The memorial has on its upper part a swastika over three concentric circles. Used by many cultures throughout the past 3,000 years, it represents life, sun, power, strength, and luck.

Every Irish village has its own unconsecrated children's burial ground because of a tradition of burying unbaptised and stillborn babies in secret graves, said Sligo historian Joe McGowan. This tradition continued until the 1960s.

"You won't find them in church records", he said. "In some localities, children's burial grounds are shown on Ordnance Survey maps, in others they are not. These sites are scattered all over the countryside, and many have been lost to memory.

Knowledge of the burial sites are mostly handed down by word of mouth. Burials like these took place up to the 1920s and '30s, some as late as 1964.

"In previous times, infant mortality rates were very high. When deaths occurred, unbaptised or stillborn children were not permitted burial in consecrated ground. The teaching of the Catholic Church prior to Vatican II emphasised the importance of baptism as a condition for salvation and prohibited the burial of pagan children in sanctified ground."

Families of unbaptised or stillborn children then turned to unused churches, graveyards, or ruined abbeys to bury their child because these places were seen as still having Christian associations.

According to Wicklow historian Pat Power, "the person who buried the child was invariably a male member of the family. Today these graves look like nothing but nettles and briars. There was a tradition in Arklow of unbaptised and stillborn babies being buried in old cemeteries. At that time, stillborn and unbaptised babies ran into hundreds of thousands in Ireland, so you can only imagine how many plots of land were used as infant graves nationwide."

The grave in Mullaghmore is one of the few burial sites in Ireland to be recognised and commemorated. Seamus Cullen of Kildare Local History Group said that "there are three unconsecrated infant burial graves in my local Donadea area, and in the next area there'll be several more.

There's several in west Wicklow and in the west of Ireland. There's others in Galway and in Offaly, and they're only the ones I've heard of."