The Adoption Machine. Paul Jude Redmond

the next. In some, particularly Protestant orphanages, children were not moved on and grew up in places like the ‘Birdsnest’ in York Road, Dún Laoghaire, and ‘Westbank’ in Co. Wicklow, staying until they were adults in some cases. Catholic orphanages were mostly reserved for middle-class legitimate children of all ages. Some of these children were lucky to find long-term foster placements and had good lives, although many others suffered at the hands of uncaring families who simply wanted the money and free labour.

      Times changed and the destinations where children went after their stay in a second-tier institution also changed. In the early days of the State, the children born in the homes generally ended up either in the county homes or industrial schools. These options were principally reserved for poor children with no family support, and illegitimate children fell into that category, albeit at an even lower level. They had miserable lives because they were singled out as an inferior class of human being and were regularly cursed as ‘bastards’ by the religious in the schools. Many of the 16-year-old girls who left industrial schools were starved of love and attention, making them easy prey for predatory men. Sadly, many of them ended up in the Mother and Baby Homes after quickly becoming pregnant outside marriage, surely a direct result of being ejected at 16 years of age into an alien environment without a shred of sex education and desperate for love after a lifetime of deprivation. Many women were doomed to a lifetime of misery and heartbreak in institutions because, if they became pregnant before marriage a second time, they were transferred from the Mother and Baby Homes directly to whichever Magdalene Laundry needed a new penitent to be punished with years of backbreaking labour. About one in every twenty-five women who entered a Magdalene Laundry was transferred directly from a Mother and Baby Home. The final chapters of Children of the Poor Clares (Mavis Arnold and Heather Laskey, 1985) record the heartbreaking testimonies of some of the girls who had been in the industrial school in Cavan and ended up in bad marriages or Mother and Baby Homes.2

      The Registration of 1934 Maternity Homes Act

      When Éamon de Valera came to power in 1932 there were four huge Catholic Mother and Baby Homes and one medium-sized Protestant home, but at least one more was needed so that in future all single mothers could be finally removed from the county homes and hospitals. However, the appalling mortality rates in the homes had finally come to the attention of the Dáil and a Bill was brought forward to regulate not just the Mother and Baby Homes but all private nursing homes, by requiring them to register and keep proper records. The Bill also provided for regular inspections. The Registration of Maternity Homes Act 1934 is like many of the Acts passed in Ireland: a fine piece of legislation if it had been enforced, but it was not. The Church had free rein to do as it pleased and was rarely challenged by State officials and inspectors.

      The final responsibility for how the Act was enforced lay with the Cabinet and ultimately with the Taoiseach, but no politician was going to challenge the Church. Whatever internal divisions there were in the Church, they behaved like a fighting family when an outsider intervened: they suddenly forgot their differences and turned on the interfering stranger. It was political suicide for any minister to order his officials to enforce the law to its spirit, let alone its letter, so the reality was that nothing changed. The slaughter of the innocents continued for at least another ten years until something far more powerful motivated the nuns to stop the extensive carnage – cash.

      Castlepollard Mother and Baby Home

      In September 1934, Mother Superior General Laurence Daly of the Sacred Hearts bought the third and last of their Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland, another large house, this time in Castlepollard, Co. Westmeath. The 15-year-old girl who had left to become a nun in France had returned many years later as the head of a rich and powerful Catholic congregation but, since this was her home territory, Mother Daly did not want to be embarrassed on her own turf. As a result, Castlepollard was radically different from the other big institutional Mother and Baby Homes of the time. It is worth taking a close look at Castlepollard for several reasons.

      The original estate house in Castlepollard was the seat of the Pollard family. It was built by Walter Pollard in 1716 with an accompanying jailhouse at the top of the nearby row of farm buildings. The Sacred Hearts bought it with 110 acres of land in September 1934, bringing their total Irish landholdings to over 900 acres. They immediately applied for yet another grant from the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake and Éamon de Valera’s government obliged them with £68,000 (€5.3 million at 2016 values). The cash paid in full for St. Peter’s, a three-storey maternity hospital, constructed between 1937 and 1939. Castlepollard was the penultimate Mother and Baby Home, opened in the rush to remove single mothers from the workhouses. One more home was opened twenty years later in 1955 and that was the end of the building phase.