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A HOSPITAL IN Dublin in the 1940s wrote to the Pro Cathedral as they were finding it difficult to foster children.
This letter from a Catholic priest in the Pro Cathedral in Dublin to the Registrar of the Hospital of St Margaret of Cortuna discusses the issue of unmarried mothers and their children.
The Hospital of St Margaret of Cortona was situated on Townsend Street and was also known as the Westmoreland Lock Hospital for Incurables or ‘The Lock’.
It was one of a few hospitals that catered for those suffering from ‘venereal disease’ or sexually transmitted diseases.
This letter is a response to a letter from the hospital stating that they are having difficulty in placing the “illegitimate children” of their patients in suitable homes. (To view document, click here)
The priest outlines his work as the Director of the Rotunda Girls Aid Society. He states:
I try and help a decent class of girl, a ‘first offender’, whose fall was mainly to ignorance or weakness. By decent class of girl, I mean one of a good family whom it will be possible to rehabilitate in her former position in life.
He goes on to say that he selects “all his foster mothers in a view to final adoption” adding:
I always give my reassurances to the foster mother that the mother was a ‘first offender’ of respectable parents…
He states that he tells the foster mother that the children of the women are perfectly healthy. The priest states that he also has the “Wassermann test” carried out on the mother “before taking the baby”. The Wassermann test is a test for syphilis and is rarely used today as it often produced false positive results.
He said that he found that foster mothers always wanted reassurances from him that the mothers came from good family backgrounds and that the child was healthy. He said they often want a brief outline of the mother’s history.
I feel to get any suitable foster mother to take a child whose mother has a history of venereal disease, I fear, under the circumstances it would be impossible for me to get any suitable foster mother to take a child whose mother had a history of venerial disease…
The father goes on to say that he does not arrange all adoptions in the hospital and that “in a great many cases”, it is in desirable that a mother and child be kept together.
If her circumstances at home would make it difficult or impossible for her to take the baby home it would often be better to have both sent to an institution.
He goes on to say that another solution would be for a family member to step in and help. He states that he does all this work “alone” and has to manage all the details by himself in addition to his parochial work. “In this letter I can only touch on the fringe of the difficulties inherent in the problem of dealing with unmarried mothers and her child,” he concludes.
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What a truly horrible place this country must have been.
Yes, unlike today where 400 a night are sleeping rough on the streets of Dublin, the soup kitchen in Bow Lane is providing 700 meals a day to 500 meter lone queues, battered wives are living with families of four in one room hotels for want of social housing and suicide is higher than it was back then. The answer to being unemployed is like conscription back in the day where you can now be picked up an made to work on jobridge for less than it costs to get to work. Have we changed that much?
great point Tom. We seem to be very good at distancing ourselves from the society we were in the past, and wagging our finger in disgust … but have little inclination to personally do anything about matters that will be equally condemnable in the distant future about how we are treating certain sections of society today.
That wasn’t my intention.
Tom Fennely, nobody is picked up and forced to work on JobBridge. Stop exaggerating to make your point.
This father was probably a more compassionate figure than society in general. And society was our grandparents and great grandparents. Our values now are different to what was important then and what will be important to our grandchildren. Perhaps judgement on others should be kept to the present generation where we plenty of examples of poor societal figures
Roll forward to Ireland in 2014 …
if a single mother is totally dependent on the State for accomodation and income, and she already has two children, and she has substance abuse/addiction problems:
if there was a medically safe and responsible method to temporarily prevent her from having more children (ie it is reversible by a doctor) should it be imposed? Or does she have a right to bring more children into her world under her care?
Personally I’d say that’s straying a little too close to a kind of social Darwinism. Obviously the case you outlined is quite extreme, but I would say very few real life cases are as clear cut, so who out of any of us is comfortable dictating whether another person is ‘worthy’ of living their life as they want? Takes a fair bit of arrogance I think.
Fair dues to that priest .He was doing the best he could in awful circumstances. After all it usually was the families themselves and very often the girls also who didn’t want these poor babies … The innocent victims. I would go to far as to say that a lot of the children born in Ireland at this time ,both in and out of wedlock weren’t really wanted …. I’m old enough to remember the 50′s and 60′s and life was very,very different to what it is today.
@helenc I have to agree. My impression from that letter was that the priest was doing his best. He was also stating the obvious – then and maybe now – that prospective foster/adoption parents wanted some history of the child. I know I will be red thumbed but we mostly agree on this website that some unmarried mothers have too many children. Then there are those who were fooled into thinking it can never happen to them. I am of split thinking on this one.
He may have been doing a good job but he got good money for it and as one of those children I now have paper proof of payment made in my case
Well done, Harry, that proof must have been tough to obtain.
Society at the time was browbeaten & brainwashed by the church to be subservient to the point of near fundamentalism. However If you were from so called ‘good stock’ i.e wealthy’ almost anything could be forgiven if the donation was large enough. The hypocrisy of the church was and still is alarming.
Tony Doran.. It is true that the Catholic Church has massive influence. My dad worked in a bakery for 30 years run by a Protestant family. They never let him take a few days off. Even when his father in law died in 1970 they wouldnt let him go to the funeral. Is that the Catholic Churchs fault?
As i said i do agree the Catholic Churchs influence was not positive in many ways. But you’d have to wonder how stupid our parents were. Employees were treated like slaves. Dirty old men were let molest children and walk the streets and Gardai looked the other way. Teachers were bullies. Dentists were butchers. And God help you if you were “simple”.. Yes the madhouse is the best place for you.
I am glad that Ole Ireland is dead and gone.
Sinead this is very true. As others have said above it is all too easy and populist to continue pointing the finger at the church. And that finger pointing is as we know, well justified. However, the church was fully empowered and encouraged by a society that was obsessed with morality and respectability. It suited society to have an organisation that helped its dirty little secrets to go away. There is one Irish institution that has yet to be scrutinised and that is the family.
Mister.. I completely agree.. I think our schools and the sick methods of educating the kids havent been looked at either..
I have a friend, a retired teacher in her 70′s and she often cried in front of me remember the things she done to children. Humiliation, beatings, dunce hats, insults were the norm. She says it was the way she learned how to teach. I have a very negative memory of my own education
And you are also right.. We need to uncover “the family”.. Thats going to be some can of worms
I have teachers of that vintage in my family and many were compassionate people who did not use the dunces hat etc.I met teachers who had no respect for children but I would say that was their temperament rather than the way they were taught to teach. Bullies perhaps?
The more I read about this sort of thing, the more angry I get.
It’s tied up with the miseducation and brainwashing of the population by schools patronage almost exclusively by the Church of Rome who also had a massive say in shaping government policy. During the lockouts, children were denied foster care in England because the church didn’t want them “corrupted” by non-Catholics. Not withstanding the realities of Anglo-Ireland history, following 1921 the national narrative was England was responsible for all Ireland’s woes, any collaborative history whitewashed and Ireland’s position as almost a Catholic theocracy reinforced. After fighting for independence Ireland handed control to a bunch of unmarried men in frocks. The treatment of women was medieval. Birth control only on prescription to married women. The shackles have come off, but true freedom is scary for some.
Ah, can you prove that it is?
The Catholic Mafia. Could make anything “undesirable” disappear and got rich doing it.
Society as a whole were in on it. The Church succeeded because the people wanted it to.
I suppose our excuse is ‘we didn’t know any better/we were only following “Orders”‘
… where have we heard that before?
Johngahan.. I totally agree with you. My best friend got pregnant in 87 and she was banished to UK cousins by her proud mother and told not to come home. Her father didnt know she was pregnant and when he found out he insisted she came home as soon as the child was born and to bring the child with her.
The girl in question never ever got over the way her mother deserted her.
Parents were more worried about what the neighbours thought than the welfare of their own children. People love to point the finger at the Catholic Church for everything but if we do that we are letting the real culprits get away with it. ie the parents. What kind of “parent” abandons their child when they get into trouble?
A man was nice to her and a woman treated her like dirt? Surely you got it wrong?
Ahippo… I dont really know what u mean by that.. But yes her Dad was the hero in this tale.. Her mother was a decent person who said she was protecting her daughters reputation.. But not telling her father?? Secrets never helped anyone
Sinead, i had a school friend back in the mid 60′s who suddenly disappeared from school. it was years later i learned that she was ‘sent away’ to have a baby. i met her in the town years later when she was home for a brief visit. she told me her family didn’t want anyone to know about ‘what SHE did’. she had her baby in Dublin and it was taken away from her just after shedelivered. she had a wee boy. she never came back to Derry and eventually met a Danish fella and had a grand life. then tragedy struck and her family were all killed in a road accident…….when she was emerging from her grief she thought on her son and started to look for him. she was one of the few who was able to trace him to London…..the same day her family were wiped out her son was killed in a motorbike.
we were standing in the street when she was telling me this story. i felt my knees going from under me……the anger in me, the frustration at how girls were treated. we were only 16 at the time she became pregnant. one of the saddest stories i have ever heard. i never forgot Kathleen or her story…..i hope where ever she is that she is well and has found some sort of happiness.
I wish the same for her <3
There are two distinct differences between society back then and society now. People were poor then but in a way they were all poor together. Today, if you add up the number of bank managers and county managers of county councils who in the last three years alone have walked with handshakes of €360,000 and added pensions of €100,000 while people are watering their milk to pay their mortgage and feed their children.
These days the dairies water the milk and sell it as “low-fat”.
This priest may have done a good job but he and the rgas in finding foster parents stole the child’s identity by allowing and aiding in the false registration of birth. I know this for a fact as I am one of those children and it took me 20 years to find some of the truth and as for the church they have my file and still won’t come clean I’m sorry to say that they still cannot be trusted
Where are all the single fathers then and now .
These stories are so sad
You see, we were working hard to find homes for the offspring of these fallen women. If only Ireland had followed the Church’s teachings – none of this would ever have been discovered.
Breda, wasn’t it the Dalha Lama who siad….’ i have great respect for jesus, its his followers i don’t have much time for’……
Folks I was born in a home in the mid eighties! This priest, for his era was very kind. The stories I’ve been told from c30years ago don’t make pleasant listening either – However society has developed and we now have other issues as Tom has very well said in his point earlier. We too will be looked back at & frowned upon.
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