The CPRS was founded to prevent Protestant proselytisers convincing desperate Catholic single mothers to have their babies raised as Protestants. While sectarian motives were common in the foundations of many Catholic organisations, the CPRS had a unique role as a self-appointed judge and jury to ‘rescue’ single pregnant women and girls from Britain. From 1922 many expectant mothers boarded the ferries to Britain to escape losing their babies to the workhouses, their worldly possessions often little more than a change of clothes. The British customs officers learned to spot them instantly and they became so common that they earned a semi-official nickname – PFIs – Pregnant from Ireland. However, the British authorities viewed them as a ‘burden to the public purse’ so did everything they could to return them. That is where the CPRS came in, as the agency that took custody of runaway Irish girls and escorted them back to the workhouses or homes in Ireland. A variety of semi-official contacts between British authorities and the CPRS formed an underground practice of semi-forced repatriation. The network continued until at least the 1970s when there are several documented cases of single girls being forcibly repatriated. Nevertheless, thousands and probably tens of thousands of Irish women beat the customs officers and police and somehow avoided the informal networks of priests and volunteers. The majority ended up in Britain’s widespread network of over one hundred Mother and Baby Homes, some run by Catholics, the majority by Protestants.
The agency system is complex and worthy of a book in its own right. There are still a handful of nuns involved and many are hate figures among the adoption and survivor communities. Certain nuns, right up to a couple of years ago, would regularly ask for ‘donations’ to fund their tracing efforts, even though their agencies were State-funded and the nuns themselves were sometimes employed by the State as paid social workers (the Sacred Heart nuns had their own agency called the ‘Sacred Heart Adoption Society’). Many adoptees and natural mothers have missed the chance to reunite because of stalling and misinformation from nuns. The vast majority of the religious-based agencies have been handed over to the government, and social workers now do the tracing and searching in almost every case.
What is most startling is the difference of opinion in the active adoption and survivor communities regarding the various agencies. Some swear at a particular agency while others swear by it. The wild disparity in experience is sometimes due to successful or failed traces but, beyond that, individual nuns and social workers can have good and bad days like anyone else, or unreasonably take a dislike to an adoptee or natural mother. Outcomes for searches among the agencies, well into the 1990s, were overwhelmingly negative and often based on the whim of a stone-faced nun demanding to know if your ‘adoption was happy and, if it was, then why are you here.’ Many of the agencies began as secretive societies back in the late nineteenth century, either to protect or punish single mothers and their babies. That mentality persists in some agencies even now. All the agencies were covered legally by the 1952 ‘sealed-for-life’ Adoption Act. Another point is that the various Catholic agencies cooperated with one another and had members in common and this has led to some confusion.
From the late 1980s, a tiny handful of people in the adoption agency industry and some highly qualified social workers with a genuine interest in adoption-related matters became more vocal about new-fangled ideas such as post-adoption support and properly facilitated reunions. However, the religious orders were still in charge and the newcomers faced a war of attrition to change existing attitudes.
There have always been long waiting lists before a social worker can be appointed. Some have stretched to five years from first contact; delays of one to two years before a first meeting with a social worker are now common. While social services in Ireland have always been chronically underfunded, many of the delays are due to the fact that adoption tracing was, and still is, seen by many as a waste of time and thus assigned a low priority. The adoption and survivor communities today are still dealing with a system that is starved of resources.
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