exceptions over the years. Therefore, we have two sources of direct testimony about conditions in Temple Hill from the mid-1960s, even though they are extremely limited with practically no paperwork or documentation of any substance available. Stories about the sisters in charge paint them as strict, uncaring and businesslike.
Testimony about conditions in Temple Hill for the babies from around 1970 indicate that they were left in their cots and given very little attention. The girls who cared for them were kept busy and had little time for any individual baby. Many commentators have expressed horror about one common practice in which the ends of babies’ sleeves were attached to their mattresses with large safety pins so they could not move about or turn on their sides. However, that custom was very much the norm in society at the time because it was believed that keeping a baby on its back would prevent cot death. The practice was relatively harmless in normal conditions where babies are picked up after naps or sleep and then moved around and cuddled. In Temple Hill, the pinning caused serious problems because the babies were left on their backs in their cots almost constantly and, as a result, bedsores were common as well as associated infections and pain stemming from raw, untreated bedsores. If the general rule that conditions get worse the further back one researches, it is likely that the babies in Mountjoy Square and Temple Hill were dumped in cots in overcrowded wards and left alone for hours at a time during most of the six to nine years that the holding centres operated.
Babies must have died in Mountjoy Square and Temple Hill as overcrowded wards and the absence of proper isolation units led to the spread of infections, viruses and bacteria. It is unknown where babies who died were interred, although it was most likely in Glasnevin Cemetery. Deansgrange Cemetery, just a couple of kilometres south of Temple Hill, is also a possibility. The mortality rates in the early days were almost certain to have been well above the national average. Temple Hill closed in 1987 and the nuns sold the building for £426,000, tax-free, because religious orders are exempt from all forms of taxation. The current Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes is not investigating Temple Hill and it may be that we will never know the full truth of what happened there.
St. Patrick’s Guild itself later moved to 82 Haddington Road in south Dublin and then further south again into the suburbs, in the direction of Temple Hill, to 203 Merrion Road, where they officially closed in 2013. Their standards declined rapidly after the Sisters of Charity took over and they developed a reputation for issues related to falsifying records. In 1997 Alan Shatter TD attacked the Guild in the Dáil for knowingly giving false information to people trying to trace nature mothers or adopted people. In 2013 the Adoption Authority notified the Department of Children that St. Patrick’s Guild is aware of ‘several hundred illegal registrations but are waiting for people to contact them: they are not seeking the people involved.’5 The illegally adopted people with fake and potentially lethal medical histories were once again compromised by both SPG and the government since neither of them proactively sought out the victims. The General Registry Office was also informed.
The Guild is also known to have settled a number of legal actions before they reached the courts. Issues associated with SPG include knowingly and illegally sending the children of married parents for adoption, and forging signatures. In one case they were so sure they were above the law that they made no attempt to imitate a natural mother’s handwriting, and spelled her name incorrectly. They finally handed their files over to Tusla, the newly named branch of Social Services dealing with various matters including adoption, in 2016 after three years of protracted legal bartering. Everyone who was adopted through SPG was left in effective limbo for those three years, as were elderly natural mothers. People undoubtedly died while waiting for an appointment to trace. There has been no audit of SPG files and no criminal investigation. Despite heavy lobbying from several survivor and adoption rights groups, SPG was not included in the current Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes.
Cúnamh, Miscellaneous Adoption and Forced Repatriation Agencies
St. Patrick’s Guild and its predecessor, the Rotunda Girls Aid Society, were only the beginnings of a minor industry of agencies, and some are still with us today. The Catholic Protection and Rescue Society (CPRS), for example, founded in 1913, is still operating and is equal to St. Patrick’s Guild in terms of overall numbers, with around 15,000 adoptions on its books. It rebranded as ‘Cúnamh’ in 1992 and is based in 30 South Anne Street, Dublin 2.
Each agency changed its function and ethos over the years. The larger agencies began as boarding-out and fostering societies and became adoption agencies after the introduction of proper adoption legislation in 1952. Some were started by well-intentioned lay people and others by religious organisations. Father P.J. Regan began his own agency called the St. Clare’s Adoption Society that specialised mostly in foreign adoptions to the United States, while other agencies handled Irish adoptions only.
The CPRS was founded to prevent Protestant proselytisers convincing desperate Catholic single mothers to have their babies raised as Protestants. While sectarian motives were common in the foundations of many Catholic organisations, the CPRS had a unique role as a self-appointed judge and jury to ‘rescue’ single pregnant women and girls from Britain. From 1922 many expectant mothers boarded the ferries to Britain to escape losing their babies to the workhouses, their worldly possessions often little more than a change of clothes. The British customs officers learned to spot them instantly and they became so common that they earned a semi-official nickname – PFIs – Pregnant from Ireland. However, the British authorities viewed them as a ‘burden to the public purse’ so did everything they could to return them. That is where the CPRS came in, as the agency that took custody of runaway Irish girls and escorted them back to the workhouses or homes in Ireland. A variety of semi-official contacts between British authorities and the CPRS formed an underground practice of semi-forced repatriation. The network continued until at least the 1970s when there are several documented cases of single girls being forcibly repatriated. Nevertheless, thousands and probably tens of thousands of Irish women beat the customs officers and police and somehow avoided the informal networks of priests and volunteers. The majority ended up in Britain’s widespread network of over one hundred Mother and Baby Homes, some run by Catholics, the majority by Protestants.
The agency system is complex and worthy of a book in its own right. There are still a handful of nuns involved and many are hate figures among the adoption and survivor communities. Certain nuns, right up to a couple of years ago, would regularly ask for ‘donations’ to fund their tracing efforts, even though their agencies were State-funded and the nuns themselves were sometimes employed by the State as paid social workers (the Sacred Heart nuns had their own agency called the ‘Sacred Heart Adoption Society’). Many adoptees and natural mothers have missed the chance to reunite because of stalling and misinformation from nuns. The vast majority of the religious-based agencies have been handed over to the government, and social workers now do the tracing and searching in almost every case.
What is most startling is the difference of opinion in the active adoption and survivor communities regarding the various agencies. Some swear at a particular agency while others swear by it. The wild disparity in experience is sometimes due to successful or failed traces but, beyond that, individual nuns and social workers can have good and bad days like anyone else, or unreasonably take a dislike to an adoptee or natural mother. Outcomes for searches among the agencies, well into the 1990s, were overwhelmingly negative and often based on the whim of a stone-faced nun demanding to know if your ‘adoption was happy and, if it was, then why are you here.’ Many of the agencies began as secretive societies back in the late nineteenth century, either to protect or punish single mothers and their babies. That mentality persists in some agencies even now. All the agencies were covered legally by the 1952 ‘sealed-for-life’ Adoption Act. Another point is that the various Catholic agencies cooperated with one another and had members in common and this has led to some confusion.
From the late 1980s, a tiny handful of people in the adoption agency industry and some highly qualified social workers with a genuine interest in adoption-related matters became more vocal about new-fangled ideas such as post-adoption support and properly facilitated reunions.
