By Conall Ó FáthartaIrish Examiner Reporter
Infant death rates at the Bessborough mother-and-baby home in Cork soared to almost 70% in the early 1940s.
The revelations come just two months after the Government announced a statutory commission to investigate practices, deaths, illegal adoptions and vaccine trials at the country’s mother-and-baby homes.
* www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/mother-and-baby-homes-were-symptoms-of-a-traumatised-society-after-civil-war-1.1908597
* www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/mother-and-baby-homes-were-symptoms-of-a-traumatised-society-after-civil-war-1.1908597
Previous research done by adoption campaigners indicated a death rate of around 50% and above at Bessborough throughout the late 1930s and 1940s.
However, material uncovered by the Irish Examiner in the Cork City archives shows an official investigation carried out by the Cork County Medical Officer in 1943, on foot of inquiries from a Department of Local Government inspector, confirmed a death rate of 68% at the home.
Concern about the “habitual” high infant mortality rate at the home was so grave that the Cork County Medical Officer Robert Condy, prepared two separate reports about Bessborough for the Cork County Manager in 1943 and 1944.
The first confirms most of the children were listed as dying from “debility”, some from gastroenteritis, and “a small number” due to prematurity. It also speculates that the lack of adequate nursing qualifications by staff may have been a reason for the large number of children dying there.
“The Sister in charge of this home has no nursing qualifications and no hospital training in infants and children apart from two months in Temple Street Hospital, Dublin,” Dr Condy wrote.
“This may or may not be a cause but I suppose a qualified Nurse and specially qualified in infant feeding should be appointed for 6-12 months. The figures could then be compared with the previous term.”
A second report prepared in January 1944 by Dr Condy examines the qualifications of the staff.
It points out that only two of the four staff members in the maternity section of the home were State- registered nurses, with none having qualifications in treating children.
“There is therefore only one Nurse in this section who possesses the CMB [Central Midwives Board] Certificate, and no member of the Nursing staff has undergone any special training in infant hygiene and dietetics,” Dr Condy wrote.
In the infant home, a similar lack of qualifications was present in the three nuns running the section.
Dr Condy also took issue with the nuns boarding out children to foster parents from as early an age as just six weeks old.
“I am informed that the age at which infants are discharged from this section for boarding-out, averages around one year but infants have been boarded out at as early an age as six weeks,” wrote Dr Condy. “It would seem undesirable that infants should be separated from their mothers at such an early period.”
Both reports from 1943 and 1944 confirm that the State was aware that a “habitual” high child death rate was occurring at Bessborough.
These reports also seem predate those of State chief medical officer, James Deeny, who inspected the institution in the mid- to late 1940s and closed it down briefly due to his concerns about the level of child death there.
“The deaths had been going on for years. They had done nothing about it, had accepted the situation and were quite complacent about it,” Dr Deeny wrote in his 1989 memoir.
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*There is no reason for us to believe that the mother-and-baby homes investigation will change anything, even if the State apologises, writes Susan Lohan
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*There is no reason for us to believe that the mother-and-baby homes investigation will change anything, even if the State apologises, writes Susan Lohan
YESTERDAY, on foot of journalist Conall Ó Fátharta’s discovery of the historic mortality rate for ‘illegitimate’ children of 68% children in Cork’s Bessborough mother-and-baby home, my colleague Claire McGettrick asked if the State would ever do right by all those it had failed since it’s inception?
To recap, that includes the tens of thousands of children who had the misfortune of being born into denigrating poverty, whose parents lacked the financial means to clothe, feed, or educate them adequately, and who, as a result, the State sentenced to a childhood in cruel, punitive industrial schools, where sadism and torture were the order of the day.
It includes the young women who were deemed guilty of being sexually abused or attracting too much male attention; also those to failed to follow the rule of only having sex within marriage and avoiding pre-marital pregnancy. Of particular note are those girls from the industrial schools who were identified either as being biddable and hard-working or as hard to control, who were destined for a life of revolving doors between the schools, the Magdalene laundries, the county homes, and the so-called mother-and-baby homes, whose raison d’etre was to separate mothers from their children as a punishment for their egregious crimes. The worst fate of all befell those women whose spirits were so broken as a result of the crimes carried out against them that they were committed to medieval “mental asylums”, from which no such woman ever escaped.
Such industrial-scale denigration was not limited to the poor and illiterate. The claws of misogynists were also found in our treatment of all child-bearing women. From the butchering of women through symphysiotomies, unnecessary hysterectomies, enforced vaginal deliveries, contaminated blood transfusions, denial of contraceptives — the list goes on.
THE apologists from within the cabal of vested interests groups would have us believe that this series of unfortunate events are merely historical anomalies and that everyone knows better now and such crimes would never occur today — ergo in Ireland, we wish to dispense with restorative justice when the culprit is ourselves.
The astounding death rates at Bessborough discovered in local authority archives by Conall Ó Fátharta are only half of the picture: Of greater value to observers today is to note, on one hand, the genuine concern of individual public servants who sought to flag the death toll with their political masters and, on the other hand, to note the deafening silence after a once-off missive was issued to redirect the women and girls to the county home until matters could be resolved. We know from the memoirs of the State’s chief medical officer in the late 1940s, James Deeny, that no such resolution occurred and he reclosed the Bessborough home once again in the mid to late 1940s.
We might have hoped that the long predicted investigation into all matters surrounding the State’s treatment of unmarried mothers and their children announced by an internationally embarrassed and short-tenured Children’s Minister Charlie Flanagan in June this year, would finally have resolved the myriad of questions we might have asked. Our hopes were quickly dashed when we realised that Mr Flanagan was a passing good guy, empowered to promise the sun, moon, and stars, while he readied his briefcase for the more important foreign affairs portfolio.
Those of us who follow the appointments of ministers for children closely were frankly aghast that Enda Kenny saw fit to appoint James Reilly as the third minister for children in under seven weeks. We know that Dr Reilly has ‘skin in the game’. While covering for his absent colleague Frances Fitzgerald in June 2011, he told Socialist Party TD Clare Daly that the scale of illegal birth registrations and illegal adoptions facilitated by mother-and-baby homes was “unknown”.
He added that “the issue of historical documentation” was a matter for “these private institutions” and his understanding was that, where such documentation existed, “the nature and secretiveness of the process means that any correlation of data is extremely difficult”. Hardly the response of a man you would want drafting the serious areas for investigation.
I am not talking about a little irregular paperwork here. The questions to which we as a nation need answers include but are not limited to why, in this State/Church oligarchy, it was decided that mainly unmarried women and girls could be detained without leave? Why were these women and girls subjected to cruel and degrading treatment? Why were the ‘illegitimate’ children of these unmarried mothers allowed to die at rates almost 10 times greater than the general population of ‘legitimate’ children? Why were the children allowed to be sold for profit to the US? Why were any surviving children and all of their off-spring denied all knowledge of their birth-rights and origins? Why were these children allowed to be routinely used as guinea pigs in illegal vaccine trials?
What profit did the religious orders make from this cruel industry? Why (as the untiring Catherine Corless asked in Tuam) were these children so disposable that. three months after the international outrage broke around mass graves dotted around the country, no one in the State machinery can say were these children are buried? Finally, will we ever discover who was responsible for all of this barbarity?
To return to Ms McGettrick’s question, will the State finally do the right thing by the tens of thousands of its most vulnerable citizens it has debased and trampled into oblivion? I believe it will not.
I believe the incredibly narrow Interdepartmental Report, which will form the basis for the terms of reference for the Commission of investigation into the homes, already reveals this Government’s intention to underplay the State’s role in these killing homes and that those instructions were issued ahead of the Dáil holiday recess.
We can expect further crocodile tears from Mr Kenny or whoever is occupying the role of Taoiseach when the inevitable State apology is made, but nothing will have changed; we as a nation will have merely moved onto a new prey, a new group of society that we can debase and despise.
Susan Lohan is co-founder of Adoption Rights Alliance.
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