Mary O’Malley was born in Connemara, the eldest of ten children, and says she ‘came to poetry very early … through Irish poetry’. O’Malley believes that the Irish language and mythology are an important part of her poetic inspiration. O’Malley studied at University College Galway. She lived in Lisbon, Portugal for eight years and taught at university there before returning to Ireland in the late 1980s and beginning her career as a poet. O’Malley taught courses in Writing and Education in NUI Galway for ten years as well as holding posts in universities in Europe and America. She has won awards for her poetry and is a regular writer and broadcaster on RTÉ radio.
‘Cealthrach’ is from O’Malley’s 1993 collection, Where the Rocks Float. The title, ‘Cealthrach’, means a burial ground. For generations, babies who died before they could be baptised by the Catholic Church were believed to go to hell or to limbo (a place between heaven and hell). Such infants were not, according to the Church, cleansed of original sin by baptism and therefore could not be buried in consecrated (holy) ground. Communities often chose boundary places between fi elds or near the shore to bury their babies instead. One such place, Oileán na Marbh (Isle of the Dead) is an island off the west coast of Donegal on which over 1,200 infants are buried. In 2009, a ceremony was held to bless the island and erect a commemorative stone on the island. An Irish Times article from 2011 reports that: ‘Many present at the ceremony had grown up with the sight of mothers and fathers standing on the piers and gazing across the water, not knowing, as children, that what they were seeing were parents pining for their stillborn babies buried on the island.’ Such deep and private grief was, unfortunately, a feature of the lives of many until the Catholic Church reversed its decision on unbaptised children and allowed them to be buried in consecrated ground.
