The small house at Blackhall Place was constantly overcrowded and conditions were dire. In 1934 the committee purchased a sizable period house in Orwell Road in Rathgar on Dublin’s southside from one of their own members. That committee member held the rest of them to ransom by demanding a price 50% above its independent valuation. Since the old house at Blackhall Place was literally falling down and subject to a compulsory purchase order, the Bethany management committee paid the requested price.
There is much information available about the Bethany Home, thanks to the research of survivor Derek Leinster, who was later joined in the undertaking by Dr. Niall Meehan. A disturbing insight into its early years is the number of babies and children who died in a comparatively small home from 1922 to 1949: at least 227 deaths. That figure also includes stillbirths, and this is unique to Bethany. The most common causes of death were officially recorded as convulsions (54), heart failure (41), marasmus (26) and stillborn (16). ‘Marasmus’ is a medical term that is often recorded as the cause of death for babies from the homes; it means death from malnutrition. The children and babies were buried at Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin in various sections including the Paupers’ Plot along the back wall.
Bethany’s IMR soared during 1935 and 1936 and forty children died. That spike brought attention to the home. The Bethany committee considered withdrawing its registration under the Registration of Maternity Homes Act 1934 to free itself from government involvment. The Deputy Chief Medical Adviser, Sterling Berry, inspected the home a number of times in the late 1930s. Berry was a Protestant and took an interest in the Bethany Home. While it would now be considered extraordinary, the main focus of the State officials and the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society was to ensure that Catholic babies were excluded from Bethany rather than investigating the horrific conditions and hundreds of dead babies. Catholic babies were formally excluded in 1939. Part of the problem was that Bethany received effectively no State assistance up to 1948 when its application for funding was finally approved after many unsuccessful previous applications. There is also no record of Bethany receiving a single penny from Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake grants while the Catholic Mother and Baby Homes received substantial funding.2 The conditions and mortality rates there did improve after 1948, although this could be a reflection of the general improvements across all the homes that began in 1945.
Unlike the Catholic homes, Bethany sent many children to Britain and Northern Ireland and some even ended up as part of the child-export schemes that thrived during the twentieth century. Bethany children were sent to Canada and Australia and other far-flung destinations on the edges of the British Empire. Protestant adoption agencies did not embrace foreign adoptions after 1945 and sent only twenty-four babies oversees, while the Catholic homes and agencies sent thousands.
Bethany never embraced formal adoption, preferring boarding or fostering out, particularly in south Dublin and north Wicklow. Part of the reason for this was because the town of Greystones expanded significantly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the opening of the new east-coast railway. It also had a predominantly Protestant population already: Protestants tended to settle in north County Wicklow and the south Dublin suburb of Dún Laoghaire after 1922. The majority of Protestant orphanages and children’s homes were in these two areas, such as Westbank in Greystones and Avoca House in Wicklow. Bethany’s most famous resident, Derek Leinster, was sent to north Wicklow where he was treated appallingly. Derek had left school early and was functionally illiterate. He later emigrated to England where he rebuilt his life with the help of Carol, his wife. He pulled himself up through sheer grit and determination and finally wrote two books, focusing on Bethany and his childhood. They are a harrowing read. Leinster’s reproduced medical records, when he was sent to hospital from Bethany, are a shocking indictment of the wanton and wilful neglect he suffered.
The records for Bethany and many other related Protestant orphanages are held by PACT, the Protestant Adoption Society, at Arabella House in Rathfarnham in south Dublin.
Kilrush Mother and Baby Homes (aka The Nurseries)
Just after the Bethany Home was founded, the newly formed ‘County Board of Health’ in Co. Clare separated single mothers from all other residents of the workhouse in Ennis. It designated the small public auxiliary workhouse in Kilrush as a ‘County Nursery’, another early name for a Mother and Baby Home. It was administered on behalf of the County Board of Health by the Sisters of Mercy, who also ran many of the country’s industrial schools for girls and retain a reputation as one of the cruelest orders of nuns. References to the ‘Nurseries’ in official documents of the time mean Kilrush Mother and Baby Home.
A newspaper article in the Clare People by Joe O’Muircheartaigh a couple of weeks after the Tuam 800 story broke shed considerable light on the home.3 There are also some minor mentions in the LGRs. Like Tuam Mother and Baby Home, which opened in 1926, Kilrush Mother and Baby Home was flexible about who it accepted as residents. They took older children and even the occasional destitute mother and her children if referred from the main county home in Ennis or by the County Board of Health. The Nurseries was also known as the ‘County Orphanage’, although this was a local understanding of its function as distinct from an official designation.
A newspaper report in 1927 states that ‘The Home is in a very poor condition of repair. There is no water supply and no bathing or sanitary accommodation and the lighting is by lamps.’4 In fact, Kilrush had only its own well on-site and no connection to any mains water supplies or sewage outlet. The journalist went on to report how difficult life was for the nuns and how it was ‘not fair’ to expect them to remain in such conditions. The conditions for mothers and babies did not warrant the same level of indignation.
The Sisters of Mercy detained mothers for at least two years and found plenty to keep them busy. They scrubbed already clean floors, did general domestic duties and were hired out whenever possible for any suitable position. After a child turned 2 years old, mothers could leave, but were expected to find employment and contribute a substantial sum towards the maintenance of their child. They were also expected to visit their child and stay in touch. The majority did for at least a number of years while others stayed on in the Nurseries a little longer. The nuns often arranged positions for the women as domestic servants or on local farms. There were several recorded escape attempts and ‘scaling the walls’ seems to have been the chosen method. The local Gardaí rounded up the escapees and returned them for punishment. The women and girls were humiliated through shaving or clipping off their hair, a certain way to prevent future escape attempts. This was followed by a ‘number one diet’ consisting of bread and water. The Sisters of Mercy were well known for removing their heavy leather belts from their habits and savagely beating children in the industrial schools. There is no evidence that they beat the women and children in Kilrush but it is likely. Those who repeatedly attempted to escape were sent to the local county home/workhouse as a severe punishment.
The babies who lived to 2 years of age were ‘boarded out’ until they were roughly 8 years old and this may be a clue as to why Pelletstown was also listed as a workhouse school until at least 1918. It is possible, although still speculation, that the children in Pelletstown were the sons and daughters of single mothers also resident in the same buildings but not mentioned in annual reports. The children went to local schools when they came of age although they were strictly segregated from the local children. At any one time in Kilrush, there were around 150 mothers and children in the home and it was grossly overcrowded during its ten years of existence. At the end of 1928, there were twenty-seven single mothers who had given birth to their first child, while a further six mothers had two or more children.5
The known infant mortality rates for the Nurseries spell out