The Voiceless: Abuse of Women and Their Children Laid Bare in Commission Report on Ireland's Mother and Baby Homes

By Emma Gallagher
Sligo Champion
January 23, 2021

https://www.independent.ie/regionals/sligochampion/news/the-voiceless-abuse-of-women-and-their-children-laid-bare-in-commission-report-on-irelands-mother-and-baby-homes-39982289.html

Ireland was described as a 'cold, harsh place' for the 56,000 women and 57,000 children in the mother and baby homes, from 1922 to 1998, who suffered serious discrimination, the Mother and Baby Homes Commission Report stated.

The extensive report, almost 3,000 pages in length, covers a 76 year period and gives a harrowing, shameful look into the treatment of these mothers and their babies.

The Commission found that a total of 9,000 children died in the institutions under investigation during that time, most under the age of one, 15% of all the children in the institutions.

Although none of the mother and baby homes the Commission investigated were located in Sligo, statistics in the report reveal Sligo mothers were resident in these homes, including in Stranorlar and Tuam.

The report also indicates the high volume of women who went to homes in Dublin such as Pelletstown, who came up from the country. Many more rural women also travelled to Britain.

The report described the very high rate of infant mortality (first year of life) in Irish mother and baby homes as probably the most disquieting feature of those institutions. It found that the death rate in 1945/46 among infants in mother and baby homes was almost twice that of the national average for illegitimate children. A shocking statistic revealed that in Bessborough mother and baby home in Cork in 1943, 75% of the children died before their first birthday.

There is no single explanation for the appalling level of infant mortality in Irish mother and baby homes. The children of unmarried mothers were at greater risk, because of stress, and a lack of ante-natal care. The report states that the 'very high' mortality rates were known to local and national authorities at the time and were recorded in official publications.

It found there was no evidence that unmarried mothers were ever discussed at Cabinet during the first 50 years after independence.

While some women went to England or to Dublin to prevent their families knowing of the pregnancy, others travelled with the advice and assistance of family members.

A Sligo family sent their pregnant daughter to England, where she gave birth, 'to get child adopted' but she was returned and admitted to the Castlepollard mother and baby home.

This was not an uncommon story.

In the mid-1950s, 61% of the almost 800 expectant mothers that were referred to the English Catholic Rescue Society were from Ireland.

The Liverpool Society for the Prevention of International Traffic in Women and Children said they had met a total of 1,947 Irish expectant mothers in the years 1926-30.

The report bluntly states that the women in mother and baby homes should not have been there. They should have been at home with their families. However, the reality was that most had no choice - they were, or expected to be, rejected by their families and they needed a place to stay. Most were unable to provide for the baby.

The Ireland during the early half of the period under remit (1922 to 1998) was hard for the majority of its residents, the Commission maintains, adding all women suffered serious discrimination. Women who gave birth outside marriage were subject to particularly harsh treatment.

The report claims that the responsibility for that harsh treatment rested mainly with the fathers of their children and their immediate families. It was supported by, contributed to, and condoned by, the institutions of the State and the Churches.

The report maintains that it must be acknowledged that the institutions under investigation provided a refuge - a harsh refuge in some cases - when the families of these women provided no refuge at all.

While mother and baby homes were not a peculiarly Irish phenomenon, the proportion of Irish unmarried mothers who were admitted to mother and baby homes or county homes in the twentieth century was probably the highest in the world.

It reveals that the greatest number of admissions were in the '60s and early seventies'.

The Commission adds that there is likely a further 25,000 unmarried mothers and a larger number of children in the county homes throughout Ireland largely pre-1960, which were not investigated.

There were county homes in every county except Louth, including St John's Hospital in Sligo and St Patrick's Home in Carrick-on-Shannon.

By the late 1960s/early 1970s, they were being used exclusively for the care of older people and they later began to be described as public community nursing homes and many of them still operate as such.

The report found that the majority, or 80% of the women in the mother and baby homes were between the ages of 18 and 29. It discovered that 5,616 were under the age of 18.

Some pregnancies were the result of rape, some women had mental health problems, some had an intellectual disability.

The only difference between the women in mother and baby homes and their sisters, classmates and work companions was that they became pregnant while unmarried. Their lives were blighted by pregnancy outside marriage, and the responses of the father of their child, their immediate families and the wider community.

The profiles of the women changed over the decades, the report indicates, mirroring changes in Irish women's lives.

In the early decades most women who were admitted were domestic servants or farm workers or they were carrying out unpaid domestic work in their family home.

In later years, however, many of the women were clerical workers, civil servants, professional women and schoolgirls or third-level students.

Many of the women in the mother and baby homes did suffer emotional abuse and were often subject to denigration and derogatory remarks.

It appears there was little kindness shown to them and this was particularly the case when they were giving birth. There were no qualified social workers, or counsellors attached to these homes until at least the 1970s.

Many of the women found childbirth to be a traumatic experience.

The overwhelming majority were first-time mothers and they were probably uninformed about childbirth.

The trauma of childbirth must have been especially difficult for the many women who had no prospect of keeping their child.

There was no evidence of the sort of gross abuse that occurred in industrial schools, the report says, although there were a small number of complaints of physical abuse.

The women worked, but they were generally doing the sort of work that they would have been doing at home, women in the county homes did arduous work for which they should have been paid and there are a few other examples where this is the case, the report alludes to.

The vast majority of children in the institutions were 'illegitimate' and because of this, they suffered discrimination for most of their lives.

Before the availability of legal adoption in Ireland (1953), children who left the mother and baby institutions usually ended up in other institutions such as industrial schools or were boarded out or nursed out.

The report explains that Irish families were large; in 1960 the number of children born in a marriage, was the highest in the developed world despite the fact that couples married at a late age.

Many families were poor and living in overcrowded homes so an additional child would have put them under pressure.

Such a child would have been especially unwelcome in a farm house where the marriage of the inheriting son depended on clearing the home of non inheriting siblings.

Many pregnant women fled to Britain, to protect this secrecy, only to face the prospect of being returned to Ireland against their wishes.

British Catholic charities put considerable pressure on the Irish Hierarchy and on the government to repatriate the women.

Some of the treatment meted out to these women, who were commonly described as PFIs, (pregnant from Ireland) was inhumane and occasionally it placed them at medical risk.

British authorities also returned children born there to Irish women, sometimes approaching the woman's family who might be unaware of the child's existence, asking them to take the child. The Department of Health and local authorities appear to have co-operated with these practices.

The main motivation behind the British and Irish Catholic charities who were involved in repatriating Irish women from Britain, either pregnant or with their new-born infant, was to prevent these children being 'lost' to Catholicism through adoption into Protestant families.

The report states that several women were repatriated at a very late stage in pregnancy and in circumstances that presented a serious risk to health.

One woman became extremely ill on the boat returning from England, and refused to travel beyond Dublin.

When the Sligo health authority was asked to agree to maintain her in the Pelletstown mother and baby home, they contacted the department asking whether it was an approved institution.

* Further coverage in the January 19th edition of The Sligo Champion