IRELAND
The Journal
Survivors are calling for the Westbank home, in Greystones, Co Wicklow, to be included in the wide-ranging inquiry tasked with investigating the State’s network of mother-and-baby homes.
The children allege that they were beaten with electric flexes and coathangers, that they were constantly hungry and starving and that Ms Mathers, who insisted on the name ‘Auntie’ ran a sort of a reign of terror.
ADELINE MATHERS RAN the Westbank (aka Mayil) orphanage in Co Wicklow for over 50 years.
Originally known as the Protestant Home for Orphan & Destitute Girls and based in Harold’s Cross, Dublin, the institution moved to Wicklow in the late 1940s, and began taking in boys as well as girls.
Over the following decades, Mathers presided over a regime whereby children were forced to carry out manual labour, deprived of food, whipped and beaten (so badly, at least on one occasion, that the authorities had be called).
Between 30 and 50 children, aged from just a few months old to their late teens, were resident in the home at any given time. Mathers, who began her career as a nurse, named all of the children after herself, residents recall — perhaps in an attempt to ‘Anglicise’ their names.
Residents were also trafficked illegally over the border and placed with unregistered foster carers — in some of these arrangements, the children also suffered from physical, emotional and/or sexual abuse.
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