Obituary: John Furlong, an ‘Angel of Bessborough’, helped women flee mother and baby home
John Furlong, RIP. In an interview two years ago, Mr Furlong told the ‘Irish Examiner’ how as a young man he and other local 'Angels' in Blackrock, Cork, helped women flee Bessborough.
Tributes have poured in for the last known ‘Angel of Bessborough’ who helped rescue women from the religious-run institution.
John Furlong passed away peacefully at Cork University Hospital on Monday aged 94. He was part of an unofficial group of 10 locals who lived near the home and helped women to escape when he was a teenager.
Mother and baby home survivors and their families have publicly thanked Mr Furlong online for the help he gave young mothers whose babies were forcibly taken by the nuns, because they fell pregnant outside of marriage.
Carmel Cantwell, whose mother Madeline Walsh was locked up in Bessborough in 1960, said it is “lovely to hear there were people around that had a conscience”.
“I did wonder what happened to the babies that were left behind though,” she said. “But it is a lovely story to hear.
"I made the comparison between him and the character Bill Furlong played by Cillian Murphy in the film Small Things Like These.
“I wonder was his character based on John Furlong, it’s a lovely story and he did good work.
“My mother’s son William died in Bessborough in October 1960, and we have just been refused for a second time to have an inquest."
Thousands of women like Carmel’s mother were put into the home in Cork, which is now a centre run by Tusla, when they were pregnant.
The Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary oversaw Cork’s Bessborough institution, as well as Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea and Castlepollard in Co Westmeath.
Bessborough opened in 1922 and according to the Commission of Inquiry into mother and baby homes, it operated until 1998.
During that time, figures show 9,768 mothers and 8,938 children were admitted to the institution and 923 children are registered as dying during that time.
John Furlong grew up in Ballinure Cottages whose gardens backed up against the mother and baby home.
At the time, his role as one of the Angels was to throw local gardaí off the scent when a woman was being rescued.
In 2023, he told the :
“We helped the girls, but we kept our distance, too. It was a group that had to be protected — there was a certain amount of privacy that had to be acknowledged back then in order to protect the women who were escaping.
“The girls trapped there were almost imprisoned, they couldn't get out. Local people knew what was going on and a few were determined to do something about it.”
The well thought out plan worked by changing the identity of all those involved.
He said: “We didn't do names, everything was changed, and everyone had a specific job that they did. I was young at the time, maybe in my early teens.
“My job, with another lad, was to keep watch on the local Garda — and his bike — who would be sent to search whenever a girl was reported missing."
Each planned escape began with the main point of contact — a local man who worked in the grounds of Bessborough.
“A plan was then put in place,” he explained. “He was someone they knew could help them, but it had to be done so carefully.”
The 10-foot wall dividing the convent from the cottages where Mr Furlong lived at the time would be ‘doctored’ by having a few bricks removed on the convent side, thus enabling the girl to clamber over to the safety of the cottage where a local would be waiting to bring her to a safe house nearby.
“Here she was bathed and dressed and given everything she wanted right down to the hat and the umbrella. She would stay there until the hullabaloo of her escape had died down,” he said.
“The guard was sent on the bike looking for her. Me and another fella would take the bike and hide it for a while, but we’d always leave it back outside the barracks in Blackrock, but that would get him out of the way.
“We knew what was happening, I saw it myself. I saw nuns coming to the gate of Bessborough and parents collecting babies from them."
When the young girls got out of Bessborough they could expect to end up in the Irish communities in London.
A local Blackrock man worked for the City of Cork Steam Packet Company Limited, the operators of the ferryboat, The Innisfallen, that sailed twice weekly between Cork and Fishguard.
He helped ‘smuggle’ them on board.
John said: “There were loads of girls that escaped. They went to Fishguard or Swansea and they were met by friends of ours, they would be given a ticket to go to London, to Cricklewood where they were among their own.”
