General Chat

The Lisheen, known in some places as a Lios or a Cillíní, was according to my father a place where many infants who died without being baptised were buried from the 1800s and well into the 1900s. It was usually situated outside the local cemetery.

It was of course a reflection of the high infant mortality rate in Ireland and while this situation did improve somewhat as the State began to grow through the mid-20th century, the change was slow & often only marginal.

In many ways, Ireland wasn’t a very nice place to live or grow up in during our first half century of independence, especially if any individual was unfortunate enough to ‘stray outside the Pale’ in terms of their so called moral standards.

Unmarried mothers or people with mental health problems were at particular risk of, at best, social isolation and at worst, incarceration at institutions that could have been taken straight from Dickensian times.

The truth is that across Ireland in a large middle chunk of the 20th century, thousands of infants and young children died due to now entirely curable ailments such as TB, measles, flu, bronchitis and meningitis.

I’m sure similar instances occurred in other nearby countries too.

Could be, Det, I often wonder if his little skeleton has been disturbed by new owners but I think one of the relatives still in the village would have heard about.

Lizx