in the Catholic parish of St. Mary’s Pro Cathedral in Dublin in 1881.
The RGAS was one of hundreds of ‘rescue societies’ set up during the nineteenth century and survived because no other group could provide its specific services. In its annual report for 1887/88, the society noted the death of its founder by remarking that Mrs Macan had ‘saved many from shame, sin and sorrow’.2 RGAS was based in 82 Marlborough Street, which is the presbytery beside the Pro Cathedral in Dublin, and in other offices in the same area over its lifetime. It quickly evolved into an organisation run by Catholic laywomen almost exclusively for Catholics, although these women provided their services regardless of religion. While they offered practical help and advice to girls to rebuild their lives, this was only after the girls had given up their children. The primary mission of RGAS was to help find respectable homes for children and then inspect the homes to safeguard the welfare of the babies and children in their care. RGAS helped reunite women with their children if their circumstances had changed enough to ensure they could care for their own children without assistance. Usually the women had married and their new husbands were willing to ‘take on’ their children. The Poor Law of 1899 legislated for adoption by resolution and the RGAS used it when sourcing families who sought to adopt children rather than take cash for boarding them out.
The early decades of RGAS reflected a contradiction of contemporary Victorian and Catholic judgement and yet also contained elements of the emerging Women’s Liberation movement and some genuine Christian sentiment. Like many of the rescue societies, their hearts were essentially in the right place, but the climate of the times also influenced their personal attitudes and behaviour. The girls RGAS aided were reminded of their shame on a regular basis but men were equally castigated for their failure to accept responsibility. In later years RGAS became more judgemental and secretive. From its outset, and despite its name, the society had a large catchment area not confined to the Rotunda Hospital. Up to the 1950s, RGAS placed babies in dozens of small nursing homes in north-inner-city Dublin, and with residents of the surrounding genteel suburbs of Drumcondra. After the 1952 Adoption Act, RGAS found and matched married couples who wanted to adopt babies.
RGAS was sued in the late 1990s by two informally adopted women who demanded their personal files and details. RGAS refused, as it was legally required to do, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Towards the end of its existence, RGAS stopped facilitating adoptions and concentrated solely on tracing and reuniting natural mothers and their adult children, although the adoption community’s memories of dealing with RGAS are decidedly mixed. The society closed quietly and handed over its records and files to the Health Service Executive (HSE) in 2009 after protracted negotiations to protect itself from potential legal actions.
Pelletstown Mother and Baby Home (aka St. Patrick’s)
The first and biggest of Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes was Pelletstown (also known as St. Patrick’s) auxiliary workhouse, situated on the north-west outskirts of Dublin at 381 Navan Road. It was an ‘auxiliary’ unit of the South Dublin Union’s workhouse complex based in James’ Street and operated by the Dublin Board of Guardians. The network of workhouses and Boards of Guardians around Ireland sent the children in their care to local schools, but separated them within the classroom from the local ‘respectable’ children. There were four specific workhouse schools around Ireland, two of them in Dublin, run respectively by the North and South Dublin Unions. Pelletstown was the South Dublin Union School and held about 350 children at full capacity. It eventually became ‘St. Patrick’s Mother and Baby Home’ but there are currently no records available to record when and how this happened: it is likely that it evolved slowly over a period of years.
The single biggest problem with researching Mother and Baby Homes, and indeed the whole subject of adoption, is the secrecy built into the system from the very beginning when babies arriving at Coram’s Foundling Hospital were renamed and had their original identities sealed. Both the Catholic and Protestant Churches were fanatical about secrecy when it came to single mothers. Because of the nature of the system, there are no memories or memoirs from this period, and it is not until the 1940s that we begin to gain serious insights into the homes from those sources. Memoirs describing events and experiences from the 1940s were written only from the 1990s onwards, rather than contemporaneously.
Even in 2017, adoption records in Ireland are sealed for life and the Adoption Authority is exempt from the various Freedom of Information Acts and the Data Protection Act. Trying to get information about Mother and Baby Homes and adoption is frustratingly difficult, and any information received is painfully scant. I fought for nearly thirty years for the results of a medical examination I underwent when I was 15 days old in Pelletstown/St. Patrick’s in 1964. When I finally managed to get the information, I was given two photocopies of the front and back of a card about three inches by two. One side had originally contained nothing but my original name and was blanked out. The other side had four words – ‘normal healthy male infant’. I finally obtained the information in 2015, having sought it since the mid-1980s. The further back one researches, the sparser the record-keeping and the scarcer the details.
Paul Michael Garrett from NUI Galway’s School of Political Science and Sociology identifies the date for the beginning of Pelletstown/St. Patrick’s as the ‘late nineteenth century’.3 He cites the Interdepartmental Report about Mother and Baby Homes from 2014 as his source. However, all that report says is that a team of civil servants working for a couple of months with full access to all government records could only stipulate that the founding of Pelletstown ‘predated the foundation of the state’. This author claims 1904 because it was the year George Patrick Sheridan began his extensive works (see below). But 1906 and 1911 have also been cited. Mary Raftery in her book Suffer the Little Children uses the year 1918 but provides no references. To date, the best evidence comes from Eileen Conway, who worked in Dublin for the Health Service Executive in a senior capacity on an adoption ‘information and tracing’ team. She did a PhD on adoption policy practice in Ireland in the 1980s. In December 2009, Conway told the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health and Children that: ‘We hold the records for St. Patrick’s Mother and Baby Home, so we have thousands of records of mothers who gave birth, from approximately 1900.’
Conway’s evidence dovetails with another clue: the architect George Patrick Sheridan was commissioned to undertake extensive additions and alterations to Pelletstown between 1904 and 1906 at a cost of £10,970, although The Dictionary of Dublin Architects is ambiguous about the work done. Does Conway’s testimony about records from 1900 mean that Sheridan’s work was to facilitate or customise part of Pelletstown as a Mother and Baby Home to sit alongside the workhouse school? The LGRs give annual figures for the total numbers of children housed in both Pelletstown and Cabra workhouse schools at 635 in 1915 and 639 in 1918 so there is no question that Pelletstown was still being used as a residential workhouse school until at least 1918. The North and South Dublin Unions were merged in 1918 and Pelletstown may have been officially designated a Mother and Baby Home, or a ‘special institution’ as they were called at the time. Once again, however, there is no available record of such designation.
Other records from this time are scant because social and civil unrest consumed public and political attention in Ireland, compounded by a severe shortage of paper during the First World War. Single pregnant women were already hidden away from ‘respectable’ society and there was little interest in keeping detailed records about them.
Most institutions recorded only the barest and most basic details. As a rule, they used a single or double line across the page, or two pages at a time, to record essential facts such as names and addresses, dates of birth, the dates when a person entered and left, and their destination upon leaving. There was also information such as the name and date of birth of any baby born, whether born dead or alive, and where they were placed. Many of these records are lost or incomplete, although most that have survived are in excellent condition because of the top-quality leatherbound ledgers that were used. Record-keeping also tended to be inaccurate in many of the homes, whether by accident, design or plain laziness.
The
