100 jobs to go as nuns sell family facility

A HUNDRED jobs are to be lost following the decision by an order of nuns to sell a 40-acre estate that accommodates a range of services for vulnerable families and children.

Over the past 20 years, €30million in State funding has been spent on upgrading and maintaining Bessborough in Blackrock, on the southside of Cork city, which belongs to the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.

Staff at the facility were called to a meeting on Tuesday and told that their jobs would be gone within three months.

According to a staff statement released to a radio station, the order is selling the estate as part of a restructuring operation. Staff said that the sale is a ‘run-and-graball attempt by the Bessborough nuns’.

‘The Bessborough estate is in the final processes of being sold and the nuns, with their headquarters in the UK, who ran the infamous mother and baby home there, are now due to make €12million,’ staff said.

The centre, on a 40-acre estate in Cork city, offers a residential parent and baby unit for families in crisis as well as a community creche. It is also home to a secondary school and training centre for second-chance education. Bessborough opened as a mother and baby home in 1922. Up to 800 children are believed to have died there, according to findings from the Mother and Baby Home Commission.

Tara Keogh, a child protection specialist at the centre, said staff were unsure about their prospects for relocation.

She said: ‘We are all trying to put our heads (together) trying to think about that, but I don’t know how realistic it is at this point with such short notice.’

In a statement to the Irish Daily Mail, the Sisters said: ‘The Sisters recognise the concern this decision will create for staff and we will now be actively seeking another service provider that will continue this excellent service into the future.’

The Departments of Health and Education were contacted for a comment concerning the services that may be affected due to the sale, but had not responded at the time of going to press.