The graves known as Paisti Marbha, on the edge of the sea in Dookinella, near Keel, and 21 other sites on Achill Island, Co Mayo, where stillborn and unbaptised babies were buried up until the 1950s, will be blessed in a special ceremony next Sunday.
The move, undertaken by the Catholic Church and initiated by the parish advisory council on Achill with the strong support of local people, should go some way towards healing the pain and hurt caused by the church's stark and cruel policy, now abolished, which prohibited unbaptised babies from being buried in consecrated ground.
A baby who died in the womb or shortly after birth was taken from the mother and buried in a nearby field, often in an atmosphere of secrecy, without a headstone or cross to mark the site. Bereaved family members grieved in silence.
"It was a sensitive thing, very private, a sad affair," said Mr Farrell Gallagher, of Dookinella, chairman of the local committee to restore Paisti Marbha. People usually didn't talk about it at all, he explained.
"They're angels, really," Father Patrick O'Connor, of Dookinella church, said. Born in Roscrea, Co Tipperary, and having spent more than 40 years in England before retiring to Achill, Father O'Connor said he had been unaware of the cillini in Ireland. "They're holy places," he observed, and the danger was that "maybe the sites would be lost."
There will be two walks beginning at 2 p.m. on this Pilgrimage Sunday, to obtain holy water which residents will take to each of the 22 infant graves - one from Dookinella church to St Fionnan's well, under the Minaun Cliffs, led by Father O'Connor and the parish priest of Achill, Father Paddy Gilligan, and the other, from Derreens church to Kildownet, led by Father John Kenny and Father Sean Nolan.
Mr Farrell Gallagher, Ms Marie Toolis, Mr Tommy Gallagher, Ms Ellen Marie Cafferkey, Mr James Gallagher and many other Dookinella residents have spent the past several weeks working on Paisti Marbha, clearing the land of rocks and boulders, raking it, covering the cillin with soil and marking the border of the graves with white stones taken from the quarry at Slievemore.
A meeting will be held at the Achill Head Hotel at 9 p.m. tonight to discuss plans for the blessing of the other infant graves on the island.