Union decided to unofficially assign it a dual purpose. It is likely that single, pregnant women were quietly transferred over many years from the main workhouse in James’ Street to a segregated part of Pelletstown to separate them from the ‘respectable’ poor. Ireland’s first Mother and Baby Home was co-located with the Dublin auxiliary workhouse school. It may also have been that many of the children in the workhouse school were the children of single mothers residing in the same building but kept apart from one other.
The Pelletstown school needed women and girls to do the laundry and domestic work, and a perfect solution for the South Dublin union could have been to transfer the unmarried mothers from the main workhouse in Dublin city centre to a segregated section of Pelletstown. What we can definitively say is that sometime after 1918 and before 1922, the older school-aged children were moved out and Pelletstown was designated a ‘special institution’ exclusively for single mothers.
It was administered by yet another French order of nuns, the Sisters of the Daughters of St. Vincent de Paul (later called the Daughters of Charity), founded in 1633 and not in any way related to the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. The order had extensive experience in Britain, where they ran dozens of institutions for children and babies. They continued to run the home on the Navan Road until it finally closed in 1985 and they downsized to a period house in Donnybrook, Dublin 4, where they reinvented the institution as ‘supervised flatlets’.
From the time Pelletstown became a Mother and Baby Home, the everyday routine of the workhouse regime continued. Women stayed for up to two years and then left their children in the home and went to find accommodation and work outside. The nuns often arranged work placements, ensuring that they could check on the former occupants via their new employers. The women were expected to pay for their children’s upkeep and contribute substantial sums from their meagre wages for many years, even if their child was with a family. These ‘parental monies’ were collected by the local Gardaí. The Department of Education administered the scheme, although there are few or no records left to explain its precise workings.
The nuns always referred to the women and girls in Pelletstown as ‘girls’, a psychological ploy used in all the Mother and Baby Homes where women in their twenties, thirties and forties were treated as naughty children rather than as adults. Older women were told that their parents would be contacted if they did not behave themselves. Another method of controlling the residents was to intimidate them with threatened removals to another institution with a harsher reputation. This was common across the system of institutional care. Children in orphanages were threatened with being sent to the industrial schools; women in the Mother and Baby Homes were threatened with Magdalene Laundries or, the most feared of all the institutions, mental asylums.
Pelletstown, in common with many of the major Mother and Baby Homes, was the recipient of generous Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake grants during the early 1930s, and maternity units were established so that the pregnant women and girls would not have to be sent to the workhouse hospital in Dublin. In 1933, Pelletstown received over £8,000 (nearly €650,000 in 2016 values) for a maternity unit. Pelletstown Auxiliary Hospital, as it was officially known, was granted over £43,000 (over €3.5 million at 2016 values) in Sweepstakes funds.
The homes’ emphasis was on the punishment and rehabilitation of ‘first-time offenders’. Second-time or ‘repeat offenders’, as they were known, were treated brutally from the moment they arrived. They often remained in the homes for years, working as virtual slaves, constantly reminded by the nuns of their inferior status. In Pelletstown there was a segregated secure unit for repeat offenders from at least the late 1950s onwards. The secrecy surrounding the Mother and Baby Homes means that there are no records available about this unit. Its existence would be unknown if it were not for the personal testimonies of former residents. The secure unit may have existed from the beginning in some form or other. The other Mother and Baby Homes, particularly the private ones, usually refused repeat offenders and sent them to Pelletstown/St. Patrick’s.
Pelletstown was later certified for 149 mothers and 560 cots. It was common in all the homes to have more cots than beds for mothers so that the homes could accept unaccompanied illegitimate babies from all other sources, such as home births or women presenting in labour to public hospitals. Pelletstown was very large compared to the later homes and its boarding-out system struggled to find enough foster parents willing to take the babies and children. Conveniently, the sisters already had an orphanage and school in Dublin’s North William Street since the 1860s. They opened St. Philomena’s in Stillorgan, Co. Dublin, in 1933 (in the grounds of the present St. Raphaela’s School) for the sole purpose of keeping children between the ages of 3 and 4, and up to 8 years of age. According to the LGR, it was ‘certified in pursuance of the Pauper Children (Ireland) Act 1889, for the reception of boys and girls who may be eligible to be sent to certified schools’. In this case ‘certified school’ means industrial school. St. Philomena’s was exclusively for children too old for the nursery wards in Pelletstown but too young for the industrial schools. Philomena’s was later split when the boys were transferred to another auxiliary orphanage the nuns founded, St. Theresa’s, in nearby Blackrock. The strict division of the genders varied back and forth over the years as numbers and needs dictated. St. Theresa’s and St. Philomena’s were also used occasionally to hold ‘the better class’ of children between foster placements. When the children reached the age of 7 or 8, girls were normally transferred to Lakelands industrial school at Gilford Road, Sandymount, Dublin 4, while the boys were sent to the Artane industrial school on Dublin’s northside. There are also records of children going to other institutions around the country, such as Tralee industrial school in Kerry.
There is strong anecdotal evidence to suggest that, at some point, mixed-race babies from around the country were routinely transferred to Pelletstown and possibly kept in a segregated ward. The ‘coloured’ babies, as they were called, were held until they were old enough to be transferred to St. Philomena’s or St. Theresa’s and it was extremely rare for them to be adopted. Casual racism and sectarianism were commonplace in the homes; mixed-race babies and children were subjected to additional beatings, racist verbal abuse and shaming throughout their time in State ‘care’. They almost universally ended up in the industrial schools, whose survivors still bear the scars of their shameful treatment. Most of these survivors left Ireland as soon as they were freed from the system and, over the last few years, have organised themselves into the ‘Association of Mixed Race Irish’ founded by activist Rosemary Adaser. They have become a powerful campaigning group with several members bravely speaking out about their personal stories. Pelletstown features in practically every story.
By far the best evidence relating to conditions in the homes from the 1920s and 1930s are the records of ‘infant mortality rates’. Before looking in detail at the available records from Pelletstown, it is important to understand exactly how ‘infant mortality rates’ (IMR) work and how to interpret them. Sadly, it is necessary to go into detail about this tragic, and often taboo, subject.
Mortality Rates
The term ‘infant mortality rate’ is used by countless commentators who may have different understandings of its proper definition and usage. The IMR is correctly defined as the percentage figure of the number of babies who were born alive but did not survive until their first birthday. The number of babies who survived their first year is compared to those who did not survive in any given area or institution. It is expressed in two ways: as a percentage figure or as a total number of deaths out of 1,000. The percentage version will be used in this book.
It is imperative to have a basic grasp of the overall IMR in Ireland since 1922 to fully understand the figures given for infant deaths throughout the rest of this book. In 1900, the IMR in Ireland was 9.9%. In other words, one in every ten babies born alive did not live to see his or her first birthday. This figure includes both legitimate and illegitimate babies. The IMR has dropped steadily around the world due to the availability of modern medicine.
Throughout the 1920s, the national IMR was roughly around
