the Fermoy Nurseries except that it was used to hold unaccompanied babies. It is unknown if it accommodated single mothers in another part of the building. Numbers are impossible to estimate.
The Regina Coeli Hostel
Frank Duff is one of the most interesting and in some ways the most radical individual in the story of Ireland’s treatment of single mothers and their babies. In him, the most vulnerable in Irish society had a rare champion who saved thousands of mothers and children from disaster.
Duff was born into a middle-class family and attended Blackrock College, a private school on the southside of Dublin. He joined the civil service in 1908 where he served with distinction until he left in 1934. Duff was a devout Catholic and genuine Christian in the charitable sense of the word. He firmly believed it was his duty as a Christian to actively help his fellow human beings. He was never an ‘armchair activist’ but a man of energy and action who devoted his life to the betterment of others. He was not without his flaws and could be deeply stubborn. In later life, he lost his hearing and when arguing would state his position and then pointedly turn off his hearing-aid. Duff was a velvet radical at a time when very few people dared to oppose the official policies of the Catholic Church.
Duff founded the Legion of Mary in 1921 as a lay Catholic organisation, and membership involved meeting up and saying prayers before going out to visit the most marginalised and forgotten in society. His legionnaires visited people who were sick, lonely and desperate alongside providing support for juvenile offenders and former prisoners whom they assisted in rebuilding their lives. The Legion is currently the largest international organisation ever founded in Ireland and boasts an astounding four million active members and another ten million auxiliary members around the world.
As discussed earlier, the north and south Dublin Unions merged in 1918 and the northside workhouse was closed and abandoned for a while. It was situated in north-inner-city Dublin just south of what is now the Broadstone bus depot. During the War of Independence, the British government managed to find a single solution to two of its problems, just as they had rid themselves of countless tens of thousands of orphans and bastards to the frontiers of the Empire, to conveniently populate it with white Christian ‘stock’. Now it found itself overrun with First World War veterans who were suffering from shellshock (an early term for post-traumatic stress disorder), and a strange assortment of warmongers who simply missed the violence and military life. Ragtag former soldiers were recruited into an ill-disciplined army force and shipped off to Ireland. They proceeded to drink heavily, run amuck and terrorise the countryside by taking pot-shots at men, women and children working in the fields. The ‘Black and Tans’ as they were known, because of their uniforms, which consisted of military surplus, took possession of the former northside workhouse and used it as their headquarters and barracks. After the Treaty, the Black and Tans withdrew and once again the old workhouse was left derelict.
Enter Frank Duff. He persuaded the authorities to give him part of the workhouse as accommodation for homeless men and it opened in 1927 as the ‘Morning Star’ hostel. The narrow road leading up to the entrance was renamed ‘Morning Star Avenue’ and Duff later moved his mother into a house beside the hostel which had been the residence of the workhouse doctors.
On 5 October 1930, a segregated section of the former workhouse was opened for women and named Regina Coeli. At this time, around 70% of institutionalised single mothers were still in workhouses around the country and the rest were in Mother and Baby Homes. Duff’s hostel was opened as a counterpart to the adjoining Morning Star but while the first women who entered the hostel were homeless, word quickly spread that Regina would admit single pregnant girls and single mothers with children. While Britain saw several organisations founded in the twenty years from 1900 to 1920 to represent and assist single mothers, Ireland would have to wait another fifty years before ‘Cherish’ was founded by single mothers to lobby for official recognition and support. Yet in 1930, when practically no one would defend single mothers for fear of being labelled a supporter of sin, here was a devout Catholic, famously obedient to the Church, opening a hostel that admitted single mothers and supported them in keeping and rearing their babies. Regina very quickly became a hostel exclusively for single mothers. It remains a testament to the depth of Duff’s compassion that it housed and supported single mothers and illegitimate children when the rest of society disowned them and imprisoned them in institutions.
The buildings of the old North Union Workhouse were dilapidated and damp when Duff took possession. The women and their children slept in the large dormitories without any privacy and an open turf fire burned for most of the day as the only source of heat and cooking facilities. It was at times overrun with vermin and lice; bed-bugs and illness were rampant. But, for all its failings, it was the only refuge in Ireland for single mothers and was a place where they were treated with respect and dignity by the volunteer staff. It was an oasis in a country that despised single mothers and their ‘bastards’ and Duff was a saviour and saint to the residents of Regina.
The hostel was chronically underfunded from the start and the buildings were in need of constant maintenance but they muddled through. It was run by ‘indoor sisters’, voluntary members of the Legion of Mary who opted to live in the hostel for room and board. They were called ‘Sister’ by the residents, although they were not nuns or qualified nurses. The residents had to pay a nominal sum to stay but Regina would accept bottles or jam jars if a deposit could be redeemed. Duff and the staff did their best to brighten up the gloomy dormitories with limited funds or success. Regina was associated with the Coombe Maternity Hospital and, to a lesser extent, the Rotunda Maternity Hospital. Because it was unique in being the only refuge for single mothers, the dormitories were soon overcrowded. At one point, it held 107 mothers and 150 children. Even the ‘lowest-of-the-low’ repeat offenders were welcomed at Regina and treated with respect.
Some of the mothers were known as ‘care mothers’ who remained in the hostel to mind the children during the day. The other women went out to work in local businesses. Duff formed a network of business people to employ the women, mainly as waitresses and domestic help. When they were old enough, the children went out to local schools and Duff insisted that they were properly dressed and had decent schoolbooks so they would not be targeted or humiliated by the other children. Mothers and children had to leave when the child reached 12 years of age.
Many senior Church and State figures visited Regina and were unanimously generous in their praise of the hostel and Duff. There were sporadic donations from Church and State funds from 1935 onwards. Regina also received Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake grants totalling £10,830 for ‘improvements’ but mainly depended on charity, raffles and other fundraising events to acquire desperately needed funds to supplement the meagre contributions of the mothers from their day jobs.
A sister hostel to Regina opened briefly in Athlone and there was a short-lived attempt to open branches in Waterford and Belfast but only the Dublin Regina lasted. It is still open today and provides shelter and dignity to many vulnerable women on the margins of society.
We shall return to Regina in the 1940s when its mortality rates among children were at times as high as the worst Mother and Baby Homes. Despite its good intentions, hundreds of children died in Regina.
Sean Ross Abbey
In 1927, Mother Laurence Daly from Skeyne, Co. Westmeath, was elected the new Mother Superior General of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts. She was a dynamic character and a brilliant administrator and is remembered with great pride to this day for opening one institution per year over her fourteen-year term of office. Two of those were Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland but were radically different because one was in her native Westmeath and was the order’s prestige home.
Her first purchase in 1930 was Convilla House in Roscrea, Co. Tipperary, where the owner, Count John O’Byrne, had confided to a local priest that he might be forced to sell. Word got back to Daly because it was known that she was searching Ireland for an estate
