to the LGR for that year, the nuns received an Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake grant of £13,600 to convert the old stables into a maternity wing where all future births would take place, without doctors or painkillers. At least 3 Bessboro residents who gave birth to babies in the 1920s stayed for at least 10 years and became known as the ‘old girls’. Similar stories have emerged from other homes and it appears that many of them never left.
Strangely enough, the figure for the Sweepstakes grants in the LRG is incomplete according to the official Sweepstakes book. Their official figure is that Bessboro received £26,605 for ‘capital grants’. There is surely an innocent explanation for the discrepancy of precisely £8,000 (€640,000 at 2016 values).12 £1,500 of the total (€120,000 at 2016 values) was granted to equip the maternity unit. However, June Goulding, who was a midwife in Bessboro in 1951, was adamant that there was no medical equipment in the maternity room except a bed with stirrups and a small medical cabinet containing a needle and surgical thread. Multiple testimonies from later years confirm Goulding was correct. From 1934, all births took place in Bessboro. In emergency cases, an ambulance was called, but this was very rare.
In the beginning, the nuns hired a minimal number of farm labourers locally, but the whole idea of purchasing the farmland with the house was that the residents could be used as free labour. The girls did the bulk of the farm work and they also scrubbed and cleaned the home and convent. Bessboro had its own laundry where all the washing for the home and convent was done by hand, and also had its own bakery. It later opened a farm shop where the top-quality produce was sold at full commercial value while the residents were fed on the substandard leftovers. The hard labour and the second-rate food were part of the punishment. The LRG for 1928/29, page 113, records that:
This Home was opened in 1922 and is intended primarily for young mothers who have fallen for the first time and who are likely to be influenced towards a useful and respectable life. In the Home, they are trained in domestic work, cookery, needlework, dairy work, poultry keeping and gardening and instructed in their religion. After a period of training each is provided with a suitable situation and put in the way of self-support and the children are boarded out with reliable foster mothers. The rate of maintenance is three shillings a day for mother and child, but if the child dies there is no charge.
There were 75 mothers resident on the 1 January 1928. During the following year 24 were admitted and 34 discharged, leaving 65 in residence at the end of the year. The number of children in the Home on 31 December 1928, was 64. The boards of public assistance responsible for maintenance were: South Cork, 40: Kilkenny, 11: Waterford, 8: Tipperary, N.R., 5, and Kerry, 1.
When the Interdepartmental Report was released in 2014 as a ‘scoping exercise’ into the Mother and Baby Homes after the Tuam 800 story broke, many commentators were surprised at the apparently low figure of 5,912 for births in Bessboro. However, the figure was missing the many hundreds born in St. Finbarr’s for at least ten years during the 1920s and early 1930s as well as hundreds, if not thousands, of stillbirths over its lifetime. And, in 1986, following official pressure in the mid-1980s, Bessboro agreed to stop facilitating births in the home and all subsequent births took place once again in St. Finbarr’s. For many years, this author has maintained that the final number of girls and women who went through the doors of Bessboro was between 8,000 and 10,000 and nothing to date has undermined that figure.
The nuns designated a small, anonymous area near their new home as a place for burying babies without coffins, markers or distinct graves. Although they did at one stage maintain a death register, they never kept any specific book or account of exactly who was buried there. The ‘Angels’ Plot’ was neglected by the nuns, but when international attention focused on Bessboro after the Tuam 800 story exploded in May 2014, the nuns paid to have the plot turned into a twee memorial garden. For many years, urban legends among the survivor community maintained that over 2,000 babies were buried there. It is difficult to estimate the number but it is certainly well over 1,000 and probably more than 1,500. When stillbirths are included, that figure may exceed 2,000. Bessboro’s on-site Angels’ Plot is the largest of any of the homes.
According to one of the LGRs, thirty babies died between the years 1933 and 1935 in Bessboro. More than half of that total was due to ‘marasmus’, emaciation due to malnutrition. In later years there are records of well over one hundred babies a year dying. We shall return to Bessboro to compare conditions there in the late 1930s with its sister home in Castlepollard.
Tuam Mother and Baby Home (aka The Home)
The Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway, opened in 1926. Tuam was a converted workhouse owned and financed by the Poor Law Guardians and the local authority, which invited the Bon Secours nuns to run and administer Tuam on their behalf. According to the Interdepartmental Report of 2014, there were 1,101 births included in the records of the General Registers Office during the home’s lifetime. This figure is so low because, once again, it does not reflect the fact that Tuam did not have its own maternity unit in the early years. There were three ‘old girls’ who gave birth in Tuam and stayed there for the rest of their lives.13
A maternity hospital was approved for Tuam in 1934 at a cost of £1,745 to the public purse. Overall, Tuam received £3,830 (over €300,000 at 2016 values) in Sweepstakes grants. Tuam was also used as an overflow by the local county home, so occasionally women with their children were sent there and stayed for months and even years, much as they had lived in the old workhouses now rebranded as county homes.
The following year, in 1935, it was reported that Tuam held 31 mothers and 191 children at the end of March, reflecting its status as a holding centre as much as a Mother and Baby Home. It is interesting to note what happened during the year when 113 mothers were released. Sixty returned to their families, forty were sent to positions, which undoubtedly meant menial jobs as domestic servants or to farm work; three were married. Of the sixty-six children who were discharged, only seventeen left with their mothers, while almost twice that number, thirty-two, were boarded out. The rest went either to relatives or what were referred to as ‘suitable institutions’. The missing numbers, which are not specified, are the children who died.
The LGRs mention Tuam year after year and provide useful statistics but the numbers of children who died are notably absent during the whole of the 1930s, with the exception of 1933/34. That year shows 120 admissions to Tuam and that forty-two babies died. Any mortality rate extracted from these figures would be only a rough guide to the real figure but that rate is believed to be 35%. The omission of the numbers of deaths in the homes during the 1930s is actually divided in two. Tuam and Pelletstown facts and figures omit deaths during the 1930s while the three Sacred Heart homes have their deaths published year after year. Clearly someone did not want the government to be embarrassed so details of the deaths in the public homes were surpressed, while revealing the private homes’ mortality rates for all to see. Tuam was similar to Bethany in that the nuns did not embrace legal adoption after 1952. Before that time, many of the babies born in the home stayed until they were 7 or 8 when they were transferred to industrial schools. After 1952, many children were still boarded out or sent to industrial schools, despite the availability of waiting families who wanted to adopt children. An official report about Tuam and Bessboro from 2012 was suppressed but unearthed by Conall Ó Fátharta in the Irish Examiner. It revealed a suspicion that the nuns were faking deaths and illegally selling the babies abroad.
There have been several first-hand accounts from Tuam that surfaced after the Tuam 800 story in May 2014. Conditions were grim and the buildings were old and decrepit. Overall, Tuam easily qualifies as one of the worst Mother and Baby Homes. The home closed in 1961 and is included in the Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes.
Fermoy Nurseries
The LGRs mention the ‘Nurseries’ in Fermoy, Co. Cork, in the late 1920s and early 1930s but practically nothing is known about exactly what type of institution it was or how it functioned. It is noteworthy that Kilrush Mother and Baby Home was also referred to as the ‘Nurseries’
