NORTHERN IRELAND
The Detail
By Kathryn Torney, 14 June 2017
THERE are growing calls from victims and campaigners for a public inquiry into Northern Ireland’s former mother and baby homes, with claims the findings would “shock this society to its core”.
Detail Data has examined archive documents and interviewed women and children who survived conditions in the homes for unmarried mothers that existed in Northern Ireland until the early 1980s – including institutions run by the Catholic Church, the Church of Ireland and the Salvation Army.
Files at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) include correspondence homes had with government departments, the minute book for one home and inspection records for a children’s home where some of the children would have moved to after their birth.
Pregnant girls as young as 13-years-old were sent into mother and baby homes and a letter from 1945 shows how the chairman of a home for unmarried mothers appealed for money and warned the government about the high infant mortality rate among “illegitimate” children.
Our research led us to look at the treatment more generally of children labelled as ‘illegitimate’ in Northern Ireland’s recent past. Official records from 1942 show that the ‘legitimate’ infant mortality rate for Northern Ireland was 72 per 1,000 births – it was 157 for ‘illegitimate’ children.
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