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CHAPTER 3

Going Our Own Way:

The Mother and Baby

Homes Expansion

Part of the Catholic Church’s agenda for newly independent Ireland was to isolate single mothers from the general workhouse populations and move them to separate ‘special institutions’, as Mother and Baby Homes were originally called.

While single motherhood was never a crime, it was effectively treated as such. ‘Repeat offenders’ were considered ‘mentally deficient’ and needed to be ‘committed’ to an institution, just as a convicted criminal is ‘committed’ to jail for society’s protection.

In September 1922, the ‘Federation of Dublin Charities’, under the control of Archbishop of Dublin Edward Byrne, submitted a proposal to the government for the future management of single mothers. It was a historic moment because it aimed to remove single mothers from the workhouses. It clearly had the approval of the archbishop himself as it was submitted by an organisation he controlled. The proposal was accepted by the Department of Local Government and the die was cast. Single mothers would leave the workhouses and go to a new type of ‘special institution’, and these new residential homes would be officially run by the religious orders.

The original Irish Catholic Mother and Baby Homes were generally a cross between a maternity hospital with no doctors or nurses and a low-to-medium-security prison. The permanent separation of unmarried mothers from their illegitimate babies was taken for granted. A network of smaller institutions grew to support the new ‘special institutions’. Seven of these were built between 1921 and 1935.

Single mothers and their babies after 1922 were pushed further out of Irish society, out of the workhouses, and isolated in Mother and Baby Homes. Meanwhile, the fathers of many of the babies, often rapists, liars, child abusers and married men who abandoned their victims and pregnant girlfriends to the brutality of the workhouses, escaped all responsibility for their actions.

While the options available to single mothers narrowed greatly, a number of tough and determined women, with strong family support, somehow managed to keep their babies. It was a common solution for a girl’s parents to informally adopt their grandchild as their own, with the baby’s mother becoming its elder sister. Some single mothers kept their children even after being disowned by their families but endured a constant struggle to find childcare and employment. Many in the cities resorted to begging and prostitution. The new State and the Church often intervened, snatching illegitimate children from their single mothers on the slightest pretext before dispatching them to the nearest industrial school.

The Bethany Home

The Bethany Mother and Baby Home was Protestant and remained the only such Protestant Home that ever operated in Ireland. Because Bethany was the only Protestant Home, it served a variety of purposes over the years such as occasional use by the courts as a remand centre for Protestant girls and women. Bethany even incarcerated women and girls sentenced by the courts for criminal offences, including some as serious as infanticide. Unlike Pelletstown, its only counterpart at the time it was founded, Bethany was entirely a private home. It was founded when a number of Protestant rescue societies and charities such as ‘Prison Gate’ and ‘The Midnight Mission’ came together in 1921 and opened in a nondescript and shabby house in Blackhall Place in north-inner-city Dublin.

From 1922 the new Free State Government and the Bethany Home ignored one other. This is never remarked upon in the LGRs. In fact, the only mention of anything Protestant-related from 1925 to 1945 is that Braemar House on the Blackrock Road in Cork was added to the list of approved ‘extern institutions’ for the reception of destitute Protestant children in 1933.1 Otherwise the Protestant Bethany Home and the network of orphanages that grew over time to accept the children from Bethany, and in other circumstances once they had reached the appropriate age, was close to officially invisible.

Bethany was administered by a management committee of clergy from various Protestant groups, including the Irish Church Missions and lay Protestants. Unusually for the time, men and women sat on the committee, and many were evangelical and born-again Christians, keen to save souls and rescue sinners. Bethany admitted the occasional Catholic, with the covert hope of converting them. In a bizarre incident in 1926, the Catholic St. Patrick’s Guild organisation offered what was almost a prisoner swap by proposing to accept Bethany’s Catholics in exchange for the Guild’s Protestants. Bethany refused and some of its recorded history documents its sectarian battles with groups like the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society.

The small house at Blackhall Place was constantly overcrowded and conditions were dire. In 1934 the committee purchased a sizable period house in Orwell Road in Rathgar on Dublin’s southside from one of their own members. That committee member held the rest of them to ransom by demanding a price 50% above its independent valuation. Since the old house at Blackhall Place was literally falling down and subject to a compulsory purchase order, the Bethany management committee paid the requested price.

There is much information available about the Bethany Home, thanks to the research of survivor Derek Leinster, who was later joined in the undertaking by Dr. Niall Meehan. A disturbing insight into its early years is the number of babies and children who died in a comparatively small home from 1922 to 1949: at least 227 deaths. That figure also includes stillbirths, and this is unique to Bethany. The most common causes of death were officially recorded as convulsions (54), heart failure (41), marasmus (26) and stillborn (16). ‘Marasmus’ is a medical term that is often recorded as the cause of death for babies from the homes; it means death from malnutrition. The children and babies were buried at Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin in various sections including the Paupers’ Plot along the back wall.

Bethany’s IMR soared during 1935 and 1936 and forty children died. That spike brought attention to the home. The Bethany committee considered withdrawing its registration under the Registration of Maternity Homes Act 1934 to free itself from government involvment. The Deputy Chief Medical Adviser, Sterling Berry, inspected the home a number of times in the late 1930s. Berry was a Protestant and took an interest in the Bethany Home. While it would now be considered extraordinary, the main focus of the State officials and the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society was to ensure that Catholic babies were excluded from Bethany rather than investigating the horrific conditions and hundreds of dead babies. Catholic babies were formally excluded in 1939. Part of the problem was that Bethany received effectively no State assistance up to 1948 when its application for funding was finally approved after many unsuccessful previous applications. There is also no record of Bethany receiving a single penny from Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake grants while the Catholic Mother and Baby Homes received substantial funding.2 The conditions and mortality rates there did improve after 1948, although this could be a reflection of the general improvements across all the homes that began in 1945.

Unlike the Catholic homes, Bethany sent many children to Britain and Northern Ireland and some even ended up as part of the child-export schemes that thrived during the twentieth century. Bethany children were sent to Canada and Australia and other far-flung destinations on the edges of the British Empire. Protestant adoption agencies did not embrace foreign adoptions after 1945 and sent only twenty-four babies oversees, while the Catholic homes and agencies sent thousands.

Bethany never embraced formal adoption, preferring boarding or fostering out, particularly in south Dublin and north Wicklow. Part of the reason for this was because the town of Greystones expanded significantly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the opening of the new east-coast railway. It also had a predominantly Protestant population already: Protestants tended to settle in north County Wicklow and the south Dublin suburb of Dún Laoghaire after 1922. The majority of Protestant orphanages and children’s homes were in these two areas, such as Westbank in Greystones and Avoca House in Wicklow. Bethany’s most famous resident, Derek Leinster, was sent to north Wicklow where he was treated appallingly. Derek had left school early and was functionally illiterate. He later emigrated to England where he rebuilt his life with the help of Carol, his wife. He pulled himself up through sheer grit and determination and finally wrote two books, focusing on Bethany and his childhood. They are a harrowing read. Leinster’s reproduced medical records, when he was sent to hospital from Bethany, are a shocking indictment of the wanton and wilful neglect he suffered.

The records for Bethany and many other related Protestant orphanages are held by PACT, the Protestant Adoption Society, at Arabella House in Rathfarnham in south Dublin.

Kilrush Mother and Baby Homes (aka The Nurseries)

Just after the Bethany Home was founded, the newly formed ‘County Board of Health’ in Co. Clare separated single mothers from all other residents of the workhouse in Ennis. It designated the small public auxiliary workhouse in Kilrush as a ‘County Nursery’, another early name for a Mother and Baby Home. It was administered on behalf of the County Board of Health by the Sisters of Mercy, who also ran many of the country’s industrial schools for girls and retain a reputation as one of the cruelest orders of nuns. References to the ‘Nurseries’ in official documents of the time mean Kilrush Mother and Baby Home.

A newspaper article in the Clare People by Joe O’Muircheartaigh a couple of weeks after the Tuam 800 story broke shed considerable light on the home.3 There are also some minor mentions in the LGRs. Like Tuam Mother and Baby Home, which opened in 1926, Kilrush Mother and Baby Home was flexible about who it accepted as residents. They took older children and even the occasional destitute mother and her children if referred from the main county home in Ennis or by the County Board of Health. The Nurseries was also known as the ‘County Orphanage’, although this was a local understanding of its function as distinct from an official designation.

A newspaper report in 1927 states that ‘The Home is in a very poor condition of repair. There is no water supply and no bathing or sanitary accommodation and the lighting is by lamps.’4 In fact, Kilrush had only its own well on-site and no connection to any mains water supplies or sewage outlet. The journalist went on to report how difficult life was for the nuns and how it was ‘not fair’ to expect them to remain in such conditions. The conditions for mothers and babies did not warrant the same level of indignation.

The Sisters of Mercy detained mothers for at least two years and found plenty to keep them busy. They scrubbed already clean floors, did general domestic duties and were hired out whenever possible for any suitable position. After a child turned 2 years old, mothers could leave, but were expected to find employment and contribute a substantial sum towards the maintenance of their child. They were also expected to visit their child and stay in touch. The majority did for at least a number of years while others stayed on in the Nurseries a little longer. The nuns often arranged positions for the women as domestic servants or on local farms. There were several recorded escape attempts and ‘scaling the walls’ seems to have been the chosen method. The local Gardaí rounded up the escapees and returned them for punishment. The women and girls were humiliated through shaving or clipping off their hair, a certain way to prevent future escape attempts. This was followed by a ‘number one diet’ consisting of bread and water. The Sisters of Mercy were well known for removing their heavy leather belts from their habits and savagely beating children in the industrial schools. There is no evidence that they beat the women and children in Kilrush but it is likely. Those who repeatedly attempted to escape were sent to the local county home/workhouse as a severe punishment.

The babies who lived to 2 years of age were ‘boarded out’ until they were roughly 8 years old and this may be a clue as to why Pelletstown was also listed as a workhouse school until at least 1918. It is possible, although still speculation, that the children in Pelletstown were the sons and daughters of single mothers also resident in the same buildings but not mentioned in annual reports. The children went to local schools when they came of age although they were strictly segregated from the local children. At any one time in Kilrush, there were around 150 mothers and children in the home and it was grossly overcrowded during its ten years of existence. At the end of 1928, there were twenty-seven single mothers who had given birth to their first child, while a further six mothers had two or more children.5

The known infant mortality rates for the Nurseries spell out clearly the grim regime of the Sisters of Mercy. While national mortality rates were 6–7% year on year in the 1920s, the rates in Kilrush were ‘extraordinarily high and at any one time the death rates were between 23 and 61%’.6 From what limited information is available, it is estimated that 700–800 women and girls passed through Kilrush and around 40–50% of the babies died, suggesting that more than 300 babies died in the Nurseries. There is still considerable confusion about where the babies were buried because this subject was never mentioned at the time. Nobody cared about them while they lived, so their deaths and burials were unworthy of any attention whatsoever. There is a quiet corner of the grounds of the former County Hospital that has been identified as an Angels’ Plot for stillborn babies, directly across the road from the site of the former home. The widely held local belief is that this plot was used for babies from the Kilrush Home.7 It is possible that some may be buried there, as was the practice in Tuam, which had its own Angels’ Plot.

Kilrush closed in early 1932 and Fitzgerald-Kenney noted its closure in her annual report in the 1933 LGR, where she states that all remaining children were transferred to ‘Shan Ross Abbey’ [sic].8 The Kilrush Home was demolished in 1936.

Bessboro Mother and Baby Home

The Sacred Heart nuns who had taken over the world’s first Catholic model of a Mother and Baby Home back in 1891 arrived in Cork in Ireland in 1922 to open a similar institution. Michael Sugrue, originally from County Kerry, had emigrated as a young man to London. A prosperous businessman, he wholeheartedly supported St. Pelagia’s Home, run by the Sacred Hearts in London. Sugrue received a letter from his cousin Mrs Neville in Cork, who convinced him there was dire need of a Mother and Baby Home in Cork. Sugrue approached Cardinal Francis Bourne of the Westminster Diocese, which immediately purchased a Georgian estate house, farm buildings and 210 acres of land in Bessboro, Co. Cork, on the edge of the city. Owing to the semi-forced emigration of many Protestant and Quaker landowners before and during the War of Independence and the bitter civil war that followed, property prices in Ireland were low and Bessboro was purchased for the bargain-basement price of £800.9 According to the Sacred Hearts’ official biography, Bessboro was opened on 1 February 1922 and the nuns and the inmates ‘laboured together in harmony’ in the fields to feed themselves.10 Strangely, according to the Sacred Hearts themselves, Bessboro accepted children from the local workhouse when it opened and did not become a Mother and Baby Home until 1924 when it was approved by the government as an ‘extern institution’. That meant it could be subcontracted by Local Authorities and County Councils as a home for ‘first offenders’. It was the second-biggest in terms of numbers of all the homes after Pelletstown/St. Patrick’s, and was the last to officially de-list as a home in 1996, although it continued as the Bessboro ‘Care Centre’. Although currently on the market, it remains open at the time of writing with a gentler image as a ‘refuge’, and two single mothers sat their Leaving Certificates in Bessboro as late as 2009.11

At the outset, Bessboro did not have a maternity unit and, in common with Pelletstown, all the pregnant girls were sent to a local maternity hospital – the District Hospital in Cork, now called St. Finbarr’s – a couple of weeks before they were due to give birth. They returned with their babies to Bessboro soon after. However, in 1933, according to the LGR for that year, the nuns received an Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake grant of £13,600 to convert the old stables into a maternity wing where all future births would take place, without doctors or painkillers. At least 3 Bessboro residents who gave birth to babies in the 1920s stayed for at least 10 years and became known as the ‘old girls’. Similar stories have emerged from other homes and it appears that many of them never left.

Strangely enough, the figure for the Sweepstakes grants in the LRG is incomplete according to the official Sweepstakes book. Their official figure is that Bessboro received £26,605 for ‘capital grants’. There is surely an innocent explanation for the discrepancy of precisely £8,000 (€640,000 at 2016 values).12 £1,500 of the total (€120,000 at 2016 values) was granted to equip the maternity unit. However, June Goulding, who was a midwife in Bessboro in 1951, was adamant that there was no medical equipment in the maternity room except a bed with stirrups and a small medical cabinet containing a needle and surgical thread. Multiple testimonies from later years confirm Goulding was correct. From 1934, all births took place in Bessboro. In emergency cases, an ambulance was called, but this was very rare.

In the beginning, the nuns hired a minimal number of farm labourers locally, but the whole idea of purchasing the farmland with the house was that the residents could be used as free labour. The girls did the bulk of the farm work and they also scrubbed and cleaned the home and convent. Bessboro had its own laundry where all the washing for the home and convent was done by hand, and also had its own bakery. It later opened a farm shop where the top-quality produce was sold at full commercial value while the residents were fed on the substandard leftovers. The hard labour and the second-rate food were part of the punishment. The LRG for 1928/29, page 113, records that:

This Home was opened in 1922 and is intended primarily for young mothers who have fallen for the first time and who are likely to be influenced towards a useful and respectable life. In the Home, they are trained in domestic work, cookery, needlework, dairy work, poultry keeping and gardening and instructed in their religion. After a period of training each is provided with a suitable situation and put in the way of self-support and the children are boarded out with reliable foster mothers. The rate of maintenance is three shillings a day for mother and child, but if the child dies there is no charge.

There were 75 mothers resident on the 1 January 1928. During the following year 24 were admitted and 34 discharged, leaving 65 in residence at the end of the year. The number of children in the Home on 31 December 1928, was 64. The boards of public assistance responsible for maintenance were: South Cork, 40: Kilkenny, 11: Waterford, 8: Tipperary, N.R., 5, and Kerry, 1.

When the Interdepartmental Report was released in 2014 as a ‘scoping exercise’ into the Mother and Baby Homes after the Tuam 800 story broke, many commentators were surprised at the apparently low figure of 5,912 for births in Bessboro. However, the figure was missing the many hundreds born in St. Finbarr’s for at least ten years during the 1920s and early 1930s as well as hundreds, if not thousands, of stillbirths over its lifetime. And, in 1986, following official pressure in the mid-1980s, Bessboro agreed to stop facilitating births in the home and all subsequent births took place once again in St. Finbarr’s. For many years, this author has maintained that the final number of girls and women who went through the doors of Bessboro was between 8,000 and 10,000 and nothing to date has undermined that figure.

The nuns designated a small, anonymous area near their new home as a place for burying babies without coffins, markers or distinct graves. Although they did at one stage maintain a death register, they never kept any specific book or account of exactly who was buried there. The ‘Angels’ Plot’ was neglected by the nuns, but when international attention focused on Bessboro after the Tuam 800 story exploded in May 2014, the nuns paid to have the plot turned into a twee memorial garden. For many years, urban legends among the survivor community maintained that over 2,000 babies were buried there. It is difficult to estimate the number but it is certainly well over 1,000 and probably more than 1,500. When stillbirths are included, that figure may exceed 2,000. Bessboro’s on-site Angels’ Plot is the largest of any of the homes.

According to one of the LGRs, thirty babies died between the years 1933 and 1935 in Bessboro. More than half of that total was due to ‘marasmus’, emaciation due to malnutrition. In later years there are records of well over one hundred babies a year dying. We shall return to Bessboro to compare conditions there in the late 1930s with its sister home in Castlepollard.

Tuam Mother and Baby Home (aka The Home)

The Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway, opened in 1926. Tuam was a converted workhouse owned and financed by the Poor Law Guardians and the local authority, which invited the Bon Secours nuns to run and administer Tuam on their behalf. According to the Interdepartmental Report of 2014, there were 1,101 births included in the records of the General Registers Office during the home’s lifetime. This figure is so low because, once again, it does not reflect the fact that Tuam did not have its own maternity unit in the early years. There were three ‘old girls’ who gave birth in Tuam and stayed there for the rest of their lives.13

A maternity hospital was approved for Tuam in 1934 at a cost of £1,745 to the public purse. Overall, Tuam received £3,830 (over €300,000 at 2016 values) in Sweepstakes grants. Tuam was also used as an overflow by the local county home, so occasionally women with their children were sent there and stayed for months and even years, much as they had lived in the old workhouses now rebranded as county homes.

The following year, in 1935, it was reported that Tuam held 31 mothers and 191 children at the end of March, reflecting its status as a holding centre as much as a Mother and Baby Home. It is interesting to note what happened during the year when 113 mothers were released. Sixty returned to their families, forty were sent to positions, which undoubtedly meant menial jobs as domestic servants or to farm work; three were married. Of the sixty-six children who were discharged, only seventeen left with their mothers, while almost twice that number, thirty-two, were boarded out. The rest went either to relatives or what were referred to as ‘suitable institutions’. The missing numbers, which are not specified, are the children who died.

The LGRs mention Tuam year after year and provide useful statistics but the numbers of children who died are notably absent during the whole of the 1930s, with the exception of 1933/34. That year shows 120 admissions to Tuam and that forty-two babies died. Any mortality rate extracted from these figures would be only a rough guide to the real figure but that rate is believed to be 35%. The omission of the numbers of deaths in the homes during the 1930s is actually divided in two. Tuam and Pelletstown facts and figures omit deaths during the 1930s while the three Sacred Heart homes have their deaths published year after year. Clearly someone did not want the government to be embarrassed so details of the deaths in the public homes were surpressed, while revealing the private homes’ mortality rates for all to see. Tuam was similar to Bethany in that the nuns did not embrace legal adoption after 1952. Before that time, many of the babies born in the home stayed until they were 7 or 8 when they were transferred to industrial schools. After 1952, many children were still boarded out or sent to industrial schools, despite the availability of waiting families who wanted to adopt children. An official report about Tuam and Bessboro from 2012 was suppressed but unearthed by Conall Ó Fátharta in the Irish Examiner. It revealed a suspicion that the nuns were faking deaths and illegally selling the babies abroad.

There have been several first-hand accounts from Tuam that surfaced after the Tuam 800 story in May 2014. Conditions were grim and the buildings were old and decrepit. Overall, Tuam easily qualifies as one of the worst Mother and Baby Homes. The home closed in 1961 and is included in the Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes.

Fermoy Nurseries

The LGRs mention the ‘Nurseries’ in Fermoy, Co. Cork, in the late 1920s and early 1930s but practically nothing is known about exactly what type of institution it was or how it functioned. It is noteworthy that Kilrush Mother and Baby Home was also referred to as the ‘Nurseries’ but, other than mentions in the LGRs, nothing is known about the Fermoy Nurseries except that it was used to hold unaccompanied babies. It is unknown if it accommodated single mothers in another part of the building. Numbers are impossible to estimate.

The Regina Coeli Hostel

Frank Duff is one of the most interesting and in some ways the most radical individual in the story of Ireland’s treatment of single mothers and their babies. In him, the most vulnerable in Irish society had a rare champion who saved thousands of mothers and children from disaster.

Duff was born into a middle-class family and attended Blackrock College, a private school on the southside of Dublin. He joined the civil service in 1908 where he served with distinction until he left in 1934. Duff was a devout Catholic and genuine Christian in the charitable sense of the word. He firmly believed it was his duty as a Christian to actively help his fellow human beings. He was never an ‘armchair activist’ but a man of energy and action who devoted his life to the betterment of others. He was not without his flaws and could be deeply stubborn. In later life, he lost his hearing and when arguing would state his position and then pointedly turn off his hearing-aid. Duff was a velvet radical at a time when very few people dared to oppose the official policies of the Catholic Church.

Duff founded the Legion of Mary in 1921 as a lay Catholic organisation, and membership involved meeting up and saying prayers before going out to visit the most marginalised and forgotten in society. His legionnaires visited people who were sick, lonely and desperate alongside providing support for juvenile offenders and former prisoners whom they assisted in rebuilding their lives. The Legion is currently the largest international organisation ever founded in Ireland and boasts an astounding four million active members and another ten million auxiliary members around the world.

As discussed earlier, the north and south Dublin Unions merged in 1918 and the northside workhouse was closed and abandoned for a while. It was situated in north-inner-city Dublin just south of what is now the Broadstone bus depot. During the War of Independence, the British government managed to find a single solution to two of its problems, just as they had rid themselves of countless tens of thousands of orphans and bastards to the frontiers of the Empire, to conveniently populate it with white Christian ‘stock’. Now it found itself overrun with First World War veterans who were suffering from shellshock (an early term for post-traumatic stress disorder), and a strange assortment of warmongers who simply missed the violence and military life. Ragtag former soldiers were recruited into an ill-disciplined army force and shipped off to Ireland. They proceeded to drink heavily, run amuck and terrorise the countryside by taking pot-shots at men, women and children working in the fields. The ‘Black and Tans’ as they were known, because of their uniforms, which consisted of military surplus, took possession of the former northside workhouse and used it as their headquarters and barracks. After the Treaty, the Black and Tans withdrew and once again the old workhouse was left derelict.

Enter Frank Duff. He persuaded the authorities to give him part of the workhouse as accommodation for homeless men and it opened in 1927 as the ‘Morning Star’ hostel. The narrow road leading up to the entrance was renamed ‘Morning Star Avenue’ and Duff later moved his mother into a house beside the hostel which had been the residence of the workhouse doctors.

On 5 October 1930, a segregated section of the former workhouse was opened for women and named Regina Coeli. At this time, around 70% of institutionalised single mothers were still in workhouses around the country and the rest were in Mother and Baby Homes. Duff’s hostel was opened as a counterpart to the adjoining Morning Star but while the first women who entered the hostel were homeless, word quickly spread that Regina would admit single pregnant girls and single mothers with children. While Britain saw several organisations founded in the twenty years from 1900 to 1920 to represent and assist single mothers, Ireland would have to wait another fifty years before ‘Cherish’ was founded by single mothers to lobby for official recognition and support. Yet in 1930, when practically no one would defend single mothers for fear of being labelled a supporter of sin, here was a devout Catholic, famously obedient to the Church, opening a hostel that admitted single mothers and supported them in keeping and rearing their babies. Regina very quickly became a hostel exclusively for single mothers. It remains a testament to the depth of Duff’s compassion that it housed and supported single mothers and illegitimate children when the rest of society disowned them and imprisoned them in institutions.

The buildings of the old North Union Workhouse were dilapidated and damp when Duff took possession. The women and their children slept in the large dormitories without any privacy and an open turf fire burned for most of the day as the only source of heat and cooking facilities. It was at times overrun with vermin and lice; bed-bugs and illness were rampant. But, for all its failings, it was the only refuge in Ireland for single mothers and was a place where they were treated with respect and dignity by the volunteer staff. It was an oasis in a country that despised single mothers and their ‘bastards’ and Duff was a saviour and saint to the residents of Regina.

The hostel was chronically underfunded from the start and the buildings were in need of constant maintenance but they muddled through. It was run by ‘indoor sisters’, voluntary members of the Legion of Mary who opted to live in the hostel for room and board. They were called ‘Sister’ by the residents, although they were not nuns or qualified nurses. The residents had to pay a nominal sum to stay but Regina would accept bottles or jam jars if a deposit could be redeemed. Duff and the staff did their best to brighten up the gloomy dormitories with limited funds or success. Regina was associated with the Coombe Maternity Hospital and, to a lesser extent, the Rotunda Maternity Hospital. Because it was unique in being the only refuge for single mothers, the dormitories were soon overcrowded. At one point, it held 107 mothers and 150 children. Even the ‘lowest-of-the-low’ repeat offenders were welcomed at Regina and treated with respect.

Some of the mothers were known as ‘care mothers’ who remained in the hostel to mind the children during the day. The other women went out to work in local businesses. Duff formed a network of business people to employ the women, mainly as waitresses and domestic help. When they were old enough, the children went out to local schools and Duff insisted that they were properly dressed and had decent schoolbooks so they would not be targeted or humiliated by the other children. Mothers and children had to leave when the child reached 12 years of age.

Many senior Church and State figures visited Regina and were unanimously generous in their praise of the hostel and Duff. There were sporadic donations from Church and State funds from 1935 onwards. Regina also received Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake grants totalling £10,830 for ‘improvements’ but mainly depended on charity, raffles and other fundraising events to acquire desperately needed funds to supplement the meagre contributions of the mothers from their day jobs.

A sister hostel to Regina opened briefly in Athlone and there was a short-lived attempt to open branches in Waterford and Belfast but only the Dublin Regina lasted. It is still open today and provides shelter and dignity to many vulnerable women on the margins of society.

We shall return to Regina in the 1940s when its mortality rates among children were at times as high as the worst Mother and Baby Homes. Despite its good intentions, hundreds of children died in Regina.

Sean Ross Abbey

In 1927, Mother Laurence Daly from Skeyne, Co. Westmeath, was elected the new Mother Superior General of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts. She was a dynamic character and a brilliant administrator and is remembered with great pride to this day for opening one institution per year over her fourteen-year term of office. Two of those were Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland but were radically different because one was in her native Westmeath and was the order’s prestige home.

Her first purchase in 1930 was Convilla House in Roscrea, Co. Tipperary, where the owner, Count John O’Byrne, had confided to a local priest that he might be forced to sell. Word got back to Daly because it was known that she was searching Ireland for an estate house with land. The Sacred Hearts, always eager for a good deal, purchased the Georgian manor with four cottages and 600 acres of pasture and forestry land with a river running through it.14 The nuns renamed it ‘Sean Ross Abbey’ and it was approved as an ‘extern institution’ by the Minister for Local Government and certified for 152 mothers and 200 babies and children. Daly decided, unlike in Bessboro, to rent out the 600 acres and created workshops where various types of religious paraphernalia were produced for commercial sale. Some acres around the home were retained for basic food crops. There is some unconfirmed anecdotal evidence that at one point they produced children’s coffins, for commercial sale rather than for the babies who died in Sean Ross. The nuns installed a commercial laundry that took in outside work for payment just as the Magdalene Laundries did. Unfortunately, this common feature has led to Sean Ross being designated a Magdalene Laundry by many commentators, but it was not. It was exclusively for single pregnant women and mothers.

Over the years, Sean Ross repeatedly applied for Sweepstakes grants and received a total of £44,063 (over €3.5 million at 2016 values).15 The nuns hired the Dublin architect and builder T.J. Cullen to erect a chapel.

From the very start Sean Ross was one of the worst of the nine homes. The irrefutable evidence is in the infant mortality rate for its first year. There were 120 babies born and 60 who died. The mortality rates were available for several years in the LGRs of the 1930s and remained very high for a further twenty years before showing any signs of improvement. They deserve to be known far and wide, especially in Chigwell in Essex where the Sacred Hearts have been headquartered in a lavish period house they purchased in 1895 for £5,000. We shall return to Sean Ross in the late 1930s to compare conditions with their new sister home in Castlepollard.

Like their other home in Bessboro, Sean Ross had its own Angels’ Plot. Private research carried out by members of Adoption Rights Now, and published in a report into adoption that focused on the three Sacred Heart homes, identified 800 registered deaths between 1930 and 1950. The final figure for the Angels’ Plot is almost certainly around 1,000 as it operated for another twenty years albeit with far lower mortality rates due to changes in conditions after 1950. The stillbirths push the figure considerably higher. We shall return to this home and examine conditions and funding throughout its lifetime until it closed in 1969.