Church fiercely resisted the new British policy, and following independence in 1922, moved swiftly to consolidate its control and ownership of the institutions.
Local Government Reports
In 1922, practically all welfare and public health matters were the sole responsibility of local authorities and, from the time that these forerunners of local county councils came into existence in 1872, a new government department headed by a cabinet minister issued an annual report. These Local Government Reports (LGRs) are a primary source for researchers into the Mother and Baby Homes up to 1945.
Section IV of the LGRs was entitled ‘Public Assistance’ and dealt with what would now be considered social welfare and some health-related matters. That section contained an annual report on ‘Unmarried Mothers’ and related issues, which varied from year to year, such as infant mortality rates and explanations and interpretations of new legislation. Some years contained facts and figures, others did not. By the mid-1930s, the sections dealing with ‘Unmarried Mothers’ began to shrink and, by the final year in 1945, amounted to just a couple of brief paragraphs with no useful or illuminating information.
Although the main-section narratives of the LGRs were written by anonymous civil servants, at least one and often two special reports were written every year by the ‘National Inspectors of Boarded-Out Children’: Aneenee Fitzgerald-Kenney and Alice Litster. Having served under the Senior Inspector, Fitzgerald-Kenney was the more senior; Marie Dickie had served since her appointment in 1903 and as a National Inspector from at least 1910. Litster was later also appointed National Inspector. Products of the sensitive and enlightened approach to childcare originating in Britain, their reports were mainly narrative, and significant parts were printed verbatim in the 1927/1928 LGR in the main section. The following year, their reports were relegated to the Appendices section and in smaller print than the main section.
Fitzgerald-Kenney’s and Litster’s Protestant backgrounds are vital to a full understanding of the ideological and religious battle waged in the sub text of the reports year on year. Anyone interested in the treatment of single mothers in Ireland during the 1920s and 1930s should read these reports, including Fitzgerald-Kenney’s and Litster’s individual reports in the Appendices from 1928. The complete narrative offers a fascinating insight into the Inspectors’ philosophy about single mothers and their babies. Their views on the care of children are clear and progressive, unlike the woefully out-of-date ramblings of the Catholic Irish civil servants.
While the language in the reports is very dated and would be considered offensive by today’s standards, the fundamental compassion shown by Fitzgerald-Kenney and Litster is clearly evident. They followed international best practice throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, and regularly cited League of Nations research and recommendations. They firmly believed that a child’s best interests were served by being fostered out to certified and loving families who should be fairly compensated, followed up with regular inspections and proper record-keeping. Fitzgerald-Kenney and Litster fought a losing battle from the start. While they occasionally displayed prejudices (Litster was unsympathetic towards ‘repeat offenders’), they were in many ways decades ahead of their time in insular Catholic Ireland, which had reverted after 1922 to a system of incarceration for pregnant single women.
There is a distinct difference in the attitudes of the Inspectors compared to those of the Catholic civil servants who compiled the main report. The Inspectors consistently demonstrated compassion and understanding of the children’s situations, as far back as 1915 in FitzGerald-Kenney’s case: ‘[Boarding-out is] infinitely superior to the unfortunate system which condemns young and innocent children to the Workhouse as their home … The system of hiring-out is still an unsatisfactory one, and very low wages continue to be paid.’6
The transition to Irish independence must have been a profoundly disturbing time for the Inspectors, with an uneasy standoff between the old guard of senior civil servants and the new nationalist regime that assumed power after the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed in 1921. This tension is discernible in the LGRs from 1922 to 1945.
In 1924 the new Department of Education noted that there were more children in industrial schools in the Irish Free State than in all the United Kingdom. Catholic Ireland continued to judge and punish single mothers and their babies, with Local Authorities, County Councils, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children’s Inspectors, the new police force, An Garda Síochána, and the courts committing an average of 1,000 children a year to the industrial schools, while women were poured into the Magdalene Laundries via the courts or other unofficial means.
It is clear from the LGRs that it was considerably more expensive to keep children in institutions than it was to place them in properly inspected foster homes, but the State continued to push women and children into institutions. The Children’s Act of 1929 clearly demonstrates a decisive choice the Irish State made only seven years after independence, significantly expanding the reasons children could be sent to industrial schools and streamlining the process of committing them. Britain closed its last industrial school in 1933 while Irish industrial schools and Magdalene Laundries flourished, and new Mother and Baby Homes continued to open.
There has been considerable confusion and misunderstanding about the statistics used in the LGRs. For example, the old workhouses were rebranded as ‘County Homes’. Commentators and academics have understood the references to ‘Poor Law Institutions’ to always mean ‘County Homes’. In fact, the figures given for ‘Poor Law Institutions’ always included the public Mother and Baby Homes (Pelletstown, Kilrush and Tuam) and sometimes included private Mother and Baby Homes known as ‘extern institutions’, which were subcontracted by the government (Bessboro, Sean Ross Abbey and Castlepollard). The LGRs are simply unclear at times and the figures used also changed in definition. The civil servants who compiled the reports either presumed people would understand, or they were deliberately obscuring the truth. Some basic errors in the reports also lead to the conclusion that many civil servants were lazy or incompetent, or both.
As a general guide, approximately 900–1,100 single mothers were in the various institutions at any one time during the 1920s and 1930s. These include the Workhouses/County Homes, a small number in the County Hospitals during their confinement, and the public and private Mother and Baby Homes. Overall there were approximately 1,500 illegitimate babies born in 1922, rising to over 2,000 by the early 1930s before decreasing to 1,700 at the start of the Second World War. During the war, that figure increased to over 2,600 in 1945, and we will examine the reasons in later chapters. The Protestant Bethany Mother and Baby Home is absent from all the LGRs, reflecting the State’s attitude that Bethany simply didn’t exist.
It must also be remembered that the facts stated in the LGRs reveal only a snapshot of a particular moment in time. Taking the figures on 31 March 1940 for Pelletstown, there were 135 mothers in the home on that date. However, 243 had been admitted during the previous year while 273 were discharged.
CHAPTER TWO
Building High Walls:
The First Mother and
Baby Home and
Other Institutions
Rather than survey each individual home and adoption society over their lifetimes, this book explains their foundations and returns to examine their daily conditions, funding and notable incidents in particular homes. The early years of Pelletstown are examined in greater detail as it was the first of the Mother and Baby Homes and set the template for many of the homes that followed.
Rotunda Girls Aid Society
Dr Sir Arthur Macan was Master of the Rotunda Maternity Hospital in Dublin from 1882 to 1889 and is chiefly remembered for performing the hospital’s first caesarean section.1 His wife Mary Macan (née Wanklyn) from Surrey in England was an active reformer
