which features in the documentary and is beside a river, all of these places were on boundaries because the folkloric feeling was that they didn’t belong so they were buried beside the sea, at a crossroads or at a townland boundary.”
In conversation, Donal is clearly very engaged by the topic. He says during the making of the documentary that he spoke to women who had suffered hugely, but had spoken very little about it.
“I’m passionate in the sense that the story hasn’t been told up to this. During our research, I came across quite a number of women, elderly women obviously. One had one buried at a crossroads, another had a child buried in a war in her property. None of the women would come on camera and I wasn’t going to force them because out of the five women I spoke to, three of them hadn’t told their other children.”
Many of the women whose children weren’t buried in graveyards were left feeling ashamed, he found. “There was the whole sense of shame and why should a woman feel any sense of shame. Someone asked me was I using it to attack the Church and I said that in my way I don’t need to attack the Church. A couple of years ago the Church decided that limbo was now forgotten about. But what about all the children in limbo?
“We had a case of one woman where the baby only lived for a couple of hours and the baby was taken from her. She knew her baby would be taken and buried and her husband came into the hospital and, you could say, stole his own child and buried the body in the family grave. There are so many cases, this went on everywhere.”
On a personal level, he found researching the topic difficult, because he encountered harrowing stories of loss and pain. He feels the documentary will touch a chord.
“We feel we’re going to get a lot of feedback from this. Some things can come under the radar quietly, but because of what they are about, people start talking about them.”