Some of the mothers were known as ‘care mothers’ who remained in the hostel to mind the children during the day. The other women went out to work in local businesses. Duff formed a network of business people to employ the women, mainly as waitresses and domestic help. When they were old enough, the children went out to local schools and Duff insisted that they were properly dressed and had decent schoolbooks so they would not be targeted or humiliated by the other children. Mothers and children had to leave when the child reached 12 years of age.
Many senior Church and State figures visited Regina and were unanimously generous in their praise of the hostel and Duff. There were sporadic donations from Church and State funds from 1935 onwards. Regina also received Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake grants totalling £10,830 for ‘improvements’ but mainly depended on charity, raffles and other fundraising events to acquire desperately needed funds to supplement the meagre contributions of the mothers from their day jobs.
A sister hostel to Regina opened briefly in Athlone and there was a short-lived attempt to open branches in Waterford and Belfast but only the Dublin Regina lasted. It is still open today and provides shelter and dignity to many vulnerable women on the margins of society.
We shall return to Regina in the 1940s when its mortality rates among children were at times as high as the worst Mother and Baby Homes. Despite its good intentions, hundreds of children died in Regina.
Sean Ross Abbey
In 1927, Mother Laurence Daly from Skeyne, Co. Westmeath, was elected the new Mother Superior General of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts. She was a dynamic character and a brilliant administrator and is remembered with great pride to this day for opening one institution per year over her fourteen-year term of office. Two of those were Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland but were radically different because one was in her native Westmeath and was the order’s prestige home.
Her first purchase in 1930 was Convilla House in Roscrea, Co. Tipperary, where the owner, Count John O’Byrne, had confided to a local priest that he might be forced to sell. Word got back to Daly because it was known that she was searching Ireland for an estate house with land. The Sacred Hearts, always eager for a good deal, purchased the Georgian manor with four cottages and 600 acres of pasture and forestry land with a river running through it.14 The nuns renamed it ‘Sean Ross Abbey’ and it was approved as an ‘extern institution’ by the Minister for Local Government and certified for 152 mothers and 200 babies and children. Daly decided, unlike in Bessboro, to rent out the 600 acres and created workshops where various types of religious paraphernalia were produced for commercial sale. Some acres around the home were retained for basic food crops. There is some unconfirmed anecdotal evidence that at one point they produced children’s coffins, for commercial sale rather than for the babies who died in Sean Ross. The nuns installed a commercial laundry that took in outside work for payment just as the Magdalene Laundries did. Unfortunately, this common feature has led to Sean Ross being designated a Magdalene Laundry by many commentators, but it was not. It was exclusively for single pregnant women and mothers.
Over the years, Sean Ross repeatedly applied for Sweepstakes grants and received a total of £44,063 (over €3.5 million at 2016 values).15 The nuns hired the Dublin architect and builder T.J. Cullen to erect a chapel.
From the very start Sean Ross was one of the worst of the nine homes. The irrefutable evidence is in the infant mortality rate for its first year. There were 120 babies born and 60 who died. The mortality rates were available for several years in the LGRs of the 1930s and remained very high for a further twenty years before showing any signs of improvement. They deserve to be known far and wide, especially in Chigwell in Essex where the Sacred Hearts have been headquartered in a lavish period house they purchased in 1895 for £5,000. We shall return to Sean Ross in the late 1930s to compare conditions with their new sister home in Castlepollard.
Like their other home in Bessboro, Sean Ross had its own Angels’ Plot. Private research carried out by members of Adoption Rights Now, and published in a report into adoption that focused on the three Sacred Heart homes, identified 800 registered deaths between 1930 and 1950. The final figure for the Angels’ Plot is almost certainly around 1,000 as it operated for another twenty years albeit with far lower mortality rates due to changes in conditions after 1950. The stillbirths push the figure considerably higher. We shall return to this home and examine conditions and funding throughout its lifetime until it closed in 1969.
CHAPTER 4
Holy Catholic Ireland:
A New Model
After Sean Ross Abbey, another three homes opened but they were all very different from their predecessors, as the rapid expansion of the network of private and lucrative nursing homes led to the last three homes responding to a perceived need by the upper and middle classes for a better quality of care for their pregnant daughters. Two of these homes, St. Gerard’s and Dunboyne, were effectively private fee-paying homes, while Castlepollard was a mix of public and private patients.
Private Nursing Homes and Illegal Adoptions
About 300 maternity homes were registered under the 1934 Registration of Maternity Homes Act during its legal lifetime. Most of them were small nursing homes, usually in semi-converted Victorian and Edwardian red-brick houses of two and three storeys over basements. Some of them – but not all – accepted single pregnant women among their clients while a minority specialised in single mothers only. They were usually run by midwives or nurses.
The private nursing homes were the ultra-secret preserve of the wealthy and upper classes of the day who discreetly sent their daughters away to make their problems disappear. Many of the nursing homes played hard and fast with the birth registration rules; hundreds and probably thousands of babies were falsely registered as the natural children of married couples who adopted children in a financial transaction. There was an underground ‘grey’ market in child trafficking among the wealthy who could afford to use the private nursing homes either to hide their daughters’ ‘shame’ or illicitly obtain babies for illegal adoption. Some of them were semi-integrated into the system. There are many records of unwanted babies whom they could not place being transferred to institutions such as Temple Hill, which was always happy to accept babies from any source.
Some nursing homes, such as St. Rita’s in Sandford Road, Ranelagh, Dublin 6, owned by the notorious Mary Keating, were well-known for the political and criminal intrigue attached to them. One former Lord Mayor of Dublin and later a TD was closely associated with St. Rita’s. The second edition of Banished Babies named a ‘senior Fianna Fáil politician’ from the first edition as former Taoiseach Charles Haughey.1 A priest was jokingly told by Haughey that ‘sure half the children born at St. Rita’s were fathered by members of the Dáil’. The stories among the survivors’ communities regularly mention senior politicians, and in some cases their wives, who were involved in the adoption agencies. A number of adoptees claim that they are the sons and daughters of senior politicians, including at least one former Taoiseach. Huge sums of money were paid for babies across Dublin where there was a thriving black market from the 1940s into the late 1960s. The nursing homes involved in black-market trafficking did not keep records or, if they did, they were falsified. Although there were criminal investigations, and senior politicians were alerted to the practice in the 1960s, nothing was done and the body politic and An Garda Síochána ignored matters for fear of opening an almighty can of worms that would certainly have attracted the interest of the international media.
Other nursing homes are unknown in the active survivor community let alone to the general public, even though they were bigger and in some cases custom-designed or remodelled as miniature Mother and Baby Homes. In 1938, for example, ‘Lowville’ at 11 Herbert Avenue, Dublin 4, was rebuilt and redesigned as a Mother and Baby Home by the same architect/builder who had built Sean Ross Abbey’s maternity wing and new chapel (1933/35) and Castlepollard Mother and Baby Home and chapel (1937/41).