Unmourned and unrecorded — the quest to acknowledge Ireland’s forgotten stillborn babies

Ciara O’Shea says her own family’s experience of a baby who died at birth in the late 1940s reflects the reality of that era for the thousands of parents who were never allowed to properly grieve or acknowledge babies lost at or shortly after birth.

Ciara O’Shea has been attempting to trace the story and records of her mother’s brother, Henry, who died at birth at home

Ciara O’Shea

‘We will never speak of this day again’. These were the words spoken by my grandfather sometime in the late 1940s after losing Henry, his youngest child and only son who died at birth at home.

My mum never heard her father say these words as she never knew her baby brother existed. It would take nearly 50 years after he was born before she and her sisters learned about a little boy that had come into their family and left it all at once.