The Adoption Machine. Paul Jude Redmond

      When Éamon de Valera came to power in 1932 there were four huge Catholic Mother and Baby Homes and one medium-sized Protestant home, but at least one more was needed so that in future all single mothers could be finally removed from the county homes and hospitals. However, the appalling mortality rates in the homes had finally come to the attention of the Dáil and a Bill was brought forward to regulate not just the Mother and Baby Homes but all private nursing homes, by requiring them to register and keep proper records. The Bill also provided for regular inspections. The Registration of Maternity Homes Act 1934 is like many of the Acts passed in Ireland: a fine piece of legislation if it had been enforced, but it was not. The Church had free rein to do as it pleased and was rarely challenged by State officials and inspectors.

      The final responsibility for how the Act was enforced lay with the Cabinet and ultimately with the Taoiseach, but no politician was going to challenge the Church. Whatever internal divisions there were in the Church, they behaved like a fighting family when an outsider intervened: they suddenly forgot their differences and turned on the interfering stranger. It was political suicide for any minister to order his officials to enforce the law to its spirit, let alone its letter, so the reality was that nothing changed. The slaughter of the innocents continued for at least another ten years until something far more powerful motivated the nuns to stop the extensive carnage – cash.

      Castlepollard Mother and Baby Home

      In September 1934, Mother Superior General Laurence Daly of the Sacred Hearts bought the third and last of their Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland, another large house, this time in Castlepollard, Co. Westmeath. The 15-year-old girl who had left to become a nun in France had returned many years later as the head of a rich and powerful Catholic congregation but, since this was her home territory, Mother Daly did not want to be embarrassed on her own turf. As a result, Castlepollard was radically different from the other big institutional Mother and Baby Homes of the time. It is worth taking a close look at Castlepollard for several reasons.

      The original estate house in Castlepollard was the seat of the Pollard family. It was built by Walter Pollard in 1716 with an accompanying jailhouse at the top of the nearby row of farm buildings. The Sacred Hearts bought it with 110 acres of land in September 1934, bringing their total Irish landholdings to over 900 acres. They immediately applied for yet another grant from the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake and Éamon de Valera’s government obliged them with £68,000 (€5.3 million at 2016 values). The cash paid in full for St. Peter’s, a three-storey maternity hospital, constructed between 1937 and 1939. Castlepollard was the penultimate Mother and Baby Home, opened in the rush to remove single mothers from the workhouses. One more home was opened twenty years later in 1955 and that was the end of the building phase.