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The deaths had been going on for years...They were complacent about it
Irish Examiner
As a State, we are either unwilling or unable to face up to our past, and our shameful treatment of women, writes ConallÓ Fátharta WATCHING Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald being thoroughly grilled by the chair of the UN Committee on Human Rights Nigel Rodley last month, one thing was clear — as a State, we are either unwilling or unable to face up to our past. Year after year, scandal after scandal, from the Magdalene laundries, to symphysiotomy, and now to mother and baby homes all are linked by a common thread — the shameful treatment of women and the lengths to which the State will go to delay or deny justice. In the aftermath of the long overdue State apology that was issued to the survivors of Magdalene laundries last year, many people forgot just how much effort successive governments had put into denying State involvement, in the face of incontrovertible evidence. As this newspaper reported at the time of that apology, the spectre that loomed large for the Government was that of the mother-and-baby homes. Yet, thanks to the Tuam babies making global headlines, it has been forced into an inquiry. Successive governments and ministers had been told about the horror of mother-and-baby homes. They chose to do nothing. While they wrung their collective hands after the exposure of the Tuam scandal earlier this year, archive material shows that the de facto health minister more than 60 years earlier was concerned enough about the number of infants dying in Bessborough to order that women no longer be sent there. In February 1944, it was “unanimously agreed” by the Cork Board of Public Assistance that the authorities in Bessborough be requested “not to place out at nurse any child unless they are satisfied by a Certificate of Medical Officer as to its bodily health and mental condition and suitability for placing at nurse”. The following month, it wrote to the matron of Bessborough, Sr Martina, and its medical officer, JT O’Connor, to furnish it with two reports it had compiled arising “out of an inquiry received from an Inspector of the Local Government Department relative to the high rate of infant mortality at the Sacred Heart Maternity Home, and complaints made by foster parents of alleged debilitated children being placed at nurse from the Home”. However, the government of the day decided to go a step further. Fianna Fáil’s Con Ward, effectively the health minister of the day, issued a circular directed that “for the time being”, no unmarried mother or expectant unmarried mother should be sent to The Sacred Heart Home and Hospital, Bessboro, Blackrock”. Instead, patients were to be sent to the Cork County Home. This was in 1943, but unfortunately, the concerns about Bessborough did not end there. In his 1989 memoir To Cure and to Care, former State chief medical officer James Deeny wrote that he also shut down Bessborough. Although he didn’t specify in what year, it appears his inquiries took place at some point between 1945 and 1948. Infant deaths were still a problem. Dr Deeny’s findings are worth reading in full. “For example, going through the returns for infant deaths in Cork, I noticed that there was something unusual and traced the matter to a home for unmarried mothers at Bessborough outside the city,” wrote Dr Deeny. “I found that in the previous year some 180 babies had been born there and that considerably more than 100 had died. “Shortly afterwards, when in Cork, I went to Bessboro. It was a beautiful institution, built on a lovely old house just before the war and seemed to be well run and spotlessly clean. I marched up and down and around and about and could not make out what was wrong; at last I took a notion and stripped all the babies and, unusually for a Chief Medical Adviser, examined them. “Every baby had some purulent infection of the skin and all had green diarrhoea, carefully covered up. There was obviously a staphylococcus infection about. Without any legal authority I closed the place down and sacked the matron, a nun, and also got rid of the medical officer. The deaths had been going on for years. They had done nothing about it, had accepted the situation and were quite complacent about it.”
HOWEVER, even the intervention of the State chief medical officer didn’t alter the culture at Bessborough. June Goulding was a midwife in Bessborough in 1951. Her harrowing account of her time there outlines how women were not allowed pain relief during labour or stitches after birth, and when some of them developed abscesses from breast-feeding, they were denied penicillin. One nun who ran the labour ward in 1951 also forbid any “moaning or screaming” during childbirth. Girls in poverty, who could not afford to make donations to the Sacred Heart order, had to spend another three years after their babies were born cleaning and working on the lands around the Cork city home to ‘make amends’ for their pregnancy. Such work often included cutting the home’s “immaculate lawns” on their hands and knees — with a pair of scissors. In fact, the midwife learned that, not only were painkillers not permitted, pain was mandatory. “Nobody gets any here, nurse, They just have to suffer,” she was told. The decision by Dr Ward to effectively close Bessborough and send women to the county home instead may have been well-intentioned. However, these institutions were almost as bad. While there doesn’t seem to be much appetite at Government level for including County Homes in the upcoming inquiry, one entry from Dr Deeny is instructive as to how just how badly women fared in places deemed better than mother and baby homes. “When I started to visit County Homes shortly after I was appointed I found women, some of them old, who 30 or 40 years before had been unmarried mothers, were disowned by their families and had fetched up for shelter in the workhouse,” wrote Dr Deeny. “They had been assigned to work in the kitchen or laundry as ‘able-bodied female paupers’. They had spent years or even a lifetime working without pay, dressed up in the workhouse garb, literally slaves.” From the Magdalene laundries to mother-and-baby homes to county homes — the same words crop up. Shame, slavery, and death.
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