Children's Burial Ground

Children's Burial Ground in County Galway is one of 480 cillíní recorded there, shallow pits where unbaptised or stillborn children were laid from the sixteenth century until Vatican II relaxed the ban in the mid-twentieth century. The west coast holds most of Ireland's sites because Franciscan priests enforced Canon Law harder than eastern orders, turning parental grief into a boundary the Church would not cross. Galway's number suggests whole townlands lost children to fever, birth or poverty, and each pit is a small refusal to bury love in the ground the Church claimed.