The Adoption Machine. Paul Jude Redmond
were dying in their thousands in the Mother and Baby Homes and workhouses/county homes.
Year | Children in the Institution | Number of Deaths | Mortality Rate |
1924 | 259 | 96 | 37% |
1925 | 240 | 119* | 50% |
1926 | 271 | 94 | 35% |
1927 | 263 | 111 | 42% |
1928 | 294 | 95 | 32% |
1929 | 330 | 81 | 25% |
1930 | 336 | 66 | 20% |
*Measles epidemic |
Armed with this information, a closer inspection of exact mortality rates in Pelletstown in the 1920s is revealing. The precise figures for the number of children in institutions, and the number of deaths for Ireland’s first Mother and Baby Home, were reproduced in the LGR for 1929/30. However, the ‘mortality rate’ (rounded to the nearest full number), as added below, did not appear in the original LRG and does not represent the precise infant mortality rate as defined above. Some of the deaths were of children aged over one year and most of the children and babies who died were in the large wards for unaccompanied babies in Pelletstown/St. Patrick’s, including many whose mothers were never in Pelletstown. Even with these caveats, the mortality rates were excessive by any civilised standard. The total numbers given for the deaths in Pelletstown are 622 children out of 1,993, over seven years: an average IMR of over 31% for the seven years, peaking at 50% in 1925. Babies and children in Pelletstown were dying at the rate of almost two per week over those seven years. The LGR for 1925/27 at Pelletstown produced a rare negative reaction from the office of Local Government, as shown below.
Deaths of Illegitimate Infants
The Annual Reports of the Registrar-General for the years 1925 and 1926 disclose that the mortality rate amongst infants born out of wedlock was about five times greater than that of legitimate infants, and that one out of every three of the first-mentioned class died before the completion of the first year of life.
It is recognised that illegitimate infants are handicapped by constitutional and environmental disadvantages which tend to a heavy incidence of infant mortality, but even when allowance has been made for these adverse factors, the death-rate of such infants is still disproportionately high in view of the experience of other countries.
From an analysis of the statistics it is evident that this excessive mortality is accentuated at the age period from fourteen days up to three months and in point of causation is associated with Diarrhoea and Enteritis. It may, therefore, be inferred that the unfavourable results are traceable to the early separation of mother and infant and to the influence of unsuitable artificial feeding.
The supervision of the illegitimate child is partly a matter of Poor Law (e.g., maintenance and liability), of Police (inquests and proceedings for neglect) and of Child Welfare (general protective arrangements).
The deplorable loss of life amongst these children shows the necessity for more efficient administration by local authorities of the powers conferred by the Children Act, 1908, the Notification of Birth Acts, 1907 and 1915, and the Midwives Act, 1918.
For those children who were placed with families, the future was little better, as this LGR excerpt shows:
Nurse children: The provisions of part I of the Children Act, 1908, relating to undertaking the care of infants for gain was actively administered during the year in the Dublin union, the area where the need for supervision of nurse children is greatest. There has been a steady increase in recent years in the number of registrations, while the death rate though higher than in 1927–28, compares favourably with earlier years. The number of nurse children within the cognisance of the Dublin union authorities on the 1 March 1929 was 1,261. The following are comparative figures for five years for Dublin union:
1924–5 | 1925–6 | 1926–7 | 1927–8 | 1928–9 | |
Children registered | 523 | 527 | 591 | 489 | 620 |
Deaths of infants | 83 | 85 | 111 | 49 | 66 |
Homes condemned | 46 | 87 | 138 | 162 | 161 |
Prosecutions | 11 | 15 | 26 | 25 | 26 |
Mortality rates among boarded-out children ranged from 10% to 20% after 1922 until well into the 1930s. There is very little evidence as to where exactly those children came from but many, if not the majority, were sent from Mother and Baby Homes around the country.
One key point to note is that the nuns who ran the homes also brought the lists of births and deaths to the local registry offices to be officially recorded. As it is the nuns themselves who are the direct source of the infant mortality rates, they are not in a position to dismiss the inhumanity and brutality of the figures or to distance themselves in any way from the evidence.
Of the nine Mother and Baby Homes, six were horrific and Pelletstown/St. Patrick’s was, in terms of the vast numbers of deaths, by far the worst. The current Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes is restricted to investigating from the year 1922 and therefore Pelletstown will never be formally investigated before that date. The Interdepartmental Report from 2014 states that 6,596 births were registered in Pelletstown but only seven of those births were registered up to 1934 because the home had no maternity wards of its own for the first thirty-four years of its 85-year operation. The final figure for Pelletstown will never be known, but it likely to be above 10,000 single mothers and therefore approximately 10,000 babies. In time, it will be known as the biggest residential institution, in terms of numbers, in Ireland. The figure may be as high as 25,000 mothers and babies and that is without counting the thousands of unaccompanied babies and children transferred to Pelletstown’s wards from various outside sources.
There were 622 children listed as dying in the LGR noted above. If the rate of deaths in Pelletstown from the 1920s – nearly two children per week – was replicated before 1922 and up to 1940, the final figure from 1900 to 1940 would be more than 3,000 children. At present, there is also a confirmed minimum figure for the number of babies who died between 1940 and 1965: 474, a number recently confirmed in the Dáil by the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Katherine Zappone. The two confirmed figures alone (622 + 474) add up to 1,096 and that is only what we can presently confirm with the earlier and undoubtedly worst decades missing. The total number that died will be shocking but will still be only part of the full picture of institutional neglect in Ireland since 1900.
During the 1916 Easter Rising, 500 men, women and children died. Yet at the very least, over four times that number of Irish citizens – mothers, infants and children – died in Pelletstown. There is no commemoration for this tragic institution in our history. There are no plaques or annual marches down O’Connell Street with planes flying overhead. There is only a black hole in our collective folk memory and history books.
St. Patrick’s Guild and St. Patrick’s Infant Hospital
Of all the sources of confusion in the adoption and survivor communities, the worst is unquestionably St. Patrick’s. There were three major St. Patrick’s institutions, each with a different function. Many adoptees and survivors are unaware of this until they start looking for information.
St. Patrick’s Guild (SPG) spent decades organising boarding out for illegitimate babies and some post-separation support for single mothers. After 1952, it grew into one of the biggest adoption agencies in Ireland and arranged nearly a quarter of all legal adoptions. The Catholic Protection and Rescue Society was of a comparable size. SPG also owned a ‘holding centre’ named ‘St. Patrick’s Infant Hospital’ in Blackrock, Co. Dublin. It is customarily called ‘Temple Hill’ to distinguish it from the other two St. Patrick’s. Both the SPG adoption agency and the holding centre share a name with St. Patrick’s – the Mother and Baby Home also known as Pelletstown on the Navan Road in Dublin. To make matters even more complicated, all three St. Patrick’s were based in Dublin and regularly worked closely together. There are many instances of babies born in St. Patrick’s Mother and Baby Home, then transferred to St. Patrick’s Infant Hospital and later adopted through the St. Patrick’s Guild adoption agency.
St. Patrick’s Guild was founded by Mary Josephine Cruice in 1910 to counteract the influence of the Protestant rescue societies. Those rescue societies