Georgian manor with four cottages and 600 acres of pasture and forestry land with a river running through it.14 The nuns renamed it ‘Sean Ross Abbey’ and it was approved as an ‘extern institution’ by the Minister for Local Government and certified for 152 mothers and 200 babies and children. Daly decided, unlike in Bessboro, to rent out the 600 acres and created workshops where various types of religious paraphernalia were produced for commercial sale. Some acres around the home were retained for basic food crops. There is some unconfirmed anecdotal evidence that at one point they produced children’s coffins, for commercial sale rather than for the babies who died in Sean Ross. The nuns installed a commercial laundry that took in outside work for payment just as the Magdalene Laundries did. Unfortunately, this common feature has led to Sean Ross being designated a Magdalene Laundry by many commentators, but it was not. It was exclusively for single pregnant women and mothers.
Over the years, Sean Ross repeatedly applied for Sweepstakes grants and received a total of £44,063 (over €3.5 million at 2016 values).15 The nuns hired the Dublin architect and builder T.J. Cullen to erect a chapel.
From the very start Sean Ross was one of the worst of the nine homes. The irrefutable evidence is in the infant mortality rate for its first year. There were 120 babies born and 60 who died. The mortality rates were available for several years in the LGRs of the 1930s and remained very high for a further twenty years before showing any signs of improvement. They deserve to be known far and wide, especially in Chigwell in Essex where the Sacred Hearts have been headquartered in a lavish period house they purchased in 1895 for £5,000. We shall return to Sean Ross in the late 1930s to compare conditions with their new sister home in Castlepollard.
Like their other home in Bessboro, Sean Ross had its own Angels’ Plot. Private research carried out by members of Adoption Rights Now, and published in a report into adoption that focused on the three Sacred Heart homes, identified 800 registered deaths between 1930 and 1950. The final figure for the Angels’ Plot is almost certainly around 1,000 as it operated for another twenty years albeit with far lower mortality rates due to changes in conditions after 1950. The stillbirths push the figure considerably higher. We shall return to this home and examine conditions and funding throughout its lifetime until it closed in 1969.
CHAPTER 4
Holy Catholic Ireland:
A New Model
After Sean Ross Abbey, another three homes opened but they were all very different from their predecessors, as the rapid expansion of the network of private and lucrative nursing homes led to the last three homes responding to a perceived need by the upper and middle classes for a better quality of care for their pregnant daughters. Two of these homes, St. Gerard’s and Dunboyne, were effectively private fee-paying homes, while Castlepollard was a mix of public and private patients.
Private Nursing Homes and Illegal Adoptions
About 300 maternity homes were registered under the 1934 Registration of Maternity Homes Act during its legal lifetime. Most of them were small nursing homes, usually in semi-converted Victorian and Edwardian red-brick houses of two and three storeys over basements. Some of them – but not all – accepted single pregnant women among their clients while a minority specialised in single mothers only. They were usually run by midwives or nurses.
The private nursing homes were the ultra-secret preserve of the wealthy and upper classes of the day who discreetly sent their daughters away to make their problems disappear. Many of the nursing homes played hard and fast with the birth registration rules; hundreds and probably thousands of babies were falsely registered as the natural children of married couples who adopted children in a financial transaction. There was an underground ‘grey’ market in child trafficking among the wealthy who could afford to use the private nursing homes either to hide their daughters’ ‘shame’ or illicitly obtain babies for illegal adoption. Some of them were semi-integrated into the system. There are many records of unwanted babies whom they could not place being transferred to institutions such as Temple Hill, which was always happy to accept babies from any source.
Some nursing homes, such as St. Rita’s in Sandford Road, Ranelagh, Dublin 6, owned by the notorious Mary Keating, were well-known for the political and criminal intrigue attached to them. One former Lord Mayor of Dublin and later a TD was closely associated with St. Rita’s. The second edition of Banished Babies named a ‘senior Fianna Fáil politician’ from the first edition as former Taoiseach Charles Haughey.1 A priest was jokingly told by Haughey that ‘sure half the children born at St. Rita’s were fathered by members of the Dáil’. The stories among the survivors’ communities regularly mention senior politicians, and in some cases their wives, who were involved in the adoption agencies. A number of adoptees claim that they are the sons and daughters of senior politicians, including at least one former Taoiseach. Huge sums of money were paid for babies across Dublin where there was a thriving black market from the 1940s into the late 1960s. The nursing homes involved in black-market trafficking did not keep records or, if they did, they were falsified. Although there were criminal investigations, and senior politicians were alerted to the practice in the 1960s, nothing was done and the body politic and An Garda Síochána ignored matters for fear of opening an almighty can of worms that would certainly have attracted the interest of the international media.
Other nursing homes are unknown in the active survivor community let alone to the general public, even though they were bigger and in some cases custom-designed or remodelled as miniature Mother and Baby Homes. In 1938, for example, ‘Lowville’ at 11 Herbert Avenue, Dublin 4, was rebuilt and redesigned as a Mother and Baby Home by the same architect/builder who had built Sean Ross Abbey’s maternity wing and new chapel (1933/35) and Castlepollard Mother and Baby Home and chapel (1937/41).
Theresa Hiney Tinggal, a fierce and effective campaigner for illegal adoptees, has carried out research that showed the reaction of the private nursing homes in the aftermath of a new Health Act, which promised tighter controls over nursing homes, in the early 1970s. Dozens of them closed down overnight, knowing that government inspections would have revealed their former malpractices and led to widespread prosecutions.
From the 1970s onwards, supervised ‘flatlets’ were opened in the same type of period houses, mostly in south Dublin around Donnybrook. St. Gerard’s Mother and Baby Home could just as easily be classed as a large, private nursing home instead of a tiny Mother and Baby Home. The supervised flatlets survived well into the 1990s.
Frances Fitzgerald TD was a former social worker who went into politics. For many years while in opposition, she championed the cause of open adoption records and made passionate speeches in the Dáil about the rights of adoptees. Then Minister Fitzgerald was elected to government and did a U-turn on everything she had ever said. During her term as Minister for Children, illegal adoptions were reclassified as ‘falsified birth registrations’ and that repulsive and deeply dishonest phrase remains the official line today, in an effort to divert public attention away from the fact that what occurred was in fact human trafficking and slavery. There is no help of any description for the victims and survivors. The policy of the current government is a continuation of a long-standing effort to ignore illegal adoptees and pretend that they do not exist.
Most illegally adopted people in Ireland have no records and no idea where to start searching for answers. They spend their lives searching and get nothing but heartache and sorrow. For those who have never been told that they are adopted, legally or illegally, the situation is worse again, because they are unaware of their medical history. I had to sit in a maternity hospital with my wife when we were expecting our first child and reply to a midwife’s request for my medical history that ‘I’m adopted’. I still remember her little double-take and shock: I felt embarrassed for her and personally humiliated. Innocent people have died as a result of illegal adoptions or adoptive parents withholding the truth from their children. Those who facilitated or arranged illegal adoptions have pocketed enormous sums of cash and many of them are still alive. The
