Dating from the sixteenth until the latter part of the twentieth century, cillíní are un-consecrated children’s burial grounds found throughout Ireland where unbaptised babies and infants condemned to limbo lie alongside adults expelled for contravening social taboos or religious rulings.
Archaeologists and historians have largely focused upon the burial of the un-baptised babies and infants with little investigation into the marginalised adults interred here. Collective and cultural memory in the form of oral history tells us that suicides, strangers, shipwrecked sailors, the famine dead, murderers and their victims, criminals, those with learning or physical disabilities and mothers who died in childbirth were at times buried in the cillín.
Likewise the last four decades has seen a growing acknowledgement by communities throughout Ireland to recognise, remember and embrace the cillíní within their midst as an important part of their heritage yet invariably these commemorations and media reports are largely focused upon the babies and infants with minimal attention paid to the adults.
Only a limited number of cillíní have been excavated yet evidence of women who died in pregnancy, childbirth or early motherhood has been unearthed, but this group of adults is not consistently acknowledged in the academic discourse similarly within the popular media and thus the collective consciousness of society.
Set against the backdrop of Ireland over the last two centuries as a patriarchal society governed by Church and State which controlled the moral welfare of women’s lives and deaths; this inter-disciplinary research uses auto-ethnographic fieldwork and archival materials from the National Folklore Collection to create a sonic deep-map based on nine case-study cillíní within the Beara, Iveragh and Dingle peninsulas.
Sound, according to David Toop is an already haunted medium, thus ideally placed in this context to connect and uncover the spectral traces locked within the physical landscape of the cillíní and the cultural and collective memory stored within the local community; accessed through field-recordings and recorded oral history interviews.
Requiescat sonically overlays the past with the present, giving voice to the presence of absence as it weaves together the threads of evidence found within the landscape with the wisps of collective memory of traces left behind by the mothers of the cillíní. Within the process both artist and listener become secondary witnesses to these testimonies with responsibility to relay the story of these women; achieved by public art exhibitions to widely disseminate Requiescat along with the gifting of CDs and accompanying booklet to libraries throughout County Kerry and donating fourteen of the original recorded interviews to the National Folklore Collection of Ireland. In this way raising awareness whilst contributing to the current debate concerning the negative ways in which the Catholic church eschewed female sexuality, childbirth and unmarried mothers, finding parallels with the treatment in death of the Magdalen Laundries mothers and those from the Mother and Baby Homes.
