Читать книгу The Adoption Machine - Paul Jude Redmond - Страница 12
ОглавлениеCHAPTER 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 and philanthropist like her husband, and she founded the ‘Rotunda Girls Aid Society’ (RGAS) 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 most likely explanation for the confusion about Pelletstown is that the South Dublin 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 6% and 7%, year on year, and the figures include all babies, whether born to married or single mothers. The IMR in Ireland improved with every passing decade. By 1950 the rate was down to 4.7%, and medical science and upgraded hospitals have slowly brought the rate down to its present 0.033%, making Ireland one of the safest countries in which to give birth today. This is the baseline set of figures since 1922, against which all infant mortality rates from Mother and Baby Home must be compared.
However, when we look more closely at the 1920s and separate the legitimate and illegitimate mortality rates, a completely different picture emerges. Here are some of the national figures for Ireland – after 1922 – which speak for themselves:
| Year | Infant mortality rate* | Illegitimate infant mortality rate |
| 1923 | 6.6% | 34.4% |
| 1924 | 7.2% | 31.5% |
| 1925 | 6.8% | 28.7% |
| 1926 | 7.4% | 32.3% |
| 1927 | 7.1% | 28.8% |
| 1928 | 6.8% | 30.7% |
| 1929 | 7.0% | 29.5% |
| 1930 | 6.8% | 25.1% |
| * The national IMR includes legitimate and illegitimate babies and would be lower if the births and deaths of illegitimate babies were removed. |
The national statistics show that in Ireland after 1922, illegitimate babies were dying at four and five times the rate of legitimate babies throughout the 1920s. Many of the illegitimate babies were born and died in the five Mother and Baby Homes, including Pelletstown/St. Patrick’s (1900), Bethany (1921), Kilrush (1922), Bessboro (1924) and Tuam (1926). (Opening years in brackets).
Below is an extract taken from the LGR of 1930/31. This report, documenting the discrepancy between mortality rates of legitimate and illegitimate babies in Ireland, was available to the public and media of the time.
Mortality of Illegitimate Children
The decline noted in the year 1930 in the death rate of infants generally was reflected to an enhanced degree in the corresponding rate for children born out of wedlock, the figure being 251 per 1,000 births in comparison with 295 for 1929, a decrease of 15%, and the lowest rate recorded by the Registrar-General since such mortality was classified separately in 1923. The margin for improvement regarding the mortality incidence in this class is, however, greater than in the case of legitimate children, seeing that even with this more favourable record one out of every four illegitimate infants died during 1930 in the first year of life, or in other terms, their mortality rate was more than four times greater than that of the children of married parents. The death-rate of illegitimate children in the Saorstát [Independent Ireland] is markedly more than the corresponding rates of the same year in Northern Ireland (140 per 1,000 births) and in England and Wales (105 per 1,000 births). There was an increase of ten in the number of illegitimate births in this country in 1930 as compared with the preceding year and a reduction of 79 in the number of deaths of such infants.
The comparison with Britain’s figures for the same time is illuminating. In 1930, Ireland’s illegitimate babies were dying at the rate of 25.1%, while just across the border in Northern Ireland the rate was 14%. In England and Wales, it was down to 10.5% and falling. The civil servants and religious who were actively involved with single mothers and their babies were also undoubtedly aware that Britain was closing its large institutions in favour of smaller, more compassionate orphanages and foster homes. This had already resulted in lower mortality rates and an increase in social skills and training for the young adults leaving the homes. The mortality rates in Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes were higher than the national mortality rate for illegitimate babies and remained very high until the late 1940s. Despite the good intentions and best efforts of certain civil servants, Catholic and Protestant, and some caring politicians, the system in Ireland carried on regardless of the indisputable proof that babies were dying in their thousands in the Mother and Baby Homes and workhouses/county homes.
| Year | Children in the Institution | Number of Deaths | Mortality Rate |
| 1924 | 259 | 96 | 37% |
| 1925 | 240 | 119* | 50% |
| 1926 | 271 | 94 | 35% |
| 1927 | 263 | 111 | 42% |
| 1928 | 294 | 95 | 32% |
| 1929 | 330 | 81 | 25% |
| 1930 | 336 | 66 | 20% |
| *Measles epidemic |
Armed with this information, a closer inspection of exact mortality rates in Pelletstown in the 1920s is revealing. The precise figures for the number of children in institutions, and the number of deaths for Ireland’s first Mother and Baby Home, were reproduced in the LGR for 1929/30. However, the ‘mortality rate’ (rounded to the nearest full number), as added below, did not appear in the original LRG and does not represent the precise infant mortality rate as defined above. Some of the deaths were of children aged over one year and most of the children and babies who died were in the large wards for unaccompanied babies in Pelletstown/St. Patrick’s, including many whose mothers were never in Pelletstown. Even with these caveats, the mortality rates were excessive by any civilised standard. The total numbers given for the deaths in Pelletstown are 622 children out of 1,993, over seven years: an average IMR of over 31% for the seven years, peaking at 50% in 1925. Babies and children in Pelletstown were dying at the rate of almost two per week over those seven years. The LGR for 1925/27 at Pelletstown produced a rare negative reaction from the office of Local Government, as shown below.
Deaths of Illegitimate Infants
The Annual Reports of the Registrar-General for the years 1925 and 1926 disclose that the mortality rate amongst infants born out of wedlock was about five times greater than that of legitimate infants, and that one out of every three of the first-mentioned class died before the completion of the first year of life.
It is recognised that illegitimate infants are handicapped by constitutional and environmental disadvantages which tend to a heavy incidence of infant mortality, but even when allowance has been made for these adverse factors, the death-rate of such infants is still disproportionately high in view of the experience of other countries.
From an analysis of the statistics it is evident that this excessive mortality is accentuated at the age period from fourteen days up to three months and in point of causation is associated with Diarrhoea and Enteritis. It may, therefore, be inferred that the unfavourable results are traceable to the early separation of mother and infant and to the influence of unsuitable artificial feeding.
The supervision of the illegitimate child is partly a matter of Poor Law (e.g., maintenance and liability), of Police (inquests and proceedings for neglect) and of Child Welfare (general protective arrangements).
The deplorable loss of life amongst these children shows the necessity for more efficient administration by local authorities of the powers conferred by the Children Act, 1908, the Notification of Birth Acts, 1907 and 1915, and the Midwives Act, 1918.
For those children who were placed with families, the future was little better, as this LGR excerpt shows:
Nurse children: The provisions of part I of the Children Act, 1908, relating to undertaking the care of infants for gain was actively administered during the year in the Dublin union, the area where the need for supervision of nurse children is greatest. There has been a steady increase in recent years in the number of registrations, while the death rate though higher than in 1927–28, compares favourably with earlier years. The number of nurse children within the cognisance of the Dublin union authorities on the 1 March 1929 was 1,261. The following are comparative figures for five years for Dublin union:
| 1924–5 | 1925–6 | 1926–7 | 1927–8 | 1928–9 | |
| Children registered | 523 | 527 | 591 | 489 | 620 |
| Deaths of infants | 83 | 85 | 111 | 49 | 66 |
| Homes condemned | 46 | 87 | 138 | 162 | 161 |
| Prosecutions | 11 | 15 | 26 | 25 | 26 |
Mortality rates among boarded-out children ranged from 10% to 20% after 1922 until well into the 1930s. There is very little evidence as to where exactly those children came from but many, if not the majority, were sent from Mother and Baby Homes around the country.
One key point to note is that the nuns who ran the homes also brought the lists of births and deaths to the local registry offices to be officially recorded. As it is the nuns themselves who are the direct source of the infant mortality rates, they are not in a position to dismiss the inhumanity and brutality of the figures or to distance themselves in any way from the evidence.
Of the nine Mother and Baby Homes, six were horrific and Pelletstown/St. Patrick’s was, in terms of the vast numbers of deaths, by far the worst. The current Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes is restricted to investigating from the year 1922 and therefore Pelletstown will never be formally investigated before that date. The Interdepartmental Report from 2014 states that 6,596 births were registered in Pelletstown but only seven of those births were registered up to 1934 because the home had no maternity wards of its own for the first thirty-four years of its 85-year operation. The final figure for Pelletstown will never be known, but it likely to be above 10,000 single mothers and therefore approximately 10,000 babies. In time, it will be known as the biggest residential institution, in terms of numbers, in Ireland. The figure may be as high as 25,000 mothers and babies and that is without counting the thousands of unaccompanied babies and children transferred to Pelletstown’s wards from various outside sources.
There were 622 children listed as dying in the LGR noted above. If the rate of deaths in Pelletstown from the 1920s – nearly two children per week – was replicated before 1922 and up to 1940, the final figure from 1900 to 1940 would be more than 3,000 children. At present, there is also a confirmed minimum figure for the number of babies who died between 1940 and 1965: 474, a number recently confirmed in the Dáil by the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Katherine Zappone. The two confirmed figures alone (622 + 474) add up to 1,096 and that is only what we can presently confirm with the earlier and undoubtedly worst decades missing. The total number that died will be shocking but will still be only part of the full picture of institutional neglect in Ireland since 1900.
During the 1916 Easter Rising, 500 men, women and children died. Yet at the very least, over four times that number of Irish citizens – mothers, infants and children – died in Pelletstown. There is no commemoration for this tragic institution in our history. There are no plaques or annual marches down O’Connell Street with planes flying overhead. There is only a black hole in our collective folk memory and history books.
St. Patrick’s Guild and St. Patrick’s Infant Hospital
Of all the sources of confusion in the adoption and survivor communities, the worst is unquestionably St. Patrick’s. There were three major St. Patrick’s institutions, each with a different function. Many adoptees and survivors are unaware of this until they start looking for information.
St. Patrick’s Guild (SPG) spent decades organising boarding out for illegitimate babies and some post-separation support for single mothers. After 1952, it grew into one of the biggest adoption agencies in Ireland and arranged nearly a quarter of all legal adoptions. The Catholic Protection and Rescue Society was of a comparable size. SPG also owned a ‘holding centre’ named ‘St. Patrick’s Infant Hospital’ in Blackrock, Co. Dublin. It is customarily called ‘Temple Hill’ to distinguish it from the other two St. Patrick’s. Both the SPG adoption agency and the holding centre share a name with St. Patrick’s – the Mother and Baby Home also known as Pelletstown on the Navan Road in Dublin. To make matters even more complicated, all three St. Patrick’s were based in Dublin and regularly worked closely together. There are many instances of babies born in St. Patrick’s Mother and Baby Home, then transferred to St. Patrick’s Infant Hospital and later adopted through the St. Patrick’s Guild adoption agency.
St. Patrick’s Guild was founded by Mary Josephine Cruice in 1910 to counteract the influence of the Protestant rescue societies. Those rescue societies were involved in arranging boarding out and it was feared that they would ‘snatch’ Catholic children for baptism in one of the Protestant Churches before their placement. SPG was for the ‘better class’ of Catholic single mothers and Cruice was motivated by money as much as by religious zeal.4 SPG’s motto was ‘Save the child’ and its original office was in 46 Middle Abbey Street in Dublin, before moving up a couple of doors to number 50 in 1915. While Cruice was in charge, SPG kept meticulous records.
Cruice had a mixed reputation. She was a very tough character, according to many accounts, and she was certainly ambitious, and driven, at least in part, by greed. Around 1918 SPG opened its own ‘holding centre’ in 19 Mountjoy Square, a formerly genteel Georgian square in north Dublin where most of the four-storey-over-basement, red-brick family homes were turned into flats and overcrowded tenements. The holding centre was a new type of support institution to provide an overflow and/or temporary residence for illegitimate babies born in private nursing homes or public maternity hospitals such as the nearby Rotunda or Holles Street. SPG’s holding centre later also supported the mainstream Mother and Baby Homes.
By 1930 its city holding centre was overcrowded and in disrepair, so SPG leased a large period residence in Temple Hill in Blackrock, at the opposite end of the village from where Lady Arabella Denny had lived. Built in 1767 and known as Temple Hill House, it was originally called Neptune House and was the seaside residence of the First Earl of Clonmel, also known as Copper Face Jack, who resided at his better-known house in Harcourt Street, Dublin. The architect Thomas Joseph Cullen was commissioned to design and build a proper laundry for the new centre, ‘St. Patrick’s Infant Hospital’.
There were only two, possibly three, ‘holding centres’ and they should not be confused with orphanages where children stayed for years. However, to further complicate matters, there were some children in Temple Hill who had confirmed stays of one and two years in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and even a handful of cases where babies stayed for three years. It is likely that several thousand, if not over 10,000, babies passed through the doors of these two holding centres.
According to Damien Corless in his splendid book about the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake, in 1922 St. Patrick’s Infant Hospital tried to organise an early type of lottery known as a ‘Sweep’, based on betting large sums on a chosen horse race. SPG threatened to close its home if its ‘Save the Child’ sweep did not go ahead. When the money started to flow from the government-licensed Sweepstakes, SRG and Temple Hill were quick to become involved and received large sums of Sweepstake money over the years. Of all the groups and institutions related to single mothers, SPG benefitted second only to the Sacred Heart nuns, receiving a total of over £100,000 (nearly €8 million at 2016 values) for reconstruction, additions and maintenance, and capital grants for Temple Hill.
St. Patrick’s Guild was eventually taken over by the Sisters of Charity and shortly afterwards in 1942 came under the control of the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, and his successors.
Conditions in Temple Hill holding centre, in both its locations, were a mystery until the mid-1960s. A small number of women have spoken about their time working there, supposedly training to be staff nurses, although this ‘job’ was often a sham. It was a common deception that was used by the nuns in a slightly different way in Castlepollard and Bessboro and probably in other homes as well. The majority of the girls who ‘trained’ in Temple Hill were assigned there after they had lost their babies to adoption. Many of them were in shock and had no other options in their lives. The pay in Temple Hill was poor and the girls’ lives were highly regimented for fear that they would become ‘repeat offenders’. The mothers who had recently lost their babies did the actual work and treated the babies as well as they could, but the regime was strict and any sort of bonding or affection was strongly discouraged. The girls worked hard to take advantage of the training opportunity, but many ended up with no formal qualifications except a reference from the nuns when they departed. Natural mothers never stayed in the holding centres and visiting their babies was strongly discouraged, at least from the 1960s, although there are recorded exceptions over the years. Therefore, we have two sources of direct testimony about conditions in Temple Hill from the mid-1960s, even though they are extremely limited with practically no paperwork or documentation of any substance available. Stories about the sisters in charge paint them as strict, uncaring and businesslike.
Testimony about conditions in Temple Hill for the babies from around 1970 indicate that they were left in their cots and given very little attention. The girls who cared for them were kept busy and had little time for any individual baby. Many commentators have expressed horror about one common practice in which the ends of babies’ sleeves were attached to their mattresses with large safety pins so they could not move about or turn on their sides. However, that custom was very much the norm in society at the time because it was believed that keeping a baby on its back would prevent cot death. The practice was relatively harmless in normal conditions where babies are picked up after naps or sleep and then moved around and cuddled. In Temple Hill, the pinning caused serious problems because the babies were left on their backs in their cots almost constantly and, as a result, bedsores were common as well as associated infections and pain stemming from raw, untreated bedsores. If the general rule that conditions get worse the further back one researches, it is likely that the babies in Mountjoy Square and Temple Hill were dumped in cots in overcrowded wards and left alone for hours at a time during most of the six to nine years that the holding centres operated.
Babies must have died in Mountjoy Square and Temple Hill as overcrowded wards and the absence of proper isolation units led to the spread of infections, viruses and bacteria. It is unknown where babies who died were interred, although it was most likely in Glasnevin Cemetery. Deansgrange Cemetery, just a couple of kilometres south of Temple Hill, is also a possibility. The mortality rates in the early days were almost certain to have been well above the national average. Temple Hill closed in 1987 and the nuns sold the building for £426,000, tax-free, because religious orders are exempt from all forms of taxation. The current Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes is not investigating Temple Hill and it may be that we will never know the full truth of what happened there.
St. Patrick’s Guild itself later moved to 82 Haddington Road in south Dublin and then further south again into the suburbs, in the direction of Temple Hill, to 203 Merrion Road, where they officially closed in 2013. Their standards declined rapidly after the Sisters of Charity took over and they developed a reputation for issues related to falsifying records. In 1997 Alan Shatter TD attacked the Guild in the Dáil for knowingly giving false information to people trying to trace nature mothers or adopted people. In 2013 the Adoption Authority notified the Department of Children that St. Patrick’s Guild is aware of ‘several hundred illegal registrations but are waiting for people to contact them: they are not seeking the people involved.’5 The illegally adopted people with fake and potentially lethal medical histories were once again compromised by both SPG and the government since neither of them proactively sought out the victims. The General Registry Office was also informed.
The Guild is also known to have settled a number of legal actions before they reached the courts. Issues associated with SPG include knowingly and illegally sending the children of married parents for adoption, and forging signatures. In one case they were so sure they were above the law that they made no attempt to imitate a natural mother’s handwriting, and spelled her name incorrectly. They finally handed their files over to Tusla, the newly named branch of Social Services dealing with various matters including adoption, in 2016 after three years of protracted legal bartering. Everyone who was adopted through SPG was left in effective limbo for those three years, as were elderly natural mothers. People undoubtedly died while waiting for an appointment to trace. There has been no audit of SPG files and no criminal investigation. Despite heavy lobbying from several survivor and adoption rights groups, SPG was not included in the current Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes.
Cúnamh, Miscellaneous Adoption and Forced Repatriation Agencies
St. Patrick’s Guild and its predecessor, the Rotunda Girls Aid Society, were only the beginnings of a minor industry of agencies, and some are still with us today. The Catholic Protection and Rescue Society (CPRS), for example, founded in 1913, is still operating and is equal to St. Patrick’s Guild in terms of overall numbers, with around 15,000 adoptions on its books. It rebranded as ‘Cúnamh’ in 1992 and is based in 30 South Anne Street, Dublin 2.
Each agency changed its function and ethos over the years. The larger agencies began as boarding-out and fostering societies and became adoption agencies after the introduction of proper adoption legislation in 1952. Some were started by well-intentioned lay people and others by religious organisations. Father P.J. Regan began his own agency called the St. Clare’s Adoption Society that specialised mostly in foreign adoptions to the United States, while other agencies handled Irish adoptions only.
The CPRS was founded to prevent Protestant proselytisers convincing desperate Catholic single mothers to have their babies raised as Protestants. While sectarian motives were common in the foundations of many Catholic organisations, the CPRS had a unique role as a self-appointed judge and jury to ‘rescue’ single pregnant women and girls from Britain. From 1922 many expectant mothers boarded the ferries to Britain to escape losing their babies to the workhouses, their worldly possessions often little more than a change of clothes. The British customs officers learned to spot them instantly and they became so common that they earned a semi-official nickname – PFIs – Pregnant from Ireland. However, the British authorities viewed them as a ‘burden to the public purse’ so did everything they could to return them. That is where the CPRS came in, as the agency that took custody of runaway Irish girls and escorted them back to the workhouses or homes in Ireland. A variety of semi-official contacts between British authorities and the CPRS formed an underground practice of semi-forced repatriation. The network continued until at least the 1970s when there are several documented cases of single girls being forcibly repatriated. Nevertheless, thousands and probably tens of thousands of Irish women beat the customs officers and police and somehow avoided the informal networks of priests and volunteers. The majority ended up in Britain’s widespread network of over one hundred Mother and Baby Homes, some run by Catholics, the majority by Protestants.
The agency system is complex and worthy of a book in its own right. There are still a handful of nuns involved and many are hate figures among the adoption and survivor communities. Certain nuns, right up to a couple of years ago, would regularly ask for ‘donations’ to fund their tracing efforts, even though their agencies were State-funded and the nuns themselves were sometimes employed by the State as paid social workers (the Sacred Heart nuns had their own agency called the ‘Sacred Heart Adoption Society’). Many adoptees and natural mothers have missed the chance to reunite because of stalling and misinformation from nuns. The vast majority of the religious-based agencies have been handed over to the government, and social workers now do the tracing and searching in almost every case.
What is most startling is the difference of opinion in the active adoption and survivor communities regarding the various agencies. Some swear at a particular agency while others swear by it. The wild disparity in experience is sometimes due to successful or failed traces but, beyond that, individual nuns and social workers can have good and bad days like anyone else, or unreasonably take a dislike to an adoptee or natural mother. Outcomes for searches among the agencies, well into the 1990s, were overwhelmingly negative and often based on the whim of a stone-faced nun demanding to know if your ‘adoption was happy and, if it was, then why are you here.’ Many of the agencies began as secretive societies back in the late nineteenth century, either to protect or punish single mothers and their babies. That mentality persists in some agencies even now. All the agencies were covered legally by the 1952 ‘sealed-for-life’ Adoption Act. Another point is that the various Catholic agencies cooperated with one another and had members in common and this has led to some confusion.
From the late 1980s, a tiny handful of people in the adoption agency industry and some highly qualified social workers with a genuine interest in adoption-related matters became more vocal about new-fangled ideas such as post-adoption support and properly facilitated reunions. However, the religious orders were still in charge and the newcomers faced a war of attrition to change existing attitudes.
There have always been long waiting lists before a social worker can be appointed. Some have stretched to five years from first contact; delays of one to two years before a first meeting with a social worker are now common. While social services in Ireland have always been chronically underfunded, many of the delays are due to the fact that adoption tracing was, and still is, seen by many as a waste of time and thus assigned a low priority. The adoption and survivor communities today are still dealing with a system that is starved of resources.
