Mother and Baby Homes Commission references to Athy's County Home

The recently-published Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Report has been the subject of much comment and criticism. Running to 2865 pages, the report tells the story of Mother and Baby Homes between 1922 and 1998, in accordance with its terms of reference. The Commission, chaired by Judge Yvonne Murphy, acknowledges that the experiences of women and children in the 1920s were vastly different from the experiences of the 1990s, and that the institutions under investigation were very different in 1998 than they were in 1922. The Commission recognised that Ireland was a harsh environment for many during the early decades of the newly established Irish Free State, and women in particular suffered serious discrimination. Women who gave birth outside marriage were subjected to particularly harsh treatment. The report makes the important and clearly correct claim that “responsibility for that harsh treatment rests mainly with the fathers of their children and their own immediate families,” while “it was supported or contributed to and condoned by the institutions of the State and the Churches.” The institutions investigated include a variety of Mother and Child Homes as well as County Homes in Cork, Stranolar and Thomastown. The Commission found that County Homes offered worse physical conditions than the majority of the Mother and Baby Homes and that in addition mothers in County Homes had to carry out “onerous and unpleasant work for which they were not paid.” County Homes were successors to the workhouses and provided accommodation for the poor and the elderly, as well as single mothers and their children. The County Home in Athy, although not fully investigated by the Commission, is referenced several times in the report. It quotes a report of 1927 which claimed that the majority of the County Homes were in poor condition, reflecting the lack of investment prior to 1920. In Athy’s County Home, for instance, the bedside lockers provided “were simply tables made in the Home, each with a small drawer closed by a wooden catch sufficient to hold small personal items.” Unmarried mothers in the Home were noted as having “no privacy or personal space.” As early as 1927 the Commissioners for the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor recommended that the County Homes be reserved for the aged and the chronic sick and that unmarried mothers and their children should be removed to special homes. This recommendation was followed up by the Department of Local Government and Public Health, but without success. In 1926 772 unmarried mothers lived in Ireland’s County Homes. Their numbers were reduced to 582 by 1942. The newly established Department of Health returned to this issue in the 1950s when it made a sustained effort to have unmarried mothers and children removed from County Homes. However, the County Boards of Health, administered by the County Councils, failed to respond and would continue to use the County Homes not only to accommodate the aged and infirm but also to provide emergency accommodation for families and unmarried mothers from poor backgrounds. A 1953 report concerning Athy’s County Home reported that it had “a fleeting population of families admitted because of eviction, unemployment, illness of one or both parents or some other causes of break in family life.” County Managers exercised executive control of the County Homes, and they decided whether expectant mothers were sent to County Homes or to Mother and Baby Homes. Apparently a woman’s family background was considered by the Boards of Health and the County Managers when deciding whether to send a woman to a Mother and Baby Home or to a County Home. Until the maternity unit attached to St Vincent’s Hospital was closed in 1986, unmarried mothers continued to give birth in what was Athy’s former County Home. However, unlike the County Home days, neither mother nor baby remained in the hospital after birth. The situation was different in the years after Irish independence. Unmarried mothers, generally from poor backgrounds, were confined in the County Home and on many occasions their babies remained in the County Home when the mothers left. The children abandoned in Athy’s County Home were of sufficient numbers to require a school to be maintained on the premises until the 1940s. Thereafter, the schoolgoing children from the County Home attended local national schools, marching each morning to school wearing their distinctive County Home clothing. The Commission reports how the Athy County Home had a separate nursery in 1952, but that two years later it was gone. That year, the County Home housed 24 children, from infants to early teens, who slept in the adult dormitories. The sleeping arrangements were adversely commented on by the Department of Health’s inspector, who expressed concern about young boys sleeping in dormitories “with some kindly old men” but where it might be expected there were also “degenerates and the subnormal.” Strangely, there was no concern expressed for the young girls’ sleeping arrangements. The 1952 report on Athy’s County Home noted that “mothers do the household work. There appears to be three or four women, all unmarried mothers, working daily in the laundry… none are paid… the washing for the whole institution is done here… other mothers work as ward attendants, nursery attendants, and one looks after the nurses. There are in the Home women admitted as unmarried mothers whose children have been boarded out. They are employed according to their capacity but not paid.” While the inspector’s report did not criticise the facilities in the County Home, it was critical of the conditions in which the unmarried mothers lived, with particular reference to long hours worked and unpaid labour. The most damning evidence of the draconian work required in Athy’s County Home in 1952 was given in the inspector’s observation of one nine-week-old baby which “appeared healthy, clean and well catered for. She was however lying in her cradle with a half-emptied bottle of milk beside her. I suggested that she should be lap fed – the excuse offered was that the child’s mother would never get her work done if she had to spend so much time feeding her baby.” The practice of requiring unmarried mothers, or indeed anyone in receipt of public assistance, to do unpaid work ended with the passing of the Health Act of 1953. The first paid attendant was employed in Athy’s County Home in 1952 a few years after it was recorded that the County Home’s staff consisted of three nurses and three members of the Sisters of Mercy. Children abandoned in the County Homes were sometimes boarded out once they reached nine months of age, while their mothers were expected to remain in the County Homes carrying out unpaid work for two years after giving birth. It is uncertain if any infants were boarded out from Athy’s County Home, but several young boys were boarded out at nine years of age or older. Regrettably, the practice of boarding out children left some of those children abused and isolated. The passing of the Adoption Act 1953 and the Unmarried Mothers’ Allowance paid from 1973 brought an end to the abandonment of infants in County Homes. Children at risk are now boarded out or fostered under arrangements made by TUSLA. Their arrangements are better financed and monitored than the unacceptable practices which saw young boys and girls from Ireland’s County Homes boarded out, many to be ill-treated and used as slave labour. The rebuilding of Athy’s County Home commenced in 1966, long after the practice of admitting and retaining children of unmarried mothers in that institution had ended. The building work took three years to complete and on 3rd April 1969 the newly-named St Vincent’s Hospital was opened. Workhouse, County Home, St Vincent’s Hospital - each marked a step away from the misery and hunger of the Famine years, but that slow improvement was almost crippled by the shameful, harsh discrimination suffered by women in the first half of the last century. The journey continues into the 21st century, but with vast improvements in both institutional care and society’s attitudes to the most vulnerable. The Commission’s report on Mother and Baby Homes is a hugely comprehensive account of a shameful period in our nation’s history, and its findings have been unfairly criticised. Its finding that blame rests with absent fathers, unsympathetic families and Irish society generally, as well as Church and State, must leave us all ashamed of our country’s grim, joyless history.