or fostering out, particularly in south Dublin and north Wicklow. Part of the reason for this was because the town of Greystones expanded significantly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the opening of the new east-coast railway. It also had a predominantly Protestant population already: Protestants tended to settle in north County Wicklow and the south Dublin suburb of Dún Laoghaire after 1922. The majority of Protestant orphanages and children’s homes were in these two areas, such as Westbank in Greystones and Avoca House in Wicklow. Bethany’s most famous resident, Derek Leinster, was sent to north Wicklow where he was treated appallingly. Derek had left school early and was functionally illiterate. He later emigrated to England where he rebuilt his life with the help of Carol, his wife. He pulled himself up through sheer grit and determination and finally wrote two books, focusing on Bethany and his childhood. They are a harrowing read. Leinster’s reproduced medical records, when he was sent to hospital from Bethany, are a shocking indictment of the wanton and wilful neglect he suffered.
The records for Bethany and many other related Protestant orphanages are held by PACT, the Protestant Adoption Society, at Arabella House in Rathfarnham in south Dublin.
Kilrush Mother and Baby Homes (aka The Nurseries)
Just after the Bethany Home was founded, the newly formed ‘County Board of Health’ in Co. Clare separated single mothers from all other residents of the workhouse in Ennis. It designated the small public auxiliary workhouse in Kilrush as a ‘County Nursery’, another early name for a Mother and Baby Home. It was administered on behalf of the County Board of Health by the Sisters of Mercy, who also ran many of the country’s industrial schools for girls and retain a reputation as one of the cruelest orders of nuns. References to the ‘Nurseries’ in official documents of the time mean Kilrush Mother and Baby Home.
A newspaper article in the Clare People by Joe O’Muircheartaigh a couple of weeks after the Tuam 800 story broke shed considerable light on the home.3 There are also some minor mentions in the LGRs. Like Tuam Mother and Baby Home, which opened in 1926, Kilrush Mother and Baby Home was flexible about who it accepted as residents. They took older children and even the occasional destitute mother and her children if referred from the main county home in Ennis or by the County Board of Health. The Nurseries was also known as the ‘County Orphanage’, although this was a local understanding of its function as distinct from an official designation.
A newspaper report in 1927 states that ‘The Home is in a very poor condition of repair. There is no water supply and no bathing or sanitary accommodation and the lighting is by lamps.’4 In fact, Kilrush had only its own well on-site and no connection to any mains water supplies or sewage outlet. The journalist went on to report how difficult life was for the nuns and how it was ‘not fair’ to expect them to remain in such conditions. The conditions for mothers and babies did not warrant the same level of indignation.
The Sisters of Mercy detained mothers for at least two years and found plenty to keep them busy. They scrubbed already clean floors, did general domestic duties and were hired out whenever possible for any suitable position. After a child turned 2 years old, mothers could leave, but were expected to find employment and contribute a substantial sum towards the maintenance of their child. They were also expected to visit their child and stay in touch. The majority did for at least a number of years while others stayed on in the Nurseries a little longer. The nuns often arranged positions for the women as domestic servants or on local farms. There were several recorded escape attempts and ‘scaling the walls’ seems to have been the chosen method. The local Gardaí rounded up the escapees and returned them for punishment. The women and girls were humiliated through shaving or clipping off their hair, a certain way to prevent future escape attempts. This was followed by a ‘number one diet’ consisting of bread and water. The Sisters of Mercy were well known for removing their heavy leather belts from their habits and savagely beating children in the industrial schools. There is no evidence that they beat the women and children in Kilrush but it is likely. Those who repeatedly attempted to escape were sent to the local county home/workhouse as a severe punishment.
The babies who lived to 2 years of age were ‘boarded out’ until they were roughly 8 years old and this may be a clue as to why Pelletstown was also listed as a workhouse school until at least 1918. It is possible, although still speculation, that the children in Pelletstown were the sons and daughters of single mothers also resident in the same buildings but not mentioned in annual reports. The children went to local schools when they came of age although they were strictly segregated from the local children. At any one time in Kilrush, there were around 150 mothers and children in the home and it was grossly overcrowded during its ten years of existence. At the end of 1928, there were twenty-seven single mothers who had given birth to their first child, while a further six mothers had two or more children.5
The known infant mortality rates for the Nurseries spell out clearly the grim regime of the Sisters of Mercy. While national mortality rates were 6–7% year on year in the 1920s, the rates in Kilrush were ‘extraordinarily high and at any one time the death rates were between 23 and 61%’.6 From what limited information is available, it is estimated that 700–800 women and girls passed through Kilrush and around 40–50% of the babies died, suggesting that more than 300 babies died in the Nurseries. There is still considerable confusion about where the babies were buried because this subject was never mentioned at the time. Nobody cared about them while they lived, so their deaths and burials were unworthy of any attention whatsoever. There is a quiet corner of the grounds of the former County Hospital that has been identified as an Angels’ Plot for stillborn babies, directly across the road from the site of the former home. The widely held local belief is that this plot was used for babies from the Kilrush Home.7 It is possible that some may be buried there, as was the practice in Tuam, which had its own Angels’ Plot.
Kilrush closed in early 1932 and Fitzgerald-Kenney noted its closure in her annual report in the 1933 LGR, where she states that all remaining children were transferred to ‘Shan Ross Abbey’ [sic].8 The Kilrush Home was demolished in 1936.
Bessboro Mother and Baby Home
The Sacred Heart nuns who had taken over the world’s first Catholic model of a Mother and Baby Home back in 1891 arrived in Cork in Ireland in 1922 to open a similar institution. Michael Sugrue, originally from County Kerry, had emigrated as a young man to London. A prosperous businessman, he wholeheartedly supported St. Pelagia’s Home, run by the Sacred Hearts in London. Sugrue received a letter from his cousin Mrs Neville in Cork, who convinced him there was dire need of a Mother and Baby Home in Cork. Sugrue approached Cardinal Francis Bourne of the Westminster Diocese, which immediately purchased a Georgian estate house, farm buildings and 210 acres of land in Bessboro, Co. Cork, on the edge of the city. Owing to the semi-forced emigration of many Protestant and Quaker landowners before and during the War of Independence and the bitter civil war that followed, property prices in Ireland were low and Bessboro was purchased for the bargain-basement price of £800.9 According to the Sacred Hearts’ official biography, Bessboro was opened on 1 February 1922 and the nuns and the inmates ‘laboured together in harmony’ in the fields to feed themselves.10 Strangely, according to the Sacred Hearts themselves, Bessboro accepted children from the local workhouse when it opened and did not become a Mother and Baby Home until 1924 when it was approved by the government as an ‘extern institution’. That meant it could be subcontracted by Local Authorities and County Councils as a home for ‘first offenders’. It was the second-biggest in terms of numbers of all the homes after Pelletstown/St. Patrick’s, and was the last to officially de-list as a home in 1996, although it continued as the Bessboro ‘Care Centre’. Although currently on the market, it remains open at the time of writing with a gentler image as a ‘refuge’, and two single mothers sat their Leaving Certificates in Bessboro as late as 2009.11
At the outset, Bessboro did not have a maternity unit and, in common with Pelletstown, all the pregnant girls were sent to a local maternity hospital – the District Hospital in Cork, now called St. Finbarr’s – a couple of weeks before they were due to give birth. They returned with
