with the problem for fear of being held liable in the civil courts. As always, Irish citizens’ lives and health take second place to financial constraints.
The problems with illegal and with secret adoptions (where the adoption is legal but kept secret from the adoptee) are huge. Thousands of adoptees have discovered when going through old paperwork after their parents’ deaths that they are adopted either legally or illegally and the shock is intense and life-changing. These ‘Late Discovery Adoptees’ around the world are far more common than is generally realised and there are books about the subject and special groups for support. Being told one is adopted at a family funeral or social event by a drunken uncle or cousin is also more common than people realise. Late-discovery adoptees always feel utterly betrayed by their own parents and usually have no chance of resolution or finding out the truth. They spend the remainder of their lives both hating and loving their deceased parents, and the emotional and mental stress has led to breakdowns and decades of suffering.
Tens of thousands of birth certificates have been legally and illegally faked since 1922. In the case of the legally faked certificates, the words ‘Birth Certificate’ were printed on the top of what was really an Adoption Certificate. Around 100,000 Irish mothers lost their babies to forced adoption or separation since 1922, both legal and illegal. Approximately one in every eight families in Ireland is directly affected and there are hundreds of thousands of such cases in Ireland.
Despite constant lobbying by representative groups, the government, and particularly Minister Zappone, is refusing to recommend that the current Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes should include all illegal adoptions in its remit. James Reilly, as Minister for Children, initiated a comprehensive Adoption Bill that included considerable acknowledgement but limited help for illegally adopted people, but the Bill is currently a low priority for Minister Zappone and she has stalled at every opportunity to advance it. The official policy is to do nothing and steadfastly ignore the thousands of victims or, as the author Mike Milotte has described it, to ‘deny till they die’.
St. Gerard’s Mother and Baby Home
St. Gerard’s was the smallest of the nine Mother and Baby Homes and the shortest-lived. (St. Gerard Majella is the patron saint of expectant mothers.) It was opened in 1933 by St. Patrick’s Guild in a four-storey-over-basement, terraced Georgian house at 39 Mountjoy Square, Dublin 1. Intended to cater for fee-paying private cases and ‘select destitute cases’, it was approved by the Minister for Local Government and Health for twenty mothers and twelve babies. Little is known of this smallest of the homes as it closed in 1939 after just six years and there are no former residents known to the online or real-world survivor community, as is the case for Kilrush.
From July 1933 to the following March, sixty-one girls were admitted to the home and twenty-seven babies were born in the nearby Rotunda Maternity Hospital. One of the babies died there. Even though St. Gerard’s was a terraced house in a busy square, surrounded by flats and tenements, there were ten births in the house and all the babies survived. The Interdepartmental Report in 2014 recorded that a final total of forty-five births were registered in St. Gerard’s. Residents stayed on average for six months. They learned the standard array of skills such as sewing, knitting, dressmaking, cooking and domestic chores.
The very low infant mortality rate in St. Gerard’s indicates that it was well run, as was to be expected in an exclusive, fee-paying home where wealthy families paid handsomely for their daughters, and for discretion. A bad reputation would have destroyed its ability to remain open. It may emerge as the best of the homes and is being fully investigated by the current Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes.
Second-Layer Institutions
As the Mother and Baby Homes grew and the county homes created hundreds of babies and children, a network of smaller subsidiary centres developed around the country. These held unaccompanied children who were too old for the homes but too young for industrial schools. Many commentators and writers have classified the industrial schools and Magdalene Laundries as ‘tiers’ of a vast institutional system. However, most writers were unaware of the Mother and Baby Homes network until the Tuam 800 story broke in May 2014, and the industrial schools and laundries are now viewed as a third tier. In fact, there are four layers that could accommodate any woman or child of any age both before and after the county homes were finally closed in the 1950s or were rebranded to other functions.
The interlocking system began by producing babies to begin the life cycle in the Mother and Baby Homes and, at the other end, the Magdalene Laundries were the privately owned and run fourth tier for adult women over 16 years old. Before the laundries, children were placed in industrial schools. While there are exceptions to all the age rules, including industrial schools taking children as young as 2 or 3, or girls as young as 12 in the laundries, the system generally stuck to the age limits. The problem was that this left a gap between the children who were too old for the homes but too young for the industrial schools.
The unseen second tier of mini institutions for children from a couple of weeks old up to 8 years has been only partly investigated. Many of the old orphanages were examined by the Ryan Inquiry, but the role of the Mother and Baby Homes and two sizable second-tier holding centres escaped attention. It is still a common myth that children in orphanages had no parents: the majority were there because the State had prevented their parents from caring for their own children. Poverty or the death of a single parent was enough to have children and babies placed in ‘care’. A sizable number were illegitimate and many of the second-tier places were reserved for them. Children were transferred from Pelletstown when they reached the age of around 4.5 years to two such places: boys and girls to St. Philomena’s in Stillorgan/Kilmacud in Co. Dublin, and boys to St. Theresa’s in nearby Blackrock. Protestant children were transferred from the Bethany Home to similar placements in Westbank in Greystones and Avoca, both in Co. Wicklow, and Braemar House in Co. Cork among others. Dún Laoghaire and Monkstown in Dublin seem to have been rife with Protestant orphanages of all sizes over the years. The enormous Temple Hill holding centre in Blackrock was an integral part of the network and used as a temporary holding facility by many of the Mother and Baby Homes, private nursing homes, and public as well as private maternity hospitals. Babies stayed from days to weeks to years.
Conditions varied considerably over the years and from one home to the next. In some, particularly Protestant orphanages, children were not moved on and grew up in places like the ‘Birdsnest’ in York Road, Dún Laoghaire, and ‘Westbank’ in Co. Wicklow, staying until they were adults in some cases. Catholic orphanages were mostly reserved for middle-class legitimate children of all ages. Some of these children were lucky to find long-term foster placements and had good lives, although many others suffered at the hands of uncaring families who simply wanted the money and free labour.
Times changed and the destinations where children went after their stay in a second-tier institution also changed. In the early days of the State, the children born in the homes generally ended up either in the county homes or industrial schools. These options were principally reserved for poor children with no family support, and illegitimate children fell into that category, albeit at an even lower level. They had miserable lives because they were singled out as an inferior class of human being and were regularly cursed as ‘bastards’ by the religious in the schools. Many of the 16-year-old girls who left industrial schools were starved of love and attention, making them easy prey for predatory men. Sadly, many of them ended up in the Mother and Baby Homes after quickly becoming pregnant outside marriage, surely a direct result of being ejected at 16 years of age into an alien environment without a shred of sex education and desperate for love after a lifetime of deprivation. Many women were doomed to a lifetime of misery and heartbreak in institutions because, if they became pregnant before marriage a second time, they were transferred from the Mother and Baby Homes directly to whichever Magdalene Laundry needed a new penitent to be punished with years of backbreaking labour. About one in every twenty-five women who entered a Magdalene Laundry was transferred directly from a Mother and Baby Home. The final chapters of Children of the Poor Clares
