For today’s post, I will examine the Catholic Church, the State and, Irish society’s role in the emergence of Ireland’s mother and baby homes, with particular reference to Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Blackrock, Co. Cork.
According to O’ Donnell and O’ Sullivan’s Coercive Confinement in post- Independence Ireland: Patients, Prisoners and Penitents (p. 4), the respective roles of the Church, State, and family “varied considerably by institution” and these penal institutions including mother and baby homes and Magdalan Asylums were organised for the protection rather than punishment of the unmarried expectant mother. Importantly during the nineteenth century, female religious orders were invited over from France to establish Magdalan asylums with an incentive rehabilitate ‘fallen’ women or prostitutes.
Ferriter (Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland, p.87) argues that the prevalence of sexual crimes and the determination to prosecute them remained constant in Ireland. This was due to the high rates of illegitimate births in the Irish Free State. The solution to the problem of illegitimate births was believed to be the establishment of antenatal homes in which the unmarried mother and child “might be maintained together for at least five years” (Ibid, p.127). The mother and baby homes were designed for those who transgressed social norms during the twentieth century and after the establishment of an independent Ireland in 1922, workhouses were reclassified as County Homes. They would be managed by female religious orders such as the Sisters of Mercy and Our Lady of Charity. Significantly, Milotte (Banished Babies, p.17) notes that the Church’s authority was “unquestioned” in Irish public life and due to the stigma attached to pregnancy outside of marriage, the family was involved in a process of denial and concealment.
Ferriter (p.128)states that the state classified two types of unmarried mothers and advised that the ”first-offenders” would remain in the newly funded institutions for a year, fulfil “domestic duties” and care for their child and the “sinful” women were sent to Magdalan Asylums. Separate homes for unmarried expectant mothers were set up by an English female religious congregation, the Sister of the Scared Heart of Jesus and Mary. Additionally, Milotte (Banished Babies, p.21) maintains that the nuns were sole arbiters of the Church’s moral values and “rejected unmarried mothers and banished their hapless offspring”. In 1927, The Report of the Commission on the Relief of the Destitute Poor Including the Insane Poor recognised further highlighted the stigma associated with illegitimacy. It was described as a danger to the child’s welfare and stated that the “illegitimate child was “proof of the mother’s shame”(Ibid, p.73). The State accepted these proposals and laid the foundations for the infrastructure of religious-controlled mother and baby homes.
O’ Sullivan and O’ Donnell (Coercive Confinement) maintains that there was no legal basis for confinement but the mother and baby’s freedom to leave the home was restricted as “many matrons rely” on these inmates to perform the “large” institution’s domestic duties. The Department of Health noted that an unmarried mother must remain in the mother and baby home for a two year period before her release without the baby which was reduced to six months (Ibid). Maguire (Precarious Childhood in Post-Independence Ireland, p.87) adds that most mother and baby homes operated privately, including Roscrea in County Tipperary and they received capitation grants under the Public Assistance Acts.
In 1922, Bessborough mother and baby home was established by The Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary in Cork for “young mothers who have fallen for the first time and who are likely to be influenced towards” a “respectable life” (O’ Sullivan and O’ Donnell, Coercive Confinement, p.19,). The matron of Bessborough, Sister Sarto Harney, posits that “these lapses from virtue” are “evident to all who trouble to observe life around them: no parental control, cheap romantic fiction” (Ibid). Dr James Deeny, Chief Medical Advisor in 1951, investigated the high mortality rate in Bessborough and the mother and baby home was closed for a short period of time. Importantly, infant mortality rates were very high in Ireland. By the late 1940s, the main causes of infant deaths included ‘congenital debility’ and other related diseases, diarrhoea and enteritis and pneumonia (Report of the Department Health 1949-1950, p.10).
Illegal adoptions also took place in the Mother and Baby Homes until the introduction of the 1950 Adoptions Act. O’ Sullivan and O’ Donnell (Coercive confinement, p.99) state that between the three Sacred Heart homes in Tipperary, Westmeath, and Cork and in the “largest of them”, there were 150 babies born in 1965 of which 115 were adopted. After the two years spent at a mother and baby home, the unmarried mother’s children would be boarded out by the local authorities and the women were sent to “find work elsewhere” (Ferriter, Occasions of Sin, p.252). Almost 100,000 children were born outside of marriage between the 1920s and the mid-1970s (Milotte, Banished Babies, p.18). O’ Sullivan and O’ Donnell (Coercive Confinement, p.264) note that Ireland’s “containment culture” emerged during the 1920s and the Church, the state and the family were concerned with sexual morality. Milotte (Banished Babies, p.22) states that the adopted children were sent to “good Catholic homes” but there was no “established criteria for the suitability of applicants”.
The Catholic Church and the state managed the mother and baby homes until their closures in the 1990s. By the 1970s, the Church and State’s coercive confinement was transformed as there was profound economic and social change. The Irish state was unable to establish welfare services to provide for the unmarried mother and child which left the Church to regulate mother and baby homes. Moreover, the government introduced a financial allowance for unmarried mothers in 1973. While the “expressed aim” was to reform the inmates, most of these institutions were “austere” and the experience was stigmatising (O’ Sullivan and O’ Donnell, Coercive Confinement).
Bibliography
Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor Including the Insane Poor appointed on the 19th March 1925 (Stationary Office, 1927).
Ferriter, Diarmaid, Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland, Profile Books, London, 2009.
Maguire, Moira, Precarious Childhood in Post-Independence Ireland, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2008.
Milotte, Mike, Banished Babies, New Island Books, Dublin, 1997.
O’ Sullivan, Eoin and, O’ Donnell, Ian, Coercive Confinement in post- Independence Ireland: Patients, Prisoners and Penitents, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2012.
Report of the Department of Health 1949-1950 (Stationary Office, 1950).
HealthHistoryIreland 