The single biggest problem with researching Mother and Baby Homes, and indeed the whole subject of adoption, is the secrecy built into the system from the very beginning when babies arriving at Coram’s Foundling Hospital were renamed and had their original identities sealed. Both the Catholic and Protestant Churches were fanatical about secrecy when it came to single mothers. Because of the nature of the system, there are no memories or memoirs from this period, and it is not until the 1940s that we begin to gain serious insights into the homes from those sources. Memoirs describing events and experiences from the 1940s were written only from the 1990s onwards, rather than contemporaneously.
Even in 2017, adoption records in Ireland are sealed for life and the Adoption Authority is exempt from the various Freedom of Information Acts and the Data Protection Act. Trying to get information about Mother and Baby Homes and adoption is frustratingly difficult, and any information received is painfully scant. I fought for nearly thirty years for the results of a medical examination I underwent when I was 15 days old in Pelletstown/St. Patrick’s in 1964. When I finally managed to get the information, I was given two photocopies of the front and back of a card about three inches by two. One side had originally contained nothing but my original name and was blanked out. The other side had four words – ‘normal healthy male infant’. I finally obtained the information in 2015, having sought it since the mid-1980s. The further back one researches, the sparser the record-keeping and the scarcer the details.
Paul Michael Garrett from NUI Galway’s School of Political Science and Sociology identifies the date for the beginning of Pelletstown/St. Patrick’s as the ‘late nineteenth century’.3 He cites the Interdepartmental Report about Mother and Baby Homes from 2014 as his source. However, all that report says is that a team of civil servants working for a couple of months with full access to all government records could only stipulate that the founding of Pelletstown ‘predated the foundation of the state’. This author claims 1904 because it was the year George Patrick Sheridan began his extensive works (see below). But 1906 and 1911 have also been cited. Mary Raftery in her book Suffer the Little Children uses the year 1918 but provides no references. To date, the best evidence comes from Eileen Conway, who worked in Dublin for the Health Service Executive in a senior capacity on an adoption ‘information and tracing’ team. She did a PhD on adoption policy practice in Ireland in the 1980s. In December 2009, Conway told the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health and Children that: ‘We hold the records for St. Patrick’s Mother and Baby Home, so we have thousands of records of mothers who gave birth, from approximately 1900.’
Conway’s evidence dovetails with another clue: the architect George Patrick Sheridan was commissioned to undertake extensive additions and alterations to Pelletstown between 1904 and 1906 at a cost of £10,970, although The Dictionary of Dublin Architects is ambiguous about the work done. Does Conway’s testimony about records from 1900 mean that Sheridan’s work was to facilitate or customise part of Pelletstown as a Mother and Baby Home to sit alongside the workhouse school? The LGRs give annual figures for the total numbers of children housed in both Pelletstown and Cabra workhouse schools at 635 in 1915 and 639 in 1918 so there is no question that Pelletstown was still being used as a residential workhouse school until at least 1918. The North and South Dublin Unions were merged in 1918 and Pelletstown may have been officially designated a Mother and Baby Home, or a ‘special institution’ as they were called at the time. Once again, however, there is no available record of such designation.
Other records from this time are scant because social and civil unrest consumed public and political attention in Ireland, compounded by a severe shortage of paper during the First World War. Single pregnant women were already hidden away from ‘respectable’ society and there was little interest in keeping detailed records about them.
Most institutions recorded only the barest and most basic details. As a rule, they used a single or double line across the page, or two pages at a time, to record essential facts such as names and addresses, dates of birth, the dates when a person entered and left, and their destination upon leaving. There was also information such as the name and date of birth of any baby born, whether born dead or alive, and where they were placed. Many of these records are lost or incomplete, although most that have survived are in excellent condition because of the top-quality leatherbound ledgers that were used. Record-keeping also tended to be inaccurate in many of the homes, whether by accident, design or plain laziness.
The most likely explanation for the confusion about Pelletstown is that the South Dublin Union decided to unofficially assign it a dual purpose. It is likely that single, pregnant women were quietly transferred over many years from the main workhouse in James’ Street to a segregated part of Pelletstown to separate them from the ‘respectable’ poor. Ireland’s first Mother and Baby Home was co-located with the Dublin auxiliary workhouse school. It may also have been that many of the children in the workhouse school were the children of single mothers residing in the same building but kept apart from one other.
The Pelletstown school needed women and girls to do the laundry and domestic work, and a perfect solution for the South Dublin union could have been to transfer the unmarried mothers from the main workhouse in Dublin city centre to a segregated section of Pelletstown. What we can definitively say is that sometime after 1918 and before 1922, the older school-aged children were moved out and Pelletstown was designated a ‘special institution’ exclusively for single mothers.
It was administered by yet another French order of nuns, the Sisters of the Daughters of St. Vincent de Paul (later called the Daughters of Charity), founded in 1633 and not in any way related to the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. The order had extensive experience in Britain, where they ran dozens of institutions for children and babies. They continued to run the home on the Navan Road until it finally closed in 1985 and they downsized to a period house in Donnybrook, Dublin 4, where they reinvented the institution as ‘supervised flatlets’.
From the time Pelletstown became a Mother and Baby Home, the everyday routine of the workhouse regime continued. Women stayed for up to two years and then left their children in the home and went to find accommodation and work outside. The nuns often arranged work placements, ensuring that they could check on the former occupants via their new employers. The women were expected to pay for their children’s upkeep and contribute substantial sums from their meagre wages for many years, even if their child was with a family. These ‘parental monies’ were collected by the local Gardaí. The Department of Education administered the scheme, although there are few or no records left to explain its precise workings.
The nuns always referred to the women and girls in Pelletstown as ‘girls’, a psychological ploy used in all the Mother and Baby Homes where women in their twenties, thirties and forties were treated as naughty children rather than as adults. Older women were told that their parents would be contacted if they did not behave themselves. Another method of controlling the residents was to intimidate them with threatened removals to another institution with a harsher reputation. This was common across the system of institutional care. Children in orphanages were threatened with being sent to the industrial schools; women in the Mother and Baby Homes were threatened with Magdalene Laundries or, the most feared of all the institutions, mental asylums.
Pelletstown, in common with many of the major Mother and Baby Homes, was the recipient of generous Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake grants during the early 1930s, and maternity units were established so that the pregnant women and girls would not have to be sent to the workhouse hospital in Dublin. In 1933, Pelletstown received over £8,000 (nearly €650,000 in 2016 values) for a maternity unit. Pelletstown Auxiliary Hospital, as it was officially known, was granted over £43,000 (over €3.5 million at 2016 values) in Sweepstakes funds.
The homes’ emphasis was on the punishment and rehabilitation of ‘first-time offenders’. Second-time or ‘repeat offenders’, as they were known, were treated brutally from the moment they