The sister of a boy who died in a mother and baby home wants to establish a permanent memorial to him and other babies buried in a pauper’s grave – but has been told that this is not possible.

Beth Wallace’s brother Stephen was born in a mother and baby institution. He was between three and six months old when he died from kidney failure and gastroenteritis.

As the news that the remains at the site of Tuam’s former mother and baby home are to be forensically examined, many will consider it a move towards closing the terrible chapter on the past.

But for Beth (49) and those like her, the many hurts that Ireland’s mother and baby institutions have caused are far from over.

Beth’s brother is in a pauper’s grave in Deansgrange Cemetery, along with the bodies of four others. For a year-and-a-half Beth has been in contact with Dún Laoghaire Rathdown Council hoping to buy the plot and erect a memorial there to all babies born in such institutions.

She launched a crowd-funding project to raise the €16,000 she had been told she would need to buy the plot and erect a monument. But now she has been told such a project is impossible.

“A week into the fundraising campaign, I emailed the council asking how to make payment and received an email saying it was now no longer possible to purchase the grave as the area is to be ‘landscaped’,” said Beth. “It’s outrageous. It feels as if not only Stephen is being ‘landscaped’ over but yet again the issue is being landscaped over.

“I’ve also been told I can only put an 18-inch by 12-inch plaque flat on the ground without foundation,” she said.

Beth, who is now based in Cork, had hoped to commission a stone sculpture.

She was born in a private, Protestant mother and baby home in Dublin in 1969 and adopted at the age of two. She later discovered she had a half-sister.

As an adult, Beth met her birth mother once.

She said she is committed to fighting for Stephen’s plot.

A spokesperson for the council said the decision not to sell the plot was because areas of the graveyard had “grown into a condition which is in need of improvement”.

“It is felt that, in order to preserve both the heritage of those graves and headstones in situ as well as the historic nature of the area, this should be done with a proper landscaping programme.”

They said families can still tend those graves.

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