Mother and Baby Homes: How the Catholic Church, the State, and Irish Society Influenced their Establishment

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 19^th 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).

Review: CIT Investigates Public Talk on ‘Mother & Baby Homes and Adoption Practices in Ireland’.

For today’s post I will review a public talk organised by CIT School of Humanities and CIT Arts Office on ‘Mother & Baby Homes and Adoption Practices in Ireland’.

I was drawn to this event as I have a personal interest in the history of children’s and women’s institution in Ireland. I was greatly impressed and familiar with some of the guest speakers that were on the panel discussion, namely, Professor Eoin O’Sullivan, author of Suffer the Little Children: The inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools and Coercive Confinement in Ireland: Patients, prisoners and penitents and Mike Milotte, author of Banished Babies: the secret history of Ireland’s baby export business which highlighted the illegal adoption system during the twentieth century in Ireland. Other members of the discussion panel consisted of Conail O’ Fatharta, a Senior News Reporter from the Irish Examiner and Liam O’ Mahony, a Psychotherapist and Addiction Counsellor whom was born in Bessborough Mother And Baby Home, Mary Slattery whom ‘lost her first born to a forces, secretive and closed adoption system through St Anne’s Adoption Society Cork’ in 1973 and Terri Harrison whom was abducted by the Catholic Aid and Rescue Society from Britain and brought to Bessborough Mother and Baby Home and later St Patrick’s Mother and Baby Home on the Navan Road, Dublin as she was a single expectant mother.

Prof. O’Sullivan, Professor of Social Policy at Trinity College Dublin, argued that by the 1950s, 1% of the Irish population were institutionalised such as psychiatric hospitals and county homes and although these institutions existed across Europe, they lasted longer in Ireland due to a tendency to care for the ‘dispossessed’ and ‘unwanted’ by society. Moreover, he maintained that some of these institutions were inherited from the pre-independence period while others such as the Mother and Baby Homes emerged during the 1920s to suit the needs of Irish society. Mother and Baby Homes and the Magdalan laundries were designed to separate first-time unmarried expectant mothers and women who had ‘fallen’ more than once and O’Sullivan argues that the cost of caring for ‘recidivist’ women and their children led to the development of adoption in Ireland. However, children from county homes or industrial schools were fostered while babies born in the Mother and Baby Homes were illegally adopted as they were perceive to possess a lesser ‘recidivist gene’ than those born with mothers with a number of ‘illegitimate ‘children in these other institutions. O’Sullivan states that the State paid a capitation fee for each child attending industrial schools which encouraged these intuitions to extend the stay of children for a long period of time.

Mike Milotte states that about 2,000 children were officially adopted from Ireland in 1950 and that it was organised by a religious infrastructure including nuns, the Archbishop of Dublin, Charles McQuaid, and the Department of External Affairs (whom were responsible for allocating passports). He argues that an illegal adoption system existed in Ireland and it is possible that thousands of children were exported to America during the twentieth century. According to Milotte. American business travelled to Ireland to adopt and left Ireland two weeks later with the children. He noted that this practise emerged during the Second World War as American airmen brought children back from Europe to their wives however, in 1948, the illegal exportation of children was prohibited in Europe except in Ireland. Milotte highlighted that there was no inspection of the family before the child was placed in their care as the Catholic Charities. The Catholic Charities, an adoption organisation based in America would investigate the family however, these inspections often did not take place. The only prerequisite required for the family’s approval by the religious order was that they were a Catholic family. The media collaborated with the Catholic Church’s hierarchy to conceal the scandal and therefore, stories of illegal adoptions went unreported. Therefore, unregulated adoption system in Ireland and children possibly sent to unsuitable homes. The children were referred to as ‘orphans’ but many had one parent alive in Ireland.

O’Fatharta spoke about Mother and Baby Homes in relation to the media and he stated that when the Tuam Mother and Baby Home Scandal emerged in 2014, the Minister for Children, was aware of the story since 2012. Moreover, he noted that the death rates in the Mother and Baby homes were underreported by the nuns and the homes were not inspected by the government. O’Fatharta maintained that the public need to view Mother and Baby Homes and other related institutions as a network operated by the Catholic Church in Ireland. Mary Slattery ‘lost’ her daughter to St. Anne’s Adoption Society in 1979 and explained how the Catholic ethos from her social environment influenced her decision to have her daughter adopted. Importantly, her family were supportive of her pregnancy but the Catholic Church and government acts such as the 1931 Illegitimacy Act stigmatised unmarried pregnant women and their vulnerable children. St’ Anne’s Adoption society organised through an organisation known as Ally for Mary to travel to Dublin to give birth. However, she later discovered that some of the information provided to her before the adoption was deliberately misleading in an attempt to encourage her to choose adoption. Mary Slattery states that she was told that her daughter was going to family in their thirties however, she later discovered they were in their forties.

Terri Harrison explained that she was accepted as a single expect mother in England.. However, the Catholic Aid and Rescue Society ‘abducted’ her and forced her onto an airplane back to Ireland. When she arrived at Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in 1973 she was assigned a house name and a house number. She escaped from Bessborough but was found in Dublin and sent to St. Patrick’s Home on the Navan Road. She highlighted the sexual double standard that existed for men and women in Ireland as she maintained there were no special homes for unmarried fathers. Terri described how she felt ‘de-humanised’ by the lack of medical attention and counselling after she gave birth to her son, Niall. She states that ‘[her] first encounter with motherhood was destroyed’. Due to a genetic medical condition she and her son urgently needed to go to hospital following the birth however, the nuns’ ambulance passed ‘seven hospitals’ on their way to St. Kevin’s Hospital. Liam O’Mahony, member of the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and Addiction Counsellors of Ireland described how early development trauma impacted his life after he was born on Bessborough Mother and Baby Home. He cited his inability to form meaningful relationships with other people, his negative self-image as he felt ‘unwanted’ and his perception of others as potentially ‘threatening’.

Significantly, the majority of the guest speakers cited the economic benefit for the religious orders as the reason for the long-term retention of women and children in mother and baby homes and industrial schools in Ireland. The Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation report was granted an extension of one year in February 2019. The adoption system was illegal and unregulated in Ireland until the introduction of the Adoption Act in 1952. The Catholic Church’s hierarchy and the Department of External Affairs facilitated a large number of adoptions in Ireland, many which are unaccounted for. Single and expectant mothers and their babies were stigmatised by Irish society, the State and the Catholic Church and institutionalised in a Mother and Baby Home exempt from State inspections.

Bibliography

Mother & Baby Homes and Adoption Practices in Ireland: A Panel Discussion and Q & A with Conail O’ Fatharta, Prof. Eoin O’ Sullivan, Mike Milotte, Liam O’ Mahony, Mary Slattery, and Terri Harrison, Cork Institute of Technology, 13 February 2019.

The Growth of Maternal and Infant Welfare Services during the ‘Emergency’ in Ireland, 1932-1945

For today’s post, I will examine the expansion of maternity and child welfare services during the 1930s and how the ‘Emergency’ impacted maternity and infant welfare servcies in Ireland.

During the 1930s, maternal and infant health services and preventative health services significantly expanded in Ireland. Diphtheria immunisation schemes were introduced into county Boroughs with high death rates and in 1933, the Free Milk Scheme was introduced and powder milk became available to poor children under five years of age from the maternity and child welfare centres. In Dublin, milk supply was also available from the Infant Aid Association in Dublin (Lindsey Earner-Byrne, Mother and Child: Maternity and Child Welfare Services in Dublin, 1922-60). According to Earner-Byrne, milk supply became one of the key campaigns to improve maternal health and to enable mothers to breastfeed their children making them less vulnerable to disease. Low breastfeeding rates were viewed as one of the main factors in the high infant mortality rates. By 1936, 17,656 children in county boroughs, 10,353 children in urban districts except one and 29,771 children in other areas participated in the free milk scheme (Annual Report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health, 1930-31). Campaigns were also set up to improve the mother’s nutrition, for example, The Dublin Maternity and Child Welfare Clinics and St John Ambulance Brigade provided free meals to poor mothers and ran dental clinics for ‘expectant and nursing mothers’ (Annual Report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health, 1932-33).

During the 1930s, there were increased visits to the Maternity and Child Welfare Clinics, in Cork, Limerick and Waterford. Moreover, health visits in Waterford from 4,926 in 1933 to 6,656 in 1934 (Annual Report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health, 1934-35). Ante-natal services were available in the maternity hospitals in urban areas including Limerick, Dublin and Cork but not in rural areas. Moreover, the out-patient attendances were almost doubled from 1933 to 1938 with 60,375 mothers attending these clinics (Hospitals Commission Fourth General Report 1938). However, the new housing schemes introduced in 1936 meant that in Dublin the health visitor travel longer distance and had less time with expectant and nursing mother (Ibid).

Although the maternal mortality rate remained high in Ireland during the 1930s, sulphonamide drugs aimed to reduce the maternal mortality rates from 1937 (Earner-Byrne, Mother and Child). By 1939, 148 maternity and child welfare schemes were in operation throughout the country (The child health services: report of the study group appointed for the Minister for Health to inquire into the child welfare service and school examination service). 44,566 mothers and 86,308 children were visited by the health visitor employed by local authorities and 15,464 mothers and 32,285 children by district nursing organisations including Lady Dudley nurses (Ibid). Moreover, 56,129 mothers and 70,112 children attended the local authority clinics and 3,955 mothers and 4,893 children attended the district nurse clinics (Ibid).

The outbreak of the ‘Emergency’ in September 1939 interrupted maternal and infant health services in Ireland. Laws were passed to control the spread of infectious diseases and ensure that the maternal mortality rates continued to decline. In 1941, the notification of puerperal sepsis cases became compulsory under the Public Health (Infectious Diseases) regulations. The infant mortality rate also rose, increasing from 3,759 in 1940 to 4,175 in 1941(Annual Report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health, 1943-44). Dublin County Borough, Waterford County Borough and Cork County Borough had some of the highest infant mortality rates (Ibid). In 1941, the Public Health (Infectious Diseases) Regulations made the notification of infectious diseases including polio, measles, enteric fever, whooping cough, scarlet fever compulsory. TB and gastro-enteritis were rampant during the Emergency and in 1943, Public Health (Diseases) Regulations made cases of gastro-enteritis in children under two notifiable in certain areas including County Boroughs (DLGPH 1943-44). Significantly, the neonatal death rate was extremely high and in 1943, the neonatal mortality rate was 322 per 1,000 infant deaths and the causes included congenital debility and gastro-enteritis (Ibid).

During the Emergency, food shortages contributed to the lack of nourishment of infants and children (Ruth Barrington Health, Medicine & Politics in Ireland 1900-1970). According to Bryce Evans’s ‘Food, the Emergency, and the lower-class Irish body, c.1939-45’ in D. Durnin and I. Miller (eds.) Medicine, Health and Irish Experiences of Conflict, 1914-45, p.49, ‘the transport of….medicines was seriously compromised by Britain cutting off coal and petrol supplies’. Therefore, maternal and infant mortality rates increased during the ‘Emergency’ due to the spread of disease and lack of nutrition and medicine and vaccinations. The war made it difficult to import the BCG vaccine which led to a peak in TB deaths during this period (Margaret O’hOgartaigh, ‘Dr Dorothy Price and the elimination of childhood tuberculosis’ in J. Augustin (ed.) Ireland in the 1930s). According to Dr James Deeny, the Chief Medical Advisor to the government, memoir To Cure & to Care: Memoirs of a Chief Medical Officer, ‘between 1942 and 1945, 16,186 people died of the disease’.

Maternal and infant health services were under additional strain. In 1940, the Archbishop of Dublin, Charles McQuaid established the Catholic Social Service Conference which offered food, milk and clothing to mothers at the ante-natal clinics (Earner-Byrne, Mother and Child). However during the 1940s, breastfeeding was regarded as the best method to prevent infant deaths. Dr Collis, the head of sick infant department in the Rotunda, recommended that infants should be breastfed until they were three or four months old (Irish Nurse’s Magazine November 1940). However, many mothers did not breastfeed their children as they were malnourished and many suffered from anaemia (Earner-Byrne, Mother and Child). Due to the food shortages, mothers and children receiving milk under the Free Milk Scheme from the clinics increased. Importantly, the government provided a grant of £90,000 towards the scheme (DLGPH 1943-44). In 1943, 839, 291 gallons of milk was distributed (First Report of the Department of Health 1945-1949).

The Emergency interrupted the health visitation service and the school medical service. Barrington’s Health, Medicine & Politics maintains that fuel shortages ensured that public health nurses could not travel in a motor car to visit mothers and infants and carry out medical inspections in schools. Importantly, there was a significant increase in health visits undertaken by the district nurses. In 1941, 1,354,095 health visits were carried out to mothers and children (Annual Report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health, 1941-42). In 1943, a higher number of mothers and children were visited by nurses employed by local authorities and attended their Maternity and Child Welfare clinics (DLGPH 1943-1944,). Dublin county borough had highest number of attendance to clinics by 467,840 mothers and 51,375 children while in Limerick 3,072 mothers and 3,552 children visited the health clinics (Ibid). New clinics and specialist services also emerged, for example, children received orthopaedic treatment in various institutions such as the Sunshine Home and in general hospitals (Ibid).

The Free Milk Scheme, the expansion of maternity and child welfare centres and the introduction of TB and diphtheria immunisation schemes helped to improve infant health and aimed to reduce the infant mortality rate in Ireland. Moreover, the introduction of sulphonamide drugs and ante-natal services in maternity hospitals heralded a decrease in maternal mortality rates in Ireland. The ‘Emergency’ disrupted the importation of drugs, fuel and food into Ireland which contributed to an increase in maternal and infant death rates. However, the government made cases of infectious diseases notifiable and public health nurses carried out more health visits and there were increased attendances to their centres.

Bibliography

Annual Report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health, 1930-31, (Stationary Office, Dublin, 1931).

Annual Report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health, 1932-33, (Stationary Office, Dublin, 1933).

Annual Report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health, 1934-35, (Stationary Office, Dublin, 1935).

Annual Report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health, 1941-42, (Stationary Office, Dublin, 1942).

Annual Report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health, 1943-44, (Stationary Office, Dublin, 1944).

Barrington, Ruth, Health, Medicine & Politics in Ireland, 1900-1970, Institute of Public Administration, Dublin, 1987.

Deeny, James, To Cure & to Care: Memoirs of a Chief Medical Officer, The Glendale Press, Dublin, 1989.

Earner-Byrne, Lindsey, Mother and Child: Maternity and Child Welfare in Dublin, 1922-60, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2007.

Evans, Bryce, ‘Food, the Emergency, and the lower-class Irish body, c.1939-45’ in D. Durnin and I. Miller (eds.) Medicine, Health and Irish Experiences of Conflict, 1914-45 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2017), pp.45-60.

First Report of the Department of Health 1945-1949 (Stationary Office, 1949).

Hospitals Commission Fourth General Report 1938 (Stationary Office, 1940).

Margaret O’hOgartaigh, ‘Dr Dorothy Price and the elimination of childhood tuberculosis’ in J. Augustin (ed.) Ireland in the 1930s (Four Courts Press, Dublin, 1999), p.76-7.

The child health services: report of the study group appointed for the Minister for Health to inquire into the child welfare service and school examination service (Stationary Office, 1967).

The Irish Nurse’s Magazine, Vol. 11, No. 7 (November 1940). i