1922 until well into the 1930s. There is very little evidence as to where exactly those children came from but many, if not the majority, were sent from Mother and Baby Homes around the country.
One key point to note is that the nuns who ran the homes also brought the lists of births and deaths to the local registry offices to be officially recorded. As it is the nuns themselves who are the direct source of the infant mortality rates, they are not in a position to dismiss the inhumanity and brutality of the figures or to distance themselves in any way from the evidence.
Of the nine Mother and Baby Homes, six were horrific and Pelletstown/St. Patrick’s was, in terms of the vast numbers of deaths, by far the worst. The current Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes is restricted to investigating from the year 1922 and therefore Pelletstown will never be formally investigated before that date. The Interdepartmental Report from 2014 states that 6,596 births were registered in Pelletstown but only seven of those births were registered up to 1934 because the home had no maternity wards of its own for the first thirty-four years of its 85-year operation. The final figure for Pelletstown will never be known, but it likely to be above 10,000 single mothers and therefore approximately 10,000 babies. In time, it will be known as the biggest residential institution, in terms of numbers, in Ireland. The figure may be as high as 25,000 mothers and babies and that is without counting the thousands of unaccompanied babies and children transferred to Pelletstown’s wards from various outside sources.
There were 622 children listed as dying in the LGR noted above. If the rate of deaths in Pelletstown from the 1920s – nearly two children per week – was replicated before 1922 and up to 1940, the final figure from 1900 to 1940 would be more than 3,000 children. At present, there is also a confirmed minimum figure for the number of babies who died between 1940 and 1965: 474, a number recently confirmed in the Dáil by the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Katherine Zappone. The two confirmed figures alone (622 + 474) add up to 1,096 and that is only what we can presently confirm with the earlier and undoubtedly worst decades missing. The total number that died will be shocking but will still be only part of the full picture of institutional neglect in Ireland since 1900.
During the 1916 Easter Rising, 500 men, women and children died. Yet at the very least, over four times that number of Irish citizens – mothers, infants and children – died in Pelletstown. There is no commemoration for this tragic institution in our history. There are no plaques or annual marches down O’Connell Street with planes flying overhead. There is only a black hole in our collective folk memory and history books.
St. Patrick’s Guild and St. Patrick’s Infant Hospital
Of all the sources of confusion in the adoption and survivor communities, the worst is unquestionably St. Patrick’s. There were three major St. Patrick’s institutions, each with a different function. Many adoptees and survivors are unaware of this until they start looking for information.
St. Patrick’s Guild (SPG) spent decades organising boarding out for illegitimate babies and some post-separation support for single mothers. After 1952, it grew into one of the biggest adoption agencies in Ireland and arranged nearly a quarter of all legal adoptions. The Catholic Protection and Rescue Society was of a comparable size. SPG also owned a ‘holding centre’ named ‘St. Patrick’s Infant Hospital’ in Blackrock, Co. Dublin. It is customarily called ‘Temple Hill’ to distinguish it from the other two St. Patrick’s. Both the SPG adoption agency and the holding centre share a name with St. Patrick’s – the Mother and Baby Home also known as Pelletstown on the Navan Road in Dublin. To make matters even more complicated, all three St. Patrick’s were based in Dublin and regularly worked closely together. There are many instances of babies born in St. Patrick’s Mother and Baby Home, then transferred to St. Patrick’s Infant Hospital and later adopted through the St. Patrick’s Guild adoption agency.
St. Patrick’s Guild was founded by Mary Josephine Cruice in 1910 to counteract the influence of the Protestant rescue societies. Those rescue societies were involved in arranging boarding out and it was feared that they would ‘snatch’ Catholic children for baptism in one of the Protestant Churches before their placement. SPG was for the ‘better class’ of Catholic single mothers and Cruice was motivated by money as much as by religious zeal.4 SPG’s motto was ‘Save the child’ and its original office was in 46 Middle Abbey Street in Dublin, before moving up a couple of doors to number 50 in 1915. While Cruice was in charge, SPG kept meticulous records.
Cruice had a mixed reputation. She was a very tough character, according to many accounts, and she was certainly ambitious, and driven, at least in part, by greed. Around 1918 SPG opened its own ‘holding centre’ in 19 Mountjoy Square, a formerly genteel Georgian square in north Dublin where most of the four-storey-over-basement, red-brick family homes were turned into flats and overcrowded tenements. The holding centre was a new type of support institution to provide an overflow and/or temporary residence for illegitimate babies born in private nursing homes or public maternity hospitals such as the nearby Rotunda or Holles Street. SPG’s holding centre later also supported the mainstream Mother and Baby Homes.
By 1930 its city holding centre was overcrowded and in disrepair, so SPG leased a large period residence in Temple Hill in Blackrock, at the opposite end of the village from where Lady Arabella Denny had lived. Built in 1767 and known as Temple Hill House, it was originally called Neptune House and was the seaside residence of the First Earl of Clonmel, also known as Copper Face Jack, who resided at his better-known house in Harcourt Street, Dublin. The architect Thomas Joseph Cullen was commissioned to design and build a proper laundry for the new centre, ‘St. Patrick’s Infant Hospital’.
There were only two, possibly three, ‘holding centres’ and they should not be confused with orphanages where children stayed for years. However, to further complicate matters, there were some children in Temple Hill who had confirmed stays of one and two years in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and even a handful of cases where babies stayed for three years. It is likely that several thousand, if not over 10,000, babies passed through the doors of these two holding centres.
According to Damien Corless in his splendid book about the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake, in 1922 St. Patrick’s Infant Hospital tried to organise an early type of lottery known as a ‘Sweep’, based on betting large sums on a chosen horse race. SPG threatened to close its home if its ‘Save the Child’ sweep did not go ahead. When the money started to flow from the government-licensed Sweepstakes, SRG and Temple Hill were quick to become involved and received large sums of Sweepstake money over the years. Of all the groups and institutions related to single mothers, SPG benefitted second only to the Sacred Heart nuns, receiving a total of over £100,000 (nearly €8 million at 2016 values) for reconstruction, additions and maintenance, and capital grants for Temple Hill.
St. Patrick’s Guild was eventually taken over by the Sisters of Charity and shortly afterwards in 1942 came under the control of the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, and his successors.
Conditions in Temple Hill holding centre, in both its locations, were a mystery until the mid-1960s. A small number of women have spoken about their time working there, supposedly training to be staff nurses, although this ‘job’ was often a sham. It was a common deception that was used by the nuns in a slightly different way in Castlepollard and Bessboro and probably in other homes as well. The majority of the girls who ‘trained’ in Temple Hill were assigned there after they had lost their babies to adoption. Many of them were in shock and had no other options in their lives. The pay in Temple Hill was poor and the girls’ lives were highly regimented for fear that they would become ‘repeat offenders’. The mothers who had recently lost their babies did the actual work and treated the babies as well as they could, but the regime was strict and any sort of bonding or affection was strongly discouraged. The girls worked hard to take advantage of the training opportunity, but many ended up with no formal qualifications except a reference from the nuns when they departed. Natural mothers never stayed in the holding centres and visiting their babies was strongly discouraged,
