Читать книгу The Adoption Machine - Paul Jude Redmond - Страница 14

CHAPTER 4

Holy Catholic Ireland:

A New Model

After Sean Ross Abbey, another three homes opened but they were all very different from their predecessors, as the rapid expansion of the network of private and lucrative nursing homes led to the last three homes responding to a perceived need by the upper and middle classes for a better quality of care for their pregnant daughters. Two of these homes, St. Gerard’s and Dunboyne, were effectively private fee-paying homes, while Castlepollard was a mix of public and private patients.

Private Nursing Homes and Illegal Adoptions

About 300 maternity homes were registered under the 1934 Registration of Maternity Homes Act during its legal lifetime. Most of them were small nursing homes, usually in semi-converted Victorian and Edwardian red-brick houses of two and three storeys over basements. Some of them – but not all – accepted single pregnant women among their clients while a minority specialised in single mothers only. They were usually run by midwives or nurses.

The private nursing homes were the ultra-secret preserve of the wealthy and upper classes of the day who discreetly sent their daughters away to make their problems disappear. Many of the nursing homes played hard and fast with the birth registration rules; hundreds and probably thousands of babies were falsely registered as the natural children of married couples who adopted children in a financial transaction. There was an underground ‘grey’ market in child trafficking among the wealthy who could afford to use the private nursing homes either to hide their daughters’ ‘shame’ or illicitly obtain babies for illegal adoption. Some of them were semi-integrated into the system. There are many records of unwanted babies whom they could not place being transferred to institutions such as Temple Hill, which was always happy to accept babies from any source.

Some nursing homes, such as St. Rita’s in Sandford Road, Ranelagh, Dublin 6, owned by the notorious Mary Keating, were well-known for the political and criminal intrigue attached to them. One former Lord Mayor of Dublin and later a TD was closely associated with St. Rita’s. The second edition of Banished Babies named a ‘senior Fianna Fáil politician’ from the first edition as former Taoiseach Charles Haughey.1 A priest was jokingly told by Haughey that ‘sure half the children born at St. Rita’s were fathered by members of the Dáil’. The stories among the survivors’ communities regularly mention senior politicians, and in some cases their wives, who were involved in the adoption agencies. A number of adoptees claim that they are the sons and daughters of senior politicians, including at least one former Taoiseach. Huge sums of money were paid for babies across Dublin where there was a thriving black market from the 1940s into the late 1960s. The nursing homes involved in black-market trafficking did not keep records or, if they did, they were falsified. Although there were criminal investigations, and senior politicians were alerted to the practice in the 1960s, nothing was done and the body politic and An Garda Síochána ignored matters for fear of opening an almighty can of worms that would certainly have attracted the interest of the international media.

Other nursing homes are unknown in the active survivor community let alone to the general public, even though they were bigger and in some cases custom-designed or remodelled as miniature Mother and Baby Homes. In 1938, for example, ‘Lowville’ at 11 Herbert Avenue, Dublin 4, was rebuilt and redesigned as a Mother and Baby Home by the same architect/builder who had built Sean Ross Abbey’s maternity wing and new chapel (1933/35) and Castlepollard Mother and Baby Home and chapel (1937/41).

Theresa Hiney Tinggal, a fierce and effective campaigner for illegal adoptees, has carried out research that showed the reaction of the private nursing homes in the aftermath of a new Health Act, which promised tighter controls over nursing homes, in the early 1970s. Dozens of them closed down overnight, knowing that government inspections would have revealed their former malpractices and led to widespread prosecutions.

From the 1970s onwards, supervised ‘flatlets’ were opened in the same type of period houses, mostly in south Dublin around Donnybrook. St. Gerard’s Mother and Baby Home could just as easily be classed as a large, private nursing home instead of a tiny Mother and Baby Home. The supervised flatlets survived well into the 1990s.

Frances Fitzgerald TD was a former social worker who went into politics. For many years while in opposition, she championed the cause of open adoption records and made passionate speeches in the Dáil about the rights of adoptees. Then Minister Fitzgerald was elected to government and did a U-turn on everything she had ever said. During her term as Minister for Children, illegal adoptions were reclassified as ‘falsified birth registrations’ and that repulsive and deeply dishonest phrase remains the official line today, in an effort to divert public attention away from the fact that what occurred was in fact human trafficking and slavery. There is no help of any description for the victims and survivors. The policy of the current government is a continuation of a long-standing effort to ignore illegal adoptees and pretend that they do not exist.

Most illegally adopted people in Ireland have no records and no idea where to start searching for answers. They spend their lives searching and get nothing but heartache and sorrow. For those who have never been told that they are adopted, legally or illegally, the situation is worse again, because they are unaware of their medical history. I had to sit in a maternity hospital with my wife when we were expecting our first child and reply to a midwife’s request for my medical history that ‘I’m adopted’. I still remember her little double-take and shock: I felt embarrassed for her and personally humiliated. Innocent people have died as a result of illegal adoptions or adoptive parents withholding the truth from their children. Those who facilitated or arranged illegal adoptions have pocketed enormous sums of cash and many of them are still alive. The present government has no plans or the political will to deal with the problem for fear of being held liable in the civil courts. As always, Irish citizens’ lives and health take second place to financial constraints.

The problems with illegal and with secret adoptions (where the adoption is legal but kept secret from the adoptee) are huge. Thousands of adoptees have discovered when going through old paperwork after their parents’ deaths that they are adopted either legally or illegally and the shock is intense and life-changing. These ‘Late Discovery Adoptees’ around the world are far more common than is generally realised and there are books about the subject and special groups for support. Being told one is adopted at a family funeral or social event by a drunken uncle or cousin is also more common than people realise. Late-discovery adoptees always feel utterly betrayed by their own parents and usually have no chance of resolution or finding out the truth. They spend the remainder of their lives both hating and loving their deceased parents, and the emotional and mental stress has led to breakdowns and decades of suffering.

Tens of thousands of birth certificates have been legally and illegally faked since 1922. In the case of the legally faked certificates, the words ‘Birth Certificate’ were printed on the top of what was really an Adoption Certificate. Around 100,000 Irish mothers lost their babies to forced adoption or separation since 1922, both legal and illegal. Approximately one in every eight families in Ireland is directly affected and there are hundreds of thousands of such cases in Ireland.

Despite constant lobbying by representative groups, the government, and particularly Minister Zappone, is refusing to recommend that the current Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes should include all illegal adoptions in its remit. James Reilly, as Minister for Children, initiated a comprehensive Adoption Bill that included considerable acknowledgement but limited help for illegally adopted people, but the Bill is currently a low priority for Minister Zappone and she has stalled at every opportunity to advance it. The official policy is to do nothing and steadfastly ignore the thousands of victims or, as the author Mike Milotte has described it, to ‘deny till they die’.

St. Gerard’s Mother and Baby Home

St. Gerard’s was the smallest of the nine Mother and Baby Homes and the shortest-lived. (St. Gerard Majella is the patron saint of expectant mothers.) It was opened in 1933 by St. Patrick’s Guild in a four-storey-over-basement, terraced Georgian house at 39 Mountjoy Square, Dublin 1. Intended to cater for fee-paying private cases and ‘select destitute cases’, it was approved by the Minister for Local Government and Health for twenty mothers and twelve babies. Little is known of this smallest of the homes as it closed in 1939 after just six years and there are no former residents known to the online or real-world survivor community, as is the case for Kilrush.

From July 1933 to the following March, sixty-one girls were admitted to the home and twenty-seven babies were born in the nearby Rotunda Maternity Hospital. One of the babies died there. Even though St. Gerard’s was a terraced house in a busy square, surrounded by flats and tenements, there were ten births in the house and all the babies survived. The Interdepartmental Report in 2014 recorded that a final total of forty-five births were registered in St. Gerard’s. Residents stayed on average for six months. They learned the standard array of skills such as sewing, knitting, dressmaking, cooking and domestic chores.

The very low infant mortality rate in St. Gerard’s indicates that it was well run, as was to be expected in an exclusive, fee-paying home where wealthy families paid handsomely for their daughters, and for discretion. A bad reputation would have destroyed its ability to remain open. It may emerge as the best of the homes and is being fully investigated by the current Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes.

Second-Layer Institutions

As the Mother and Baby Homes grew and the county homes created hundreds of babies and children, a network of smaller subsidiary centres developed around the country. These held unaccompanied children who were too old for the homes but too young for industrial schools. Many commentators and writers have classified the industrial schools and Magdalene Laundries as ‘tiers’ of a vast institutional system. However, most writers were unaware of the Mother and Baby Homes network until the Tuam 800 story broke in May 2014, and the industrial schools and laundries are now viewed as a third tier. In fact, there are four layers that could accommodate any woman or child of any age both before and after the county homes were finally closed in the 1950s or were rebranded to other functions.

The interlocking system began by producing babies to begin the life cycle in the Mother and Baby Homes and, at the other end, the Magdalene Laundries were the privately owned and run fourth tier for adult women over 16 years old. Before the laundries, children were placed in industrial schools. While there are exceptions to all the age rules, including industrial schools taking children as young as 2 or 3, or girls as young as 12 in the laundries, the system generally stuck to the age limits. The problem was that this left a gap between the children who were too old for the homes but too young for the industrial schools.

The unseen second tier of mini institutions for children from a couple of weeks old up to 8 years has been only partly investigated. Many of the old orphanages were examined by the Ryan Inquiry, but the role of the Mother and Baby Homes and two sizable second-tier holding centres escaped attention. It is still a common myth that children in orphanages had no parents: the majority were there because the State had prevented their parents from caring for their own children. Poverty or the death of a single parent was enough to have children and babies placed in ‘care’. A sizable number were illegitimate and many of the second-tier places were reserved for them. Children were transferred from Pelletstown when they reached the age of around 4.5 years to two such places: boys and girls to St. Philomena’s in Stillorgan/Kilmacud in Co. Dublin, and boys to St. Theresa’s in nearby Blackrock. Protestant children were transferred from the Bethany Home to similar placements in Westbank in Greystones and Avoca, both in Co. Wicklow, and Braemar House in Co. Cork among others. Dún Laoghaire and Monkstown in Dublin seem to have been rife with Protestant orphanages of all sizes over the years. The enormous Temple Hill holding centre in Blackrock was an integral part of the network and used as a temporary holding facility by many of the Mother and Baby Homes, private nursing homes, and public as well as private maternity hospitals. Babies stayed from days to weeks to years.

Conditions varied considerably over the years and from one home to the next. In some, particularly Protestant orphanages, children were not moved on and grew up in places like the ‘Birdsnest’ in York Road, Dún Laoghaire, and ‘Westbank’ in Co. Wicklow, staying until they were adults in some cases. Catholic orphanages were mostly reserved for middle-class legitimate children of all ages. Some of these children were lucky to find long-term foster placements and had good lives, although many others suffered at the hands of uncaring families who simply wanted the money and free labour.

Times changed and the destinations where children went after their stay in a second-tier institution also changed. In the early days of the State, the children born in the homes generally ended up either in the county homes or industrial schools. These options were principally reserved for poor children with no family support, and illegitimate children fell into that category, albeit at an even lower level. They had miserable lives because they were singled out as an inferior class of human being and were regularly cursed as ‘bastards’ by the religious in the schools. Many of the 16-year-old girls who left industrial schools were starved of love and attention, making them easy prey for predatory men. Sadly, many of them ended up in the Mother and Baby Homes after quickly becoming pregnant outside marriage, surely a direct result of being ejected at 16 years of age into an alien environment without a shred of sex education and desperate for love after a lifetime of deprivation. Many women were doomed to a lifetime of misery and heartbreak in institutions because, if they became pregnant before marriage a second time, they were transferred from the Mother and Baby Homes directly to whichever Magdalene Laundry needed a new penitent to be punished with years of backbreaking labour. About one in every twenty-five women who entered a Magdalene Laundry was transferred directly from a Mother and Baby Home. The final chapters of Children of the Poor Clares (Mavis Arnold and Heather Laskey, 1985) record the heartbreaking testimonies of some of the girls who had been in the industrial school in Cavan and ended up in bad marriages or Mother and Baby Homes.2

The Registration of 1934 Maternity Homes Act

When Éamon de Valera came to power in 1932 there were four huge Catholic Mother and Baby Homes and one medium-sized Protestant home, but at least one more was needed so that in future all single mothers could be finally removed from the county homes and hospitals. However, the appalling mortality rates in the homes had finally come to the attention of the Dáil and a Bill was brought forward to regulate not just the Mother and Baby Homes but all private nursing homes, by requiring them to register and keep proper records. The Bill also provided for regular inspections. The Registration of Maternity Homes Act 1934 is like many of the Acts passed in Ireland: a fine piece of legislation if it had been enforced, but it was not. The Church had free rein to do as it pleased and was rarely challenged by State officials and inspectors.

The final responsibility for how the Act was enforced lay with the Cabinet and ultimately with the Taoiseach, but no politician was going to challenge the Church. Whatever internal divisions there were in the Church, they behaved like a fighting family when an outsider intervened: they suddenly forgot their differences and turned on the interfering stranger. It was political suicide for any minister to order his officials to enforce the law to its spirit, let alone its letter, so the reality was that nothing changed. The slaughter of the innocents continued for at least another ten years until something far more powerful motivated the nuns to stop the extensive carnage – cash.

Castlepollard Mother and Baby Home

In September 1934, Mother Superior General Laurence Daly of the Sacred Hearts bought the third and last of their Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland, another large house, this time in Castlepollard, Co. Westmeath. The 15-year-old girl who had left to become a nun in France had returned many years later as the head of a rich and powerful Catholic congregation but, since this was her home territory, Mother Daly did not want to be embarrassed on her own turf. As a result, Castlepollard was radically different from the other big institutional Mother and Baby Homes of the time. It is worth taking a close look at Castlepollard for several reasons.

The original estate house in Castlepollard was the seat of the Pollard family. It was built by Walter Pollard in 1716 with an accompanying jailhouse at the top of the nearby row of farm buildings. The Sacred Hearts bought it with 110 acres of land in September 1934, bringing their total Irish landholdings to over 900 acres. They immediately applied for yet another grant from the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake and Éamon de Valera’s government obliged them with £68,000 (€5.3 million at 2016 values). The cash paid in full for St. Peter’s, a three-storey maternity hospital, constructed between 1937 and 1939. Castlepollard was the penultimate Mother and Baby Home, opened in the rush to remove single mothers from the workhouses. One more home was opened twenty years later in 1955 and that was the end of the building phase.