Kilrush closed in early 1932 and Fitzgerald-Kenney noted its closure in her annual report in the 1933 LGR, where she states that all remaining children were transferred to ‘Shan Ross Abbey’ [sic].8 The Kilrush Home was demolished in 1936.
Bessboro Mother and Baby Home
The Sacred Heart nuns who had taken over the world’s first Catholic model of a Mother and Baby Home back in 1891 arrived in Cork in Ireland in 1922 to open a similar institution. Michael Sugrue, originally from County Kerry, had emigrated as a young man to London. A prosperous businessman, he wholeheartedly supported St. Pelagia’s Home, run by the Sacred Hearts in London. Sugrue received a letter from his cousin Mrs Neville in Cork, who convinced him there was dire need of a Mother and Baby Home in Cork. Sugrue approached Cardinal Francis Bourne of the Westminster Diocese, which immediately purchased a Georgian estate house, farm buildings and 210 acres of land in Bessboro, Co. Cork, on the edge of the city. Owing to the semi-forced emigration of many Protestant and Quaker landowners before and during the War of Independence and the bitter civil war that followed, property prices in Ireland were low and Bessboro was purchased for the bargain-basement price of £800.9 According to the Sacred Hearts’ official biography, Bessboro was opened on 1 February 1922 and the nuns and the inmates ‘laboured together in harmony’ in the fields to feed themselves.10 Strangely, according to the Sacred Hearts themselves, Bessboro accepted children from the local workhouse when it opened and did not become a Mother and Baby Home until 1924 when it was approved by the government as an ‘extern institution’. That meant it could be subcontracted by Local Authorities and County Councils as a home for ‘first offenders’. It was the second-biggest in terms of numbers of all the homes after Pelletstown/St. Patrick’s, and was the last to officially de-list as a home in 1996, although it continued as the Bessboro ‘Care Centre’. Although currently on the market, it remains open at the time of writing with a gentler image as a ‘refuge’, and two single mothers sat their Leaving Certificates in Bessboro as late as 2009.11
At the outset, Bessboro did not have a maternity unit and, in common with Pelletstown, all the pregnant girls were sent to a local maternity hospital – the District Hospital in Cork, now called St. Finbarr’s – a couple of weeks before they were due to give birth. They returned with their babies to Bessboro soon after. However, in 1933, according to the LGR for that year, the nuns received an Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake grant of £13,600 to convert the old stables into a maternity wing where all future births would take place, without doctors or painkillers. At least 3 Bessboro residents who gave birth to babies in the 1920s stayed for at least 10 years and became known as the ‘old girls’. Similar stories have emerged from other homes and it appears that many of them never left.
Strangely enough, the figure for the Sweepstakes grants in the LRG is incomplete according to the official Sweepstakes book. Their official figure is that Bessboro received £26,605 for ‘capital grants’. There is surely an innocent explanation for the discrepancy of precisely £8,000 (€640,000 at 2016 values).12 £1,500 of the total (€120,000 at 2016 values) was granted to equip the maternity unit. However, June Goulding, who was a midwife in Bessboro in 1951, was adamant that there was no medical equipment in the maternity room except a bed with stirrups and a small medical cabinet containing a needle and surgical thread. Multiple testimonies from later years confirm Goulding was correct. From 1934, all births took place in Bessboro. In emergency cases, an ambulance was called, but this was very rare.
In the beginning, the nuns hired a minimal number of farm labourers locally, but the whole idea of purchasing the farmland with the house was that the residents could be used as free labour. The girls did the bulk of the farm work and they also scrubbed and cleaned the home and convent. Bessboro had its own laundry where all the washing for the home and convent was done by hand, and also had its own bakery. It later opened a farm shop where the top-quality produce was sold at full commercial value while the residents were fed on the substandard leftovers. The hard labour and the second-rate food were part of the punishment. The LRG for 1928/29, page 113, records that:
This Home was opened in 1922 and is intended primarily for young mothers who have fallen for the first time and who are likely to be influenced towards a useful and respectable life. In the Home, they are trained in domestic work, cookery, needlework, dairy work, poultry keeping and gardening and instructed in their religion. After a period of training each is provided with a suitable situation and put in the way of self-support and the children are boarded out with reliable foster mothers. The rate of maintenance is three shillings a day for mother and child, but if the child dies there is no charge.
There were 75 mothers resident on the 1 January 1928. During the following year 24 were admitted and 34 discharged, leaving 65 in residence at the end of the year. The number of children in the Home on 31 December 1928, was 64. The boards of public assistance responsible for maintenance were: South Cork, 40: Kilkenny, 11: Waterford, 8: Tipperary, N.R., 5, and Kerry, 1.
When the Interdepartmental Report was released in 2014 as a ‘scoping exercise’ into the Mother and Baby Homes after the Tuam 800 story broke, many commentators were surprised at the apparently low figure of 5,912 for births in Bessboro. However, the figure was missing the many hundreds born in St. Finbarr’s for at least ten years during the 1920s and early 1930s as well as hundreds, if not thousands, of stillbirths over its lifetime. And, in 1986, following official pressure in the mid-1980s, Bessboro agreed to stop facilitating births in the home and all subsequent births took place once again in St. Finbarr’s. For many years, this author has maintained that the final number of girls and women who went through the doors of Bessboro was between 8,000 and 10,000 and nothing to date has undermined that figure.
The nuns designated a small, anonymous area near their new home as a place for burying babies without coffins, markers or distinct graves. Although they did at one stage maintain a death register, they never kept any specific book or account of exactly who was buried there. The ‘Angels’ Plot’ was neglected by the nuns, but when international attention focused on Bessboro after the Tuam 800 story exploded in May 2014, the nuns paid to have the plot turned into a twee memorial garden. For many years, urban legends among the survivor community maintained that over 2,000 babies were buried there. It is difficult to estimate the number but it is certainly well over 1,000 and probably more than 1,500. When stillbirths are included, that figure may exceed 2,000. Bessboro’s on-site Angels’ Plot is the largest of any of the homes.
According to one of the LGRs, thirty babies died between the years 1933 and 1935 in Bessboro. More than half of that total was due to ‘marasmus’, emaciation due to malnutrition. In later years there are records of well over one hundred babies a year dying. We shall return to Bessboro to compare conditions there in the late 1930s with its sister home in Castlepollard.
Tuam Mother and Baby Home (aka The Home)
The Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway, opened in 1926. Tuam was a converted workhouse owned and financed by the Poor Law Guardians and the local authority, which invited the Bon Secours nuns to run and administer Tuam on their behalf. According to the Interdepartmental Report of 2014, there were 1,101 births included in the records of the General Registers Office during the home’s lifetime. This figure is so low because, once again, it does not reflect the fact that Tuam did not have its own maternity unit in the early years. There were three ‘old girls’ who gave birth in Tuam and stayed there for the rest of their lives.13
A maternity hospital