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