faced a war of attrition to change existing attitudes.
There have always been long waiting lists before a social worker can be appointed. Some have stretched to five years from first contact; delays of one to two years before a first meeting with a social worker are now common. While social services in Ireland have always been chronically underfunded, many of the delays are due to the fact that adoption tracing was, and still is, seen by many as a waste of time and thus assigned a low priority. The adoption and survivor communities today are still dealing with a system that is starved of resources.
CHAPTER 3
Going Our Own Way:
The Mother and Baby
Homes Expansion
Part of the Catholic Church’s agenda for newly independent Ireland was to isolate single mothers from the general workhouse populations and move them to separate ‘special institutions’, as Mother and Baby Homes were originally called.
While single motherhood was never a crime, it was effectively treated as such. ‘Repeat offenders’ were considered ‘mentally deficient’ and needed to be ‘committed’ to an institution, just as a convicted criminal is ‘committed’ to jail for society’s protection.
In September 1922, the ‘Federation of Dublin Charities’, under the control of Archbishop of Dublin Edward Byrne, submitted a proposal to the government for the future management of single mothers. It was a historic moment because it aimed to remove single mothers from the workhouses. It clearly had the approval of the archbishop himself as it was submitted by an organisation he controlled. The proposal was accepted by the Department of Local Government and the die was cast. Single mothers would leave the workhouses and go to a new type of ‘special institution’, and these new residential homes would be officially run by the religious orders.
The original Irish Catholic Mother and Baby Homes were generally a cross between a maternity hospital with no doctors or nurses and a low-to-medium-security prison. The permanent separation of unmarried mothers from their illegitimate babies was taken for granted. A network of smaller institutions grew to support the new ‘special institutions’. Seven of these were built between 1921 and 1935.
Single mothers and their babies after 1922 were pushed further out of Irish society, out of the workhouses, and isolated in Mother and Baby Homes. Meanwhile, the fathers of many of the babies, often rapists, liars, child abusers and married men who abandoned their victims and pregnant girlfriends to the brutality of the workhouses, escaped all responsibility for their actions.
While the options available to single mothers narrowed greatly, a number of tough and determined women, with strong family support, somehow managed to keep their babies. It was a common solution for a girl’s parents to informally adopt their grandchild as their own, with the baby’s mother becoming its elder sister. Some single mothers kept their children even after being disowned by their families but endured a constant struggle to find childcare and employment. Many in the cities resorted to begging and prostitution. The new State and the Church often intervened, snatching illegitimate children from their single mothers on the slightest pretext before dispatching them to the nearest industrial school.
The Bethany Home
The Bethany Mother and Baby Home was Protestant and remained the only such Protestant Home that ever operated in Ireland. Because Bethany was the only Protestant Home, it served a variety of purposes over the years such as occasional use by the courts as a remand centre for Protestant girls and women. Bethany even incarcerated women and girls sentenced by the courts for criminal offences, including some as serious as infanticide. Unlike Pelletstown, its only counterpart at the time it was founded, Bethany was entirely a private home. It was founded when a number of Protestant rescue societies and charities such as ‘Prison Gate’ and ‘The Midnight Mission’ came together in 1921 and opened in a nondescript and shabby house in Blackhall Place in north-inner-city Dublin.
From 1922 the new Free State Government and the Bethany Home ignored one other. This is never remarked upon in the LGRs. In fact, the only mention of anything Protestant-related from 1925 to 1945 is that Braemar House on the Blackrock Road in Cork was added to the list of approved ‘extern institutions’ for the reception of destitute Protestant children in 1933.1 Otherwise the Protestant Bethany Home and the network of orphanages that grew over time to accept the children from Bethany, and in other circumstances once they had reached the appropriate age, was close to officially invisible.
Bethany was administered by a management committee of clergy from various Protestant groups, including the Irish Church Missions and lay Protestants. Unusually for the time, men and women sat on the committee, and many were evangelical and born-again Christians, keen to save souls and rescue sinners. Bethany admitted the occasional Catholic, with the covert hope of converting them. In a bizarre incident in 1926, the Catholic St. Patrick’s Guild organisation offered what was almost a prisoner swap by proposing to accept Bethany’s Catholics in exchange for the Guild’s Protestants. Bethany refused and some of its recorded history documents its sectarian battles with groups like the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society.
The small house at Blackhall Place was constantly overcrowded and conditions were dire. In 1934 the committee purchased a sizable period house in Orwell Road in Rathgar on Dublin’s southside from one of their own members. That committee member held the rest of them to ransom by demanding a price 50% above its independent valuation. Since the old house at Blackhall Place was literally falling down and subject to a compulsory purchase order, the Bethany management committee paid the requested price.
There is much information available about the Bethany Home, thanks to the research of survivor Derek Leinster, who was later joined in the undertaking by Dr. Niall Meehan. A disturbing insight into its early years is the number of babies and children who died in a comparatively small home from 1922 to 1949: at least 227 deaths. That figure also includes stillbirths, and this is unique to Bethany. The most common causes of death were officially recorded as convulsions (54), heart failure (41), marasmus (26) and stillborn (16). ‘Marasmus’ is a medical term that is often recorded as the cause of death for babies from the homes; it means death from malnutrition. The children and babies were buried at Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin in various sections including the Paupers’ Plot along the back wall.
Bethany’s IMR soared during 1935 and 1936 and forty children died. That spike brought attention to the home. The Bethany committee considered withdrawing its registration under the Registration of Maternity Homes Act 1934 to free itself from government involvment. The Deputy Chief Medical Adviser, Sterling Berry, inspected the home a number of times in the late 1930s. Berry was a Protestant and took an interest in the Bethany Home. While it would now be considered extraordinary, the main focus of the State officials and the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society was to ensure that Catholic babies were excluded from Bethany rather than investigating the horrific conditions and hundreds of dead babies. Catholic babies were formally excluded in 1939. Part of the problem was that Bethany received effectively no State assistance up to 1948 when its application for funding was finally approved after many unsuccessful previous applications. There is also no record of Bethany receiving a single penny from Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake grants while the Catholic Mother and Baby Homes received substantial funding.2 The conditions and mortality rates there did improve after 1948, although this could be a reflection of the general improvements across all the homes that began in 1945.
Unlike the Catholic homes, Bethany sent many children to Britain and Northern Ireland and some even ended up as part of the child-export schemes that thrived during the twentieth century. Bethany children were sent to Canada and Australia and other far-flung destinations on the edges of the British Empire. Protestant adoption agencies did not embrace foreign adoptions after 1945 and sent only twenty-four babies oversees, while the Catholic homes and agencies sent thousands.
Bethany
