Mother-and-baby homes - Death toll indicts all of society

In the early 1940s died there. Yes, that figure is seven-out-of-ten — more than two children died for every one who managed to survive their time at the home.

New research reveals that it was almost a place of Old Testament foreboding and threat for new-born children — “abandon all hope ye who enter here” really did apply.

Even in a society almost inured to the horrors of the past, especially those inflicted on vulnerable, often abandoned children in care, this ratio is almost beyond comprehension. It is probably higher than the casualty rate among children caught in the frontline towns and cites in the savage war devastating much of Europe and Russia at that very moment. The death toll is so incomprehensible that it is impossible to pretend that any one group or any one religious order can be blamed. This level of persecution can only endure if society looks away and endorses it, at least tacitly. women, often no more than young, frightened, half-educated girls, being sent to Bessborough to, as the vocabulary and hypocritical piety of the day might decree, to hide their shame, feel? Our vocabulary might rise to that challenge, but we are hardly equipped psychologically to imagine what it must have been like. Society’s inescapable culpability is revealed in the Cork County Medical Officer’s report of 1943: “The Sister in charge of this Home has no nursing qualifications and no hospital training in infants and children... This may or may not be a cause (of the deaths) but I suppose a qualified Nurse and specially qualified in infant feeding should be appointed for six to 12 months... There is therefore only one Nurse in this section who possesses the CMB [Central Midwives Board] Certificate, and no member of the Nursing staff has undergone any special training in infant hygiene and dietetics...

It is surprising that so many children survived, that any of them, or their mothers, ever escaped the appalling circumstances they were trapped in. We cannot remake the past, but we can ensure that is not remade. How certain are we that, in 70 years time, our treatment of vulnerable children and young women facing a life defining crisis because of an unwanted pregnancy is any better? The scale may be different but the issues are the same.