Most survivors of former home ‘not entitled to redress’
Despite the horrific amount of deaths from neglect at the home, Minister Mary Couglan, speaking in Cork yesterday, said she believes that Bethany House in Rathgar was “in the main a voluntary place of detention”. It has emerged that in the 1930s and 1940s, 219 children died at the home for Protestant children and were buried in unmarked graves at Mount Jermome.
Of the children that died, it is believed that at least 54 died from convulsions, 41 from heart failure and 26 from “marasmus”, a form of malnutrition. During one period between 1935 and 1939, 86 children died. The research, by Niall Meehan from DIT, shows that one child died every three weeks at the Bethany Home in Rathgar from 1935 to 1940.
