Born into a cruel world
WHEN Derek Leinster was seven-and-a-half months old, he was hospitalised. His head was covered in “puss, blood and scabs” — scars of a cruel, sadistic and unmonitored Irish care system. He was born in 1941 to a 17-year-old Protestant woman from Meath, in a Bethany Home in the leafy Dublin suburb of Rathgar, and spent his first few months in hellish conditions.
“How it worked for Protestants was, if a girl became pregnant outside of marriage, she was assigned to a Bethany Home,” he says, on another trip to Ireland to get justice for the Bethany Home survivors.
