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ANOTHER 58 CHILDREN from the Bethany Home mother-and-baby home have been identified as being buried in unmarked graves in a Dublin cemetery.
Those who located them say the children were all from the Bethany Home, a home for unmarried mothers that was run by an evangelical Protestant group and located on Dublin’s Orwell Road in Rathgar.
They were discovered by volunteers who matched death records with burial records at Mount Jerome.
The burial records for some of the children state that they died of conditions such as marasmus (malnutrition) and heart failure.
One of the records is for a three-week-old boy, William Armstrong, a “son of [a] servant” who died of “marasmus, heart failure”.
These are not the first children from the Bethany Home who have been identified as being buried in the cemetery.
In fact, this brings to over 270 the number of Bethany Home children discovered to have been buried in paupers’ graves at Mount Jerome in Dublin’s Harold’s Cross. It is understood that children from other mother-and-baby homes are also buried in that cemetery.
Bethany Homes Survivors Group is to put the names of the children on a new memorial at Mount Jerome cemetery on 29 June this year. It will be an addition to the first memorial which was raised in 2014. Both have been funded by the State.
In 2014, a document was released which showed that some children at the home died of conditions such as marasmus (malnutrition); convulsions; ‘delicacy’; meningitis; German measles; syphilis; ‘general debility’; and heart failure.
These details were researched from Mount Jerome Cemetery records in May and September 2010 by Niall Meehan, head of the Journalism and Media Faculty at Griffith College, Dublin.
Meehan and Bethany Home survivor Derek Leinster said at the time that relatives of the children may not be aware that a member of their family is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.
(To read the full list of names, click here.)
Leinster told TheJournal.ie that while the graves are unmarked, the details of those buried in the cemetery are kept by Mount Jerome. These are then matched with death records pored over by the researchers.
“The new names we have, we have now got plot numbers of where they are buried,” explained Leinster. “We have a plot number and a site in Mount Jerome.”
He said that the feelings around the latest identifications are twofold:
It’s sadness, great sadness but it’s also it gives us, in a deep, funny way, a sense of joy because we know these children were dumped because they were considered life lower than a snake. We are now making the people and making the society that allowed this to happen to face it as if they never did before.
“222 Bethany children were denied so much in their short lives and even in death the right to their name on a headstone,” said Derek Leinster at the launch of the first memorial stone in 2014.
He said at the time that the children were placed in unmarked ground, until being rediscovered by the Bethany Home Survivors Group in 2010.
Leinster said that “nobody wanted to see [the children] so I wanted to make sure the world sees them”.
“Just because they were born out of wedlock or just because they died because they didn’t get the care that a human being would give a human being, it gives us great pleasure that … we’re making society recognise and accept.”
However, Leinster pointed out that Bethany Home survivors still haven’t had an apology or redress from the State.
“Why should thousands of people have had money and [an] apology from the State and yet after 20 years we still haven’t had that – why should that be the case?” he asked.
“For people like me, we grew up in shame – our younger part of our lives was all to do with shame. We were illegitimate and shamed going to school,” he said this week, adding that when he was seven-and-a-half months old, his head was “covered in pus, scabs and blood”.
The Bethany Home Survivors Group has called on the Irish government and the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse to include Bethany Home in the State redress scheme. In 2011, the then-Education Minister Ruairí Quinn announced that Bethany Home would not be included in the McAleese inquiry into Magdalene Laundries.
However, the home is being investigated by the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation.
In its second interim report, this commission said that there is a “strong case for inclusion” of the Bethany Home within the Residential Institutions Redress Scheme. It said that it “had not seen any evidence that the exclusion of Bethany Home constituted discrimination on religious grounds”.
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One big problem in Ireland (Not entirely related to this article) is women with kids are encouraged to stay at home and have to depend on their husbands as creche fees are absolutely absurd. The price to put 2 children into my local creche is €1800 per month. This means that skilled women (in some cases men) are staying at home!
In Belgium they are subsidized so that they can work. Even a house cleaner is subsidized. This kind of system stops women having to stay at home to look after the kids and carry out house work and most importantly getting bullied by an unfair husband!
I don’t think subsidies are the way to go here. people here have this ‘the state should pay for my lifestyle choices’ mentality. Isn’t ireland broke? Why not pay a nanny to look after the kids when you are at work instead? have you a family support network, whereby your parents could help out?
Why didn’t you think of the costs a child involves before you had 2 children in the first place? people in westernized welfare state countries seem to just have kids and expect everyone else to pay for it. This doesn’t happen in the US, and it sure as heck doesn’t happen in any realistic state that doesn’t want to end up in the hands of the IMF.
No Lizzy.
Subsidies are the way to go if it means skilled women are going to be working and paying taxes, this will help Ireland. There are women with PHD’s that are staying at home to look after the kids as its not viable to put them into a creche. This is an awful waste of good skill.
No I don’t have a family support network, My parents are gone and my siblings have emigrated.
Also I don’t have 2 kids, I’m thinking about having kids so I suppose I did think of the costs a child involves as I went away and investigated it.
I was simply stating that the system that exists in Belgium encourages women to work and put their children into childcare rather than depending on their husband just in case the partnership falls apart.
It’s a bit of a tangent, but outside of medicine, I’ve never met anyone with a PhD who created anything
On the issue itself; Subsidies = cash, right? Why not make childcare tax deductible? “The people” abuse free cash just as surely as “the politicians.”
Wrong Chuck, in this case Subsidies does NOT= cash!
In Belgium is costs around €250 to send your child to a creche for the month, It costs this little as it is subsidised by the government. This is certainly the case in Kortrijk.
People pay a lot more tax over there alright but their system seems to work alot better than ours when you count in all the subsidies.
@ Lizzie
Clueless comments really.
Many countries subsidize child care, Belgium, Finland, Sweden, Germany, France and many others.
@ Chuck
“I’ve never met anyone with a PhD who created anything”
Astonishing. Who do you think develops pharmaceuticals? Medical devices? Computers? etc etc etc
“It’s a bit of a tangent, but outside of medicine, I’ve never met anyone with a PhD who created anything”
Read the 7th, 8th, 9th & 10th words there…….
I cannot believe it was only in 1990 that rape within a marriage was ok, if a guy had of tried it he would had swiftly got to meet my friend the baseball bat, I know some one who was raped within a marriage and it changed the person she was and the relationship she had with her child was destroyed
No offense to the Irish generation above me, but you guys have so much crap that you should be ashamed of. On a regular basis I’m thankful that I didn’t have to live into that kind of Ireland.
And in fairness I’ve little doubt the same applied to alot of other small countries too.
We still have a long way to go but we’re making progress.
don’t be so sure that the current generation is without it’s faults and skeletons in it’s closets.
It’s great for you to look back and say the past generations had so much crap but alot of this continous and people in their 20′s now are just as capable of doing the same stuff that people did 40-50 years ago and they do.
True, but at least now,with Internet, immigration and improves technology answer education we’re more influenced by the outside and don’t hold onto ideas and assumptions about how things should be as much.
But yea I’ve little doubt the next generation will look back at massive aspects of our lives and wonder “what the hell were they thinking “.
Adrian your living in a dream world with that reproachful look you throw at the past Irish, and the self congratulation of the present. It’s only because of outside influences that Ireland has OSTENSIBLY changed… the EU, internet and the piles of money invested here which allowed thousands travel and form their own identities free of toxic influences form the collective here.
Some things have changed, but we haven’t moved on that much as a nation, despite outside and technological advances. Still ruled by the corrupt, still women get less pay, less opportunites, still lots of pressure to conform, still poor people and the vulnerable are raped in many other ways then sexually,
and if you haven’t occassionaly fought to change the system that is here, you are just as guilty as anyone in the past. if you have, good on ya!
Well done to the women who have come forward with this story, hopefully you are healing now after all the abuse and shame on the men of this country who did this damage to there wives and families , thankfully we are a society who now can get help with most things and move forward……..well done to OWN try and keep going even though you have little funding .
Thumbs up if you blame the church!
What a dumb comment! Sigh….
I am ashamed of being a man
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