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Nuns told don’t co-operate
Nuns told don’t co-operate as Bishop tried to thwart probes into Bessborough scandal
MONTH after month, year after year we peel away another layer of the sordid history of Ireland’s mother and baby homes.
In a country where falling pregnant outside marriage was viewed as something worse than a crime, thousands of women and girls were instead hidden away and their children taken from them.
With no real solution to the ‘problem’ of ‘illegitimacy’, the State was happy to leave it to religious orders and a system of mother and baby homes where, even by the standards of the day, the physical and psychological treatment of women and the removal of their children bordered on criminal.
We have all heard the terms. Sadly, their shock value has waned over time. Only in Ireland can a public be fatigued by terms like forced adoption, illegal adoption, trafficking, slavery, child death and mass graves.
Other countries are shocked. The international reaction to the Tuam babies scandal proved as much. However, at home we have to listen to the usual mantra of ‘Sure those were the times’, ‘Nobody forced these girls to get pregnant’ and the old classic: “Sure the religious did their best’.
The fact that none of these arguments hold water doesn’t weaken their hold over people who want to believe them. The culture of death in mother and baby homes was deemed a scandal at the highest government levels more than 70 years ago. The only thing lacking was the courage in official Ireland to do anything about it.
An archive of material obtained by the Irish Examiner from 1941-1945 in relation to Bessborough mother and baby home — including Department of Local Government and Public Health (DLGPH) inspection reports, letters from the government of the day to the order and correspondence between the order and the bishop of Cork — reveals a disturbing litany of abuse towards women and children that went largely unchecked.
Concerns around infant mortality are continually raised but there are numerous accounts of “emaciated” children, evidence of “insufficient feeding”. One inspector outlines a standard of medical supervision in Bessborough that is deemed “criminally casual” and requires “drastic action”. Such concerns span not months but years.
Not only that, it’s clear that Bishop of Cork Daniel Cohalan takes great offence to the State having the temerity to ask questions about how Bessborough was being run.
Despite being a State-licenced mother and baby home with a maternity hospital paid for exclusively with state funds and taking public cases referred by the Munster area Public Assistance Board, the bishop’s advice to the order was that their duty, above all else, was to Canon law and their loyalty was to their order.
The archive reveals that the nuns running Bessborough were nervous about state inspection from as far back as 1941. The Superioress had written to Cohalan asking advice on how to respond to questions from inspectors about its Query Sheet — its reporting structure for children born and discharged from the home.
Bishop Cohalan’s response in July 1941 is unequivocal — release as little information as possible.