Myth of Catholic Ireland: Unmarried Motherhood

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INFANTICIDE AND ILLEGITIMACY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Moira Jean Maguire

submitted to the

Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of the American University

in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for the Degree

of Doctor of Philosophy

History

Chair:

omerfordce

Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

Date 2000

American University

Washington, D.C. 20016

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MOIRA JEAN MAGUIRE

2000

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. THE MYTH OF CATHOLIC IRELAND: UNMARRIED MOTHERHOOD,

INFANTICIDE, AND ILLEGITIMACY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Moira Jean Maguire

ABSTRACT

This dissertation argues, through an analysis of official discourses and popular

experiences of two groups of social “outcasts''— unmarried mothers and illegitimate and neglected

children - that the links between Catholicism and individual and collective behavior are not as

simplistic or clear-cut as existing scholarship would suggest. The records of infanticide cases, and

the ways that families and communities treated unmarried mothers and vulnerable children,

indicates that at least in some circumstances women and men made decisions about their own

moral and sexual behaviors, and evaluated their responsibility and loyalty to others, based on a

variety of factors, and law and Catholic teaching were not always paramount.

In its examination of attitudes toward, treatment, and experiences of infanticide

and unmarried motherhood, and of the care provided by the state to illegitimate and vulnerable

children, this dissertation seeks to disentangle the complex interactions between and among

church, state, and society in elaborating the values, priorities, behaviors, and attitudes that

defined the independent Irish state. Individuals and agencies of church and state attempted to

enforce codes of maternity, childhood, and family life to suit the political and social agendas of the

fledgling state, and they adopted a variety of coercive and indeed carcerai methods to exact

conformity. Given Ireland’s historical reputation as a repressed and hyper-Catholic state, and the

enduring impression even among those who lived in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s that sex simply

“did not exist” in Ireland until the 1960s, it would be easy to assume that church and state were ii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. successful in their efforts. But historians must be careful not to interpret popular attitudes, values,

and priorities only in the context of official agendas and expectations. Ordinary women and men

had experiences, values, and priorities that occasionally conflicted with official demands, and

these conflicts are most evident where matters of sexuality and morality are concerned.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A number of people have been instrumental in completing this dissertation.

Vanessa Schwartz nurtured this work from a graduate seminar paper to its current incantation.

She challenges me to challenge myself, and my work, and my development as a historian, would

be very different without her input. I thank her most sincerely for all of her advice, support, and

encouragement over the years. Heartfelt thanks are also due to Eileen Findlay for her input on the

dissertation, and for her wisdom and warmth in everything else. The Department of History at

American University has supported me in a variety of ways over the years, and I am most

appreciative of that support, and of the encouragement, assistance, and friendship that I have

received from faculty, staff, and fellow graduate students. In particular I thank Erick Nawrocki for

all of his help in the final stages of the dissertation process.

Vincent Comerford welcomed me into the intellectual community of the

Department of Modem History, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and offered astute and

insightful feedback on the dissertation. He was unstintingly kind, generous, and helpful during my

four years in Ireland, for which I am grateful beyond words.

Gail Savage and Liz Sheehan helped me to formulate a dissertation proposal and

provided guidance in the early stages of research. I thank them for their help and interest at that

crucial time.

The process of researching and writing a dissertation can be alienating, isolating,

and extremely lonely, and only those who have been through it can fully understand the roller

coaster ride that it can be. Only with the support of family and friends have I managed to maintain

my sanity and survive the rough patches. My parents, Patricia and Dexter Merry, have been a

steady and unflagging source of moral and material support and never once asked when I was

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. going to grow up and get a real life. Their love and support mean more to me than they know. Liz

Stewart and Marie Wallace have been good friends, cheerleaders, therapists, shoulders to cry on.

Their friendship and support kept me going when I didn't think it was possible. Ann Matthews'

friendship, warmth, generosity, and encyclopaedic knowledge never cease to amaze me. She has

given me an insight into the Irish psyche without which my work would have been very different.

Thanks are also due to the staffs of archives and libraries in Ireland. Catriona

Crowe of the National Archives of Ireland has been extremely helpful, and without her knowledge

and expertise I might have overlooked some very important material. David Sheehy of the Dublin

Diocesan Archives dug out Archbishop McQuaid’s adoption policy files and cleared a bit of desk

space so that I could peruse them at my leisure. Thanks also to the friendly and helpful staff of the

National Library of Ireland.

Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to the memory of Janet Oppenheim. Jan

died while the dissertation was still in the proposal stage but she remained a source of inspiration

throughout. She will always embody for me what it means to be a mentor, scholar, and teacher. I

only hope this dissertation is worthy of her.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iv

LIST OF TABLES ...... vii

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Chapter

1. SOCIAL OUTCASTS 1: UNMARRIED MOTHERS ...... 42

2. CRIMINAL, SINNER, OR VICTIM? LEGISLATIVE AND JUDICIAL RESPONSES TO INFANTICIDE ...... 91

3. DESPERATE ACT OR WILLFUL CHOICE? INFANTICIDE AND UNWANTED PREGNANCY ...... 126

4. SOCIAL OUTCASTS 2: ILLEGITIMATE AND NEGLECTED CHILDREN 161

EPILOGUE: THE CHANGING FACE OF CATHOLIC IRELAND: ABORTION ANN LOVETT, AND THE KERRY BABIES CONTROVERSY ...... 206

Appendices

A. TABLES ...... 238

B. GLOSSARY ...... 242

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 243

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLES

Tables

A.1 Illegitimate Births 1923-80 ...... 238

A.2 Adoption as a Percent of Illegitimate Births ...... 239

A.3 Charge and Conviction Rates in Central Criminal Court Cases ...... 240

A.4 Sentences in Central Criminal Court Cases ...... 241

A.5 Crimes Against Children ...... 241

vii

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Until recently it has been standard practice among many Irish historians to

analyze the twentieth century’s key social issues and historical events from an unselfconscious

nationalist Catholic perspective. Scholars have bolstered their claim that Ireland is a “Catholic

country” with statistics illustrating the population’s continued practice of the Catholic faith and

regular attendance at church services and rituals.1 In their assessments of the process of state-

building and the development of twentieth-century social policy scholars emphasize the overt

influence of Catholic moral teaching in the areas of social welfare, parental rights and

responsibilities, and constitutional and civil rights. In foregrounding a nationalist political history

that insists on the intrinsic links between “Irishness” and Catholicism, historians implicitly argue

that ordinary women and men identified themselves primarily with reference to church and state

rather than as parents, spouses, members of families or communities, or workers. And in

highlighting the amicable relationship between church and state this scholarship suggests that the

Catholic Church was the most pervasive and influential force not only in the life of the nation but,

more importantly, in the lives of individuals, families, and communities as well.

This dissertation argues, through an analysis of official discourses and the

experiences twoof groups of social “outcasts"— unmarried mothers and illegitimate and neglected

children - that the links between Catholicism and individual and collective behavior are not as

simplistic or clear-cut as existing scholarship would suggest. The records of infanticide cases, and

the ways that families and communities treated unmarried mothers and vulnerable children,

1See Michael Fogarty, et al, Irish Values and Attitudes: The Irish Report of the European Value Systems Study (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1984) and; M. MacGreil, “Church Attendance and Religious Practice of Dublin Adults,” Social Studies III (1974).

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indicates that at least in some circumstances women and men made decisions about their own

moral and sexual behaviors, and evaluated their responsibility and loyalty to others, based on a

host of criteria, of which and law and Catholic teaching were but two. Few scholars have

attempted to scratch the surface of Irish Catholicism to analyze how individuals, families, and

communities conceptualized national and individual identity, belonging and exclusion, sin and

forgiveness in the twentieth century.

In its examination of attitudes toward, treatment, and experiences of infanticide

and unmarried motherhood, and of the care provided by the state to illegitimate and vulnerable

children, this dissertation seeks to disentangle the complex interactions between and among

church, state, and society in elaborating the values, priorities, behaviors, and attitudes that

defined the independent Irish state. Individuals and agencies of church and state attempted to

enforce codes of maternity, childhood, and family life that suited the political and social agendas of

the fledgling state, and they adopted a variety of coercive and indeed carceral methods to exact

conformity. Given Ireland’s historical reputation as a repressed and hyper-Catholic state, and the

enduring impression even among those who lived in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s that sex simply

"did not exist” in Ireland until the 1960s, it would be easy to assume that church and state were

successful in their efforts. But historians must be careful not to interpret popular attitudes, values,

and priorities only in the context of official agendas and expectations. Ordinary women and men’s

values and expectations occasionally conflicted with official demands, and these conflicts are

most evident where matters of sexuality and morality are concerned.

This dissertation focuses on “bad” mothers and illegitimate children both because

the largest network of religiously un, state-funded institutions catered to these populations; and

because they, more than any other “deviant” or “outcast” group, were regarded as the single

biggest threat to social stability and to Ireland's viability as an independent Catholic state.

Undoubtedly other individuals and groups— homosexuals, the mentally ill, or those with physical or

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psychological disabilities— also behaved, or appeared to behave, in ways that challenged the

official perception of “normalcy” in the independent state. But the level of official concern about

these groups was miniscule compared with the anxiety that lawmakers and members of the

hierarchy expressed about the potentially devastating social and political ramifications of

unmarried motherhood and illegitimacy, nor did church and state collaborate to the same extent in

isolating other “deviant” groups from mainstream society.

The Catholic ethos that pervaded in mid-twentieth century Ireland was not a

unifying force to which all Irish women and men could look for a sense of identity and inclusion

but, at the official level, primarily a reaction against the paganism and liberalism of the former

Protestant colonizer and, at the popular level, just one of a host of forces that shaped the daily

lives and experiences of ordinary women and men. Many early lawmakers and Catholic leaders

envisioned the independent Irish society as rural, frugal, self-sufficient, and insulated from the

depravity of the “outside world". In reality, however, there was a fine line between the

“respectable” poor whose simplicity and piety bolstered that image, and the “unworthy” poor

whose licentiousness and immorality threatened it. Catholicism may have offered a sense of

inclusion and identity for some segments of the population, but it also spelled exclusion and

alienation for individuals and groups, including non-Catholics, lapsed Catholics, and those who

violated prevailing codes of “normal” or “respectable behavior.

Official discourses and popular experiences of motherhood— and particularly

what would have constituted “bad” motherhood in official rhetoric— are central to this dissertation

because of the centrality of motherhood to twentieth-century definitions of family life. The 1937

Constitution placed the family at the center of Irish social life as the institution most vital to the

raising of good Irish Catholic citizens. In twentieth-century definitions of family life the father’s role

was scarcely questioned, and focused almost exclusively on hits responsibility to provide for his

family's material needs. A mother’s role, on the other hand, was paramount. She was responsible

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not alone for the physical strength of future generations but, more importantly, for her children's

socialization and spiritual and moral grounding. If fathers failed in their duties the state could,

theoretically, step in to shoulder the financial burden; but a mother’s failures to train her children or

instill religious and moral values was a potentially devastating failure, and one that could not be

remedied.

Examining discourses and experiences of unmarried motherhood, infanticide and

illegitimacy validates the two groups who were marginalized socially and politically for much of the

twentieth century, and who continue to be marginalized in historical scholarship, while elucidating

the political undertones implicit in official attitudes and policies. Margaret Humphreys and Gillian

Wagner examine the political agenda that informed Great Britain’s policy relating to “unwanted”

children in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the forced emigration of those children from

Great Britain to the farthest reaches of the empire relieved English ratepayers of the financial

burden of their care and ensured the perpetuation of a “native” English population in the colonies,

thus solving a serious social problem at home and at the same time furthering an imperial agenda

abroad.2 Similarly problematic Irish children were banished to religious run institutions or sent

abroad for adoption, not to further a colonial objective but to protect a post-colonial self-image.

The treatment of unmarried mothers and poor and illegitimate children adds an Irish dimension to

scholarship such as Humphrey and Wagner’s that reveals the ways that states and societies

constructed notions of normality and deviance at key moments in history to serve political

agendas, goals, and objectives.

Official attitudes toward unmarried mothers and their children are particularly

valuable lenses through which to examine the construction of the “ideal” citizen in the twentieth

century precisely because these two groups were excluded, in fact if not in law, from the

constitutional and legislative rights, benefits, and responsibilities attached to family life, and thus

2See Margaret Humphreys, Empty Cradles (London: Corgi, 1997) and Gillian Wagner, Children of the Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992).

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that underpinned mid-twentieth-century definitions of citizenship, and because lawmakers and

Catholic leaders regarded them as the most dangerous and sinister threats to the stability and

viability of the independent state. Religious and legislative rhetoric insisted on the inherent and

imprescriptible rights of the family and the 1937 constitution theoretically protected the family from

the interference of church and state, both of which served to perpetuate the fiction that parental

rights were fundamental rights of citizenship. In fact, church and state interfered in family life in

profound and explicit ways, from insisting on the two-parent nuclear family as the norm, to

demanding a “family wage” based on the male breadwinner/female homemaker model of

domesticity, to removing children from the care and custody of “unfir parents. Unmarried mothers

and their children were particularly vulnerable to official intrusion, and implicitly excluded from

constitutional definitions and protections of parental and family rights, because according to official

discourse they consciously and voluntarily placed themselves outside the bounds of normalcy,

respectability, and acceptability. Article 42.5 of the 1937 constitution provides the justification for

this interference in “unnatural” families: “In exceptional cases, where the parents for physical or

moral reasons fail in their duty towards their children, the state as guardian of the common good,

by appropriate means shall endeavor to supply the place of parents, but always with due regard

for the natural and imprescriptible rights of the children.”3 Parental rights were easily set aside in

the case of unmarried mothers because the “greater good”— the protection of decent, upstanding

citizens from the evil taint of immorality, and the molding of inherently morally and spiritually

flawed children into good Catholic citizens— could be achieved only through extensive

manipulation, on the part of church and state, of definitions of appropriate or acceptable family

structure. The state protected parental rights only insofar as parents fulfilled the fundamental duty

of citizenship, raising not just good Irish citizens but good Catholic citizens, and legitimate Irish

Catholic citizens at that.

3Bunreacht na h£ireann (Constitution of Ireland), Article 42.5 (Dublin: Government Stationery Office, 1995).

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The methods used to combat the potentially harmful effects of such anti-social

behaviors as unmarried motherhood and illegitimacy— specifically the official policy of

institutionalizing illegitimate children and the children of “unfit parents”, and the almost complete

denial at the official level of the unmarried mothers' right to keep and raise their children— reveal

the lengths to which church, state, and society went to regulate behavior at both the national and

local level, and to eliminate the deviant “other” from their midst. Compassion, tolerance, and

forgiveness— traits that seem to have guided judges and juries in their evaluation of infanticide-

were markedly absent in official discourses of and policies relating to unmarried mothers and

vulnerable children. But families and communities bolstered official policy by rejecting unmarried

mothers and their children, and often consigned them to religious run institutions that emphasized

sin, exclusion, and isolation. Official and religious policies relating to vulnerable and “deviant”

populations, in this case unmarried mothers and their children, could not have been successful to

the extent that they were without popular support from families and communities who placed their

own aspirations to status and respectability above familial bonds of affection, loyalty, and

responsibility.

This dissertation's analysis of discourses and experiences of unmarried

motherhood offers insight into a range of family and community relationships, and particularly the

values and priorities that informed interactions between and among individuals, families, and

communities, that historians thus far have ignored or overlooked as insignificant in the

development of the independent Irish state. Undoubtedly Catholic codes of right and wrong, moral

and immoral, sin and forgiveness, shaped romantic and sexual relationships between unmarried

women and men, the ties that bound individuals, family, and community members together, and

the ways that church and state dealt with perceived deviant or anti-social behavior. The records of

infanticide trials illustrate the complexities of romantic attachments and sexual liaisons in a social

and economic climate that, at least superficially, demanded celibacy from unmarried women and

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men. Similarly, family and community reactions to unmarried motherhood, illegitimacy, and

infanticide reveal the intricacies of family relationships in which status, reputation, and community

acceptance could, and often did, outweigh familial bonds of love, loyalty, and mutual

responsibility. But even when local values and priorities coincided with national imperatives,

whether unmarried mothers and their children were embraced or shunned, supported or rejected,

maintained at home or hidden away in institutions, derived more from local priorities and

conceptualizations of inclusion and exclusion than from official policies and sanctions. Many

people lived in occupational and thus economic uncertainty where abject poverty was a fact of life.

In such circumstances, notions of class and status depended less on economic or employment

prospects than on nuanced and subjective criteria that varied by community, and that have

received little attention from historians, sociologists, or historians. Surface displays of piety and

faith could be core ingredients in local definitions of respectability, status, and inclusion but other

factors, including participation in local sport or politics, having a child enter religious life, prevailing

against enormous odds such as the serious illness or death of a spouse or child, all contributed to

community determinations of who was worthy of forgiveness, assistance, and inclusion, and who

was not. An unwed pregnancy was not always disastrous, and some families placed affection for

and loyalty to their daughters above concerns about “what the neighbors will say”. Communities

also overlooked the sexual transgressions of certain of its members while shunning or gossiping

about others, based on their perceptions of the “offender’s” character, family background, and the

nature of her “fall”. Any evaluation of the roots and success of official policy relating to unmarried

mothers and their children must thus be examined within the context of the converging and

conflicting values and priorities of lawmakers and the hierarchy, on the one hand, and those of

“ordinary” families and communities on the other.

At a basic level, analyses of the lives and experiences of women accused of

infanticide, unmarried mothers, and illegitimate and vulnerable children, places at center-stage

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individuals and groups who traditionally are mere sidelights in contemporary historical studies.

Much of twentieth-century Irish history has been written from a nationalist Catholic perspective

that foregrounds and glorifies the national struggle to the virtual exclusion of women and men who

experienced these events in many cases with little more than passing interest or anxiety. Such

scholarship assumes that the fight for independence was the defining moment in the daily life of

the average woman or man, from which all other issues and events derived. It also assumes that

national rather than local events, values, and priorities, framed ordinary women’s and men’s

values, priorities, and experiences. My dissertation asserts that unmarried mothers and their

children are as worthy of study as the individuals and events of the struggle for independence,

because they reflect more accurately than the nationalist/Catholic paradigm the nature of

twentieth-century Irish society: the economic conditions that stemmed from lawmakers’ isolationist

policies, the social and cultural effects of the insistence of Catholic moral teaching as the

foundation of Irish social policy and self-image, and the links between official conceptualizations of

Irishness and community or popular definitions of identity, belonging, inclusion and exclusion.

Twentieth-Century Catholic History

The Catholic Church has received an inordinate share of attention in nineteenth-

and twentieth-century historical scholarship, ranging from biographies of founders of religious

orders to analyses of church-state relations and the links between Catholicism and Irishness. The

ways that Catholic teachings were deployed in the twentieth century, as both the foundation of

social policy and as a punitive or coercive system of social control, suggest that lawmakers and

the Catholic hierarchy did not intend Catholicism to facilitate the development of a positive sense

of identity that all Irish people could relate to and embrace, particularly given that it excluded a

small but significant non-Catholic community, but rather was intended to enforce a set of values

and behaviors that comprised what lawmakers and church leaders envisioned as the ideal Irish

citizen: one who embraced sexual chastity outside of marriage and abundant fertility within it; who

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attended church and the sacraments regularly and integrated Catholic teaching into all aspects of

their daily lives; who were poor but nonetheless “respectable” precisely because they embraced

Catholicism and all of its trappings; and who accepted without question the belief that the material

deprivations of their earthly lives would be more than compensated in the afterlife. This is not to

deny that those who embraced Catholicism as a faith system found comfort and solace in it,

particularly as a means of enduring the hardships and disappointments of daily life. Rather, it is to

suggest that scholars of twentieth-century Ireland have been more comfortable highlighting what

could be seen as the “positive” contributions the church made to social and political life or the

more neutral structural or institutional aspects of church-state relations. As yet there appears to

be great reluctance among scholars to examine the work of Catholic individuals, agencies, and

institutions in a critical and probing light that would facilitate a greater understanding of the nature

of Catholic power and influence in the twentieth century, and in particular the role of the Irish

Catholic Church in defining “difference” and punishing those who fell outside the pale of

acceptable or appropriate behavior.

The links between Irish social policy and Catholic doctrine have been examined

at length, although much of the scholarship was published in the 1970s and 1980s and thus does

not consider recently released material or shifts in public opinion that demand a re-evaluation of

the relationship between church and state. John Whyte’s Church and State in Modem Ireland was

among the first to consider in scholarly fashion the formal and informal ways that the Catholic

Church so successfully insinuated itself into the social and political fabric of state and society in

the post-independence period. Whyte argues that, while the Catholic ethos that pervaded

legislative policy was logical and almost inevitable given the political turmoil that existed in Ireland

in the early decades of independence and the under-representation of Protestants among the

ranks of elected officials and civil servants, it was accomplished with a minimum of coercion on

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the part of the Catholic hierarchy, indeed occurred almost “spontaneously”.4 At the same time,

lawmakers did not always follow blindly where the hierarchy wished to lead them, as evidenced by

the scuffles between church and state over the proposed mother and child scheme first

introduced in the 1947 Health Bill.5 The controversy centered around the provision of a

comprehensive health-care scheme aimed at reducing infant mortality by providing free health

care for expectant mothers and children under six years of age. In its original form draft the

scheme was compulsory for pregnant women, infants, and school-age children, and essentially

assigned participants to physicians. After a series of failed attempts the scheme finally was

implemented in the 1953 Health Act, but it was optional, catered almost exclusively to women and

children who otherwise could not afford basic medical services, and offered participants a choice

of doctors.

The hierarchy deplored the scheme as a first step on the road to socialized

medicine and on the basis that it inserted state authority into private family matters, in relations

between parents and children and, most worryingly, between women and the dictates of their

faith. While church prelates framed their concerns in the language of parental responsibility and

freedom of choice, their primary concern was that increasing state control over medicine would

take out of the hands of religiously minded doctors and educators responsibility for and control

over the education of women in reproductive, sexual, and maternal matters. Whyte interprets the

mother and child controversy as an example of lawmakers’ willingness to exercise an “individual

4John Whyte, Church and State in Modem Ireland 1923-1979, 2nd ed. (Dublin: Gill & MacMillan. 1980), 60.

5The controversy over the mother and child health scheme has been well documented by virtually all scholars who examine the 20th century political relationship between church and state, and it is not necessary or relevant to examine it again here. See Whyte, Church and State in Modem Ireland, chapters 7 & 8; Ruth Barrington, Health, Medicine & Politics in Ireland 1900-1970 (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1987), chapters 8-10 and: Eamonn McKee, “Church-State Relations and the Development of Irish Health Policy: The Mother-and- Child Scheme, 1944-53," Irish Historical Studies, xxv, no. 98 (November 1986): 159-194.

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conscience” when the church was seen to be infringing excessively or inappropriately in the

political process. In fact the scheme as implemented was much watered down from the original,

compulsion was eliminated and choice added, and the plan’s author. Minister for Health Dr. Noel

Browne, resigned in 1951 because his colleagues refused to support him in the face of

considerable opposition from the hierarchy, which can hardly be interpreted as a victory for the

state in the battle with the church for political control and moral authority.

Whyte's work was pathbreaking at the time and remains one of the most

important studies of church-state relations in the mid-twentieth century. However the study is not,

nor was it intended to be, an analysis of the process whereby the terms “Irish" and “Catholic”

became virtually interchangeable in the twentieth-century process of state-building. A more recent

work, Patrick Corish’s The Irish Catholic Experience: A Historical Survey, somewhat fills that gap,

although the fact that Corish narrates the broad swathe of Irish Catholicism from pre-history to the

late twentieth century limits his ability fully to substantiate his sweeping analyses. Corish,

professor of history at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, and leading Catholic scholar of the 1980s,

traces the fate of the Catholic Church in Ireland from Viking times, through the Anglo-Norman

conquest and the Act of Union when orders of religious were small and scarce and Catholicism

often had to be practiced in secret, to the twentieth-century when the church enjoyed

unprecedented political, social, cultural, and moral influence. According to Corish the Catholic

Church was transformed from a minor cultural and moral presence in the eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries into a well-organized, disciplined, and powerful institution by the end of the

nineteenth century. This process sparked, or was sparked by, what Emmet Larkin has termed a

“devotional revolution”, and positioned the church to enjoy significant influence once

independence was achieved and Catholicism became the religion not only of the populace but of

the independent state as well.6

6Emmet Larkin, The Historical Dimensions of Irish Catholicism (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1976, reprinted 1997). Larkin has written extensively on the history of Irish

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According to Corish, Catholicism came to define “Irishness” because there was

no other force strong or pervasive enough to sustain an official identity that distinguished the

independent Irish state from the former Protestant colonizer. Furthermore, Corish argues that

Ireland was not immune to the conservative backlash that swept Europe following World War I:

Nationalist Ireland was never in greater need of an identity; it had to be either the Irish language or the Catholic church, and for most people it was in fact the church. Add to this the middle-class nature of the government and the fact that all over Europe there was a conservative reaction to the loosening of traditional values that had happened during the Great War, and it is not surprising that life in the Irish Free State took on a certain conservative Catholic ethos.7

While Corish perhaps is correct to link Ireland’s conservative Catholic ethos with trends evident

elsewhere in Europe, Irish Catholic writing of the period linked the perceived loosening of

traditional bonds and values directly to the lasting effects of British rule and to the intrusion of

“foreign” and “pagan” ideas into native or inherently Irish values and traditions.

Like Whyte, Corish argues that the cozy relationship that developed between

church and state in the post-independence period occurred spontaneously rather than through

active manipulation on the part of the church: “It should be noted that this did not happen because

the clergy brought pressure on the government. The government was as anxious as the clergy to

preserve what were regarded as traditional values. Its favored method was to consult interested

parties when these issues arose. The Catholic hierarchy, naturally, was usually among them. The

government awaited a consensus and legislated accordingly.”8 While Whyte and Corish are

Catholicism and the evolution of Catholic power in Ireland. He is credited with coining the phrase “devotional revolution”, which historians of religion use to describe the expansion of religious orders and agencies, as well as a revival of popular religious fervor, in the second half of the nineteenth century. See also The Roman Catholic Church and the Home Rule Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 1990) and The Making of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland (University of North Carolina Press, 1980).

7Patrick Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience: A Historical Survey (Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, 1985), 244.

8Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience, 244.

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correct to argue that Catholicism was more central than the Irish language to definitions of

"Irishness”, and that officials of church and state tacitly agreed on Catholic moral values as the

basis of social policy in the post-independence state, they perhaps understate the role played by

subtle and not-so-subtle influence on the part of the hierarchy in bringing about that state of

affairs. Lawmakers might have legislated based on their own Catholic sensibilities, but the records

of various government departments suggest that the hierarchy was not averse to pressing the

government, both through the Catholic media and through direct appeals to government officials,

when sensitive moral and social issues were at stake. Perhaps this pressure was unnecessary,

but it is clear that the hierarchy did intervene to a significant degree in the affairs of state, and

lawmakers resisted only rarely. And the conservatism that existed in Ireland in the early and mid

twentieth century, while mirrored elsewhere in Europe, likely reflected circumstances that were

specific to Ireland in that period, particularly in the recovery efforts following the Black and Tan

and Civil Wars and the struggle for and consolidation of power following the transition to native

rule.

The relationship between church and state has been well-documented and

scholars generally agree on the manner and nature of Catholic influence in the legislative process.

But the links between official discourses and assumptions and popular values, priorities, and

behaviors, and the ways that ordinary women and men practiced Catholic teaching and ritual in

their daily lives, thus far have been ignored in historical scholarship but are central to this

dissertation. Surveys conducted in the 1970s and 1980s demonstrate the extent to which Irish

women and men practiced their faith through attendance at mass and the sacraments, but these

surveys offer little insight into how they interpreted the church’s official prescriptions, or how their

understanding of Catholicism informed their conceptualizations of good and bad, right and wrong,

sin and forgiveness, inclusion and exclusion.9 My dissertation considers how individuals, families,

9See Fogarty, et al, Irish Values and Attitudes and MacGreil, “Church Attendance and Religious Practice of Dublin Adults”.

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and communities reconciled the demands of their faith with practical issues and the realities and

dilemmas— including dire poverty, sexual desire and temptation, and basic human weakness—

that confronted them on a daily basis. Scholarly analyses also characterize the relationship

between members of the institutional church— the hierarchy and male and female religious— and

the “objects” of religious ministrations— parishes and congregations, and recipients of religious

“charity”— as benign and unproblematic. But the institutional regime that increasingly is coming to

light via newly-available sources and personal narratives suggests that charity and benevolence

were not always forefront in the minds of many of the administrators of religious institutions and

agencies. Catholic charity and philanthropy were shaped not solely, or even primarily, by the idea

of a “calling” or “mission”, but by the hierarchy’s social control imperative combined with the

beliefs and assumptions that male and female brought into the congregations with them about

their own place within Irish society and within the hierarchy, and their perception of the worthiness

and humanity of those to whom they ministered as in genuine humanitarianism.

One of the challenges confronting the historian of Catholicism in any society is

the need to distinguish between doctrines that are universal to Catholics across the world, and the

ways that Catholicism as both social control and faith system is uniquely deployed in individual

Catholic societies. This distinction becomes clear when one compares the political, social, and

cultural manifestations of Catholicism in twentieth-century Ireland with other former colonies in

which Catholicism was the majority religion, and with “Catholic” countries elsewhere in Europe.

Ireland’s path to independence and state-building varied dramatically from those trod by former

Latin American colonies. Likely this is due in part to the fact that, as the religion of the colonizer,

Catholicism in Latin America was not seen by those seeking independence as an “inherent” or

native tradition, and thus not one that could serve as a unifying or identity-building force. One

must also consider that, aside from the Black and Tan and Civil Wars which were of relatively

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short duration, Ireland's struggle for independence was peaceful, and the shift from colonial to

native rule remarkably smooth. Emmet Larkin suggests that it was the power of the church at the

turn of the twentieth century that prevented Ireland engaging in the blood-letting and internal

struggles for power that have characterized the transition to independence in former Latin

American coionies. Ireland’s political stability after the tumultuous years of early independence,

according to Larkin, can be linked to the Catholic Church’s moral influence over politicians and the

populace that prevented any one individual or party from imposing an authoritarian view:

In Ireland...because the revolution in the making of the state was constitutional rather than violent, the politics of dissent gave way to the politics of consensus rather than the tyranny of the general will. What later saved the Irish state...from the tyranny of either the leader, the party, or even the majority was that in the last analysis the bishops had enough real power and influence in the country to resist effectively any attempt by either the party or the leader to impose their will unilaterally on the others in the consensus. What really evolved, then, in the making of the Irish state, was a unique constitutional balance that became basic to the functioning of the Irish political system.10

In its political stability, attributable to the church's stabilizing influence, Ireland

differed from its Latin American counterparts. But the Catholic conservatism evident in mid-

twentieth-century Ireland also prevailed in Latin America and elsewhere in Europe in the inter-war

period, although sources and symptoms of this conservatism varied across countries. John Whyte

argues that there was little difference between the conservative approach to moral issues in

twentieth-century Ireland and the ways that other Catholic countries legislated such issues as

divorce, contraception, and abortion, even if Ireland’s Catholic conservatism was extreme relative

to other European societies.11 While Whyte is correct that in the inter-war years conservatism

generally was the norm across Europe, he does not consider whether that conservatism was the

product of active intervention in and manipulation of the legislative process on the part of the

10 Larkin, The Historical Dimensions of Irish Catholicism, 113.

11 Whyte, Church and State in Modem Ireland, 33.

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hierarchy, or the extent to which that conservatism reflected and responded to specifically local

conditions and suited individual states’ social and political agendas.

As Susan Pedersen shows in Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the

Welfare State, the French government worked in tandem with French industry to develop a

system of family allowances and insurance against illness and unemployment that formed a

central part of the welfare state after 1945, and although France was a predominantly Catholic

country in the sense that the majority of the population professed the faith, the church did not

exercise such a considerable influence in the legislative and policy-making processes as was the

case in Ireland nor, clearly, did the church exert significant influence over the development of

France’s social welfare system in the twentieth century.12 Similarly, Victoria Grazia’s work on

fascist Italy argues that the power to formulate social policy was centralized in the hands of a

totalitarian regime, and Italy’s conservatism facilitated the furtherance of a fascist political

agenda.13 Although relations between the fascist state and the Catholic Church were amicable,

political, social, and moral authority rested in the hands of the state; conservative policies relating

to marriage, fertility, and sexuality reflected the state’s populationist and eugenic concerns rather

than an acknowledgment of Catholic morality as the foundation of legislative and social policies. In

other words, while historians have argued that a general trend of conservatism swept across

Europe in the middle decades of the twentieth century that was precipitated by the social,

12 Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State. Britain and France 1914-1945 (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

13 See Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy 1922-1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992). A number of historians of women in Nazi Germany make similar points about the way the state harnessed women’s biological and reproductive energies in service to the political regime, rewarded abundant fertility among racially pure women, and sought to limit the fertility of inferior women and men including Jews, the poor and disabled. See Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Policies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987); Jill Stephenson, The Nazi Organisation of Women (London: Croom Helm, 1981); Lisa Pine, Nazi Family Policy (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997) and; Gisella Bock, “Nazi Gender Policies and Women's History” in A History of Women V: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century, ed. Frangois Th6baud (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994).

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economic, and psychological upheavals of war, it is also important to consider both the local and

specific origins of that conservatism, and the ways it influenced and reflected social policy and

ideology in individual societies.

In many European societies, the conservative backlash had particular

ramifications for specific groups and individuals, especially in totalitarian states where the quest

for racial purity targeted racial and ethnic minorities, the physically and mentally handicapped, and

other social “devian tsB u t the institutionalization of “deviant" and problem groups in Ireland-

among many of whom the only “crime" or “deviance" was abject poverty or falling victim to lust or

sexual aggression— was standard practice from the time the church gained a firm foothold in the

control of education and social welfare in the mid-nineteenth century into the early 1970s, when

changing social values and norms and a decline in religious vocations forced a change in both

attitude and practice toward needy, vulnerable, and problem populations. It is difficult to compare

the treatment of “outcasts” in Ireland— unmarried mothers, illegitimate and poor children— with the

treatment of similar groups on the continent given the dearth of relevant scholarship.

An enduring legacy of the church’s influence in Irish social policy, that has yet to

be examined at all in the context of twentieth-century social, political, or Catholic history, is the

widespread practice of institutionalizing anti-social or outcast populations. A host of institutions

existed, most of them under the administrative oversight of male and female religious orders, to

cater to juvenile delinquents, the mentally ill, and those suffering from physical defects. The

largest and most numerous institutions— magdalen laundries and industrial schools— provided for

what lawmakers perceived to be the most dangerous groups of social outcasts, unmarried

mothers and illegitimate, poor, and needy children. This institutional network, while not necessarily

unique to Ireland, appears to have been more pervasive and deeply-engrained than elsewhere in

Europe or the U.S, and effectively incarcerated thousands of women and children annually.

Although the work of female religious has been examined in great detail in Irish Catholic

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historiography, the role, nature, and ethos of the institution has been overtly ignored. New

revelations, based on official sources as well as first-hand narratives, have cast fresh light on the

charitable institutions overseen by religious orders from the 1920s to the 1960s. The harshness of

the institutional regime mirrored the harshness of daily life for the poorest members of the

population, but the sheer numbers confined in these institutions reflects the extreme intolerance

within society as a whole with “difference", particularly among women and children, and the official

imperative to preserve at all costs the facade of simplicity, piety, and purity that represented

independent Ireland both at home and abroad. Stories recently have emerged about similar

treatment of children in institutions in Australia and Canada, and it is worth noting that most of

those institutions were overseen by Irish religious orders.14 This raises the question of whether

the institutionalization of “difference”, and the punitive and carceral character of that

institutionalization, were distinctly Irish characteristics, an extreme obsession with the invasion of

“foreign” values and ideas that lawmakers and the hierarchy believed mocked Ireland’s distinct,

native. Catholic culture, or whether this trend existed elsewhere in Catholic Europe and simply

has not yet been documented.

Sherrill Cohen's The Evolution of Asylums offers valuable insight into the

development of both the idea and physical form of the institution in early modem Italy. Cohen is

particularly interested in the concept of the asylum, a term she applies broadly to institutions that

provided a range of services for diverse populations— from rehabilitating prostitutes to offering

safe, affordable accommodation to working women.15 Cohen argues that the women's institutions

14This issue has emerged only recently, and thus far the evidence that exists is anecdotal and sketchy at best. See Mary Raftery and Eoin O'Sullivan, Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools (Dublin: New Island Books, 1999); States of Fear, written and produced by Mary Raftery, Radio Telefis Eireann, RTE 1 Dublin; and “Suffer the Little Children: St. Julien’s Quebec", Dateline NBC, produced by Avrom Zaritsky, NBC New York.

15Sherrill Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums Since 1500. From Refuges for Ex-Prostitutes to Shelters for Battered Women (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

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that developed, largely under the auspices of female religious orders, in early modem Europe

were “breeding grounds" for philosophies of criminal justice and the correction, protection, and

welfare of women. The study’s focus on Italy and its emphasis on institutions organized by

religious orders provides a useful point of comparison with the contemporary institution in Ireland.

As was true in mid-twentieth century Ireland, early modem institutions served as “dumping

grounds" for women, including nuns and criminal, deviant, and “fallen” women, who did not fit

neatly into the social order. The trend Cohen identified of confining “dis-established" women in

institutions overseen by religious orders mirrors, in many ways, the development of the magdalen

asylum from the late eighteenth century in Ireland.16 However, the asylums Cohen examines had

been transformed, by the twentieth century, from coercive, carceral, or punitive institutions into

refuges for abused women and hostels for working women who otherwise might have been

vulnerable to the sexual advances of predatory men. While Cohen does not consider what

replaced the institutional method of dealing with problematic women, it seems that demographic

imperatives, and particularly the fascist obsession with the perpetuation of a large, strong, morally

and racially healthy population, replaced the penitential mentality that existed into the nineteenth

century. Tnis fits with Victoria de Grazia’s analysis of women in fascist Italy, which suggests that

in the drive for population growth the state paid particular attention to unmarried mothers,

endeavoring first to hold men accountable, morally and financially, for their children, and failing

that offering unmarried mothers state subsidies to rear their children.17 The institutionalization of

women who previously were perceived as problematic no longer suited the official agenda and

thus was abolished.

16Magdalen asylums were institutions, conducted by one of four Irish religious orders, that provided for unmarried mothers, prostitutes, women convicted of infanticide, and other sexually vulnerable or promiscuous women, on a voluntary or coercive basis. Female inmates worked in the financially lucrative laundry in return for room and board.

17Victoria de Grazia, “How Mussolini Ruled Italian Women” in A History of Women V: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century, ed. Frangois ThObaud (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994), 132-135.

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Comparisons of the role of the Catholic Church in the development of the state

and of social policy in twentieth-century Ireland with the political and religious ethos of other

Catholic societies suggest that while some trends, and in particular the trend toward conservatism

evident in post-Worid War I political agendas, were common to societies across Europe and not

just Catholic societies, in key areas Ireland’s political development and Catholic ethos were

distinct. This distinction is in fact related to the strength of the Catholic Church during the key

period of independence and state-building. The church was well placed to assume primary

responsibility for education and social services, and lawmakers were content to leave that role to

the church while they turned their attention to the more pressing issues of political and economic

development. The relationship between the Catholic Church and the burgeoning Irish state

fostered the politicization of definitions of womanhood, motherhood, and childhood that preserved

the facade of piety and respectability on which Ireland’s identity and reputation abroad were

based.

Irish Feminist/Women’s History

Until recently, historians of twentieth-century Ireland have equated political and

Catholic history with national history, implicitly insisting that they need only be concerned with

nationalism and the struggle for independence and self-actualization. Historians of women and

gender are among the only scholars making a sustained effort to produce social history that

facilitates a deeper understanding of twentieth-century Irish society and the experiences of

ordinary women and men whom nationalist Catholic history ignores: not only the ways that the

“great” events foregrounded by historians affected ordinary women and men, but more importantly

the “common” events that punctuated their lives, the official and popular attitudes, beliefs, and

traditions that shaped how they viewed themselves, their families, and communities, and the world

around them, what it meant to be a good Catholic, and what it meant to belong. After a period of

significant effort and pathbreaking scholarship in the 1980s, that for the first time brought women’s

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history into the academic arena, the field of Irish women's history has stagnated somewhat in

recent years. Although social history is becoming part of mainstream scholarship, women’s history

is not, primarily because Irish feminist historians tend to hold themselves apart, and to produce

work and draw on sources that focus primarily on “what women did” or how prevailing political,

social, and economic forces marginalized them. Feminist scholars examine women’s lives and

experiences in a vacuum, often without reference to broader social issues and events. From its

beginnings in the early 1980s feminist history has been confined to a narrow agenda: biographies

of “great” republican women such as Maud Gonne, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, and Constance

Markievicz; biographies of founders of religious orders and the work they performed: or narrative

studies of women’s domestic or paid labor. Furthermore, the overwhelming bulk of existing

scholarship concentrates on the nineteenth century and thus ignores the ways that assumptions

about gender, morality, sexuality, and family life shaped the development of the independent Irish

state and women’s place in it.

After “great” republican women, female religious are among the most studied

women in Irish history, and one of the few groups of women who left historical records of their

lives and work and about whom contemporaries wrote prolifically. Catriona Clear, Margaret

MacCurtain, and Maria Luddy have published numerous monographs, articles, and essays on the

founding of religious orders and on the extensive work of mission, education, and philanthropy

performed by female religious throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most of this

work is narrative in approach, documenting the process of founding religious orders in Ireland, the

missionary and charitable zeal that motivated those who entered, and the paths taken by some

female religious from their middle-class families and communities into the convent. Clear and

MacCurtain illustrate the difficulties women experienced in asserting autonomy over their orders

and charitable works within the male-dominated, highly rigid and patriarchal Irish Catholic

hierarchy. It would seem that the early success of specific orders in establishing communities and

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carving out niches for themselves in medicine, education, and charity was due as much to the

strong personalities of individual founders like Catherine Macauley and Margaret Aylward as to

the fact that there existed few other facilities or resources, public or private, lay or secular, for the

provision of such services.18 In almost all cases scholars portray female religious in a one

dimensional light that insists on their calling, vocation, and self-sacrifice and, in essence, denies

their agency and humanity. Scholars rarely question women’s motivation in professing a religious

life or their ability completely to suppress basic human desires, temptations, and frustrations in

carrying out their missions.

And yet, recent allegations about the behavior of some female religious in

industrial schools and orphanages, magdalen asylums, and institutions for mental and physical

“defectives" begs a re-evaluation of the nature of religious life in Ireland, and the extent to which

the religious life was regarded as a viable option to marriage, an acceptable career choice, and a

source of prestige for families and communities, as much as it was a “calling” or a vocation. It also

raises questions about the nature of clerical celibacy, and the extent to which the moral codes that

underscored Irish Catholicism applied in convents and rectories. But we cannot consider these

aspects of the lives, work, and behavior of religious only within the context of their membership in

religious communities. These women were raised and educated in “mainstream,” primarily middle-

class families and communities, the same way that millions of non-professed women were.

Admittedly not all, or even a majority, of female religious perpetrated physical, sexual, and

psychological abuse against the women and children in their care. But neither did they object to

what they witnessed occurring around them, even though such an institutional regime violated all

18ln 1831 Catherine McAuley founded the Irish Sisters of Mercy, a religious order dedicated to education and nursing. The Sisters of Mercy administered the majority of Ireland's industrial schools. For biographies of Catherine McAuley see M. Nathy, Catherine McAuley: Mercy Foundress (Dublin: Veritas, 1979) and Mary C. Sullivan, Catherine McAuley and the Tradition of Mercy (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1995). Margaret Aylward founded the Holy Faith Order, an Irish order devoted to education. See Jacinta Prunty, Margaret Aylward 1810-1889: Lady of Charity, Sister of Faith (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999).

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of the values ascribed to religious vocations. This is not to be overtly critical of the church or

female religious, but merely to suggest that historians should not assess the lives and work of

female religious only as members of religious orders, but as products of families, communities,

and societies, and as women who, in their hopes, aspirations, disappointments, frustrations, and

temptations, were little different from their lay counterparts no matter how vehemently religious

discourse sought to set them apart. Similarly, the history of religious life in Ireland cannot be

considered only from the perspective of female religious themselves, but must also consider the

perspective of those with whom they interacted, the “objects" of their charity and ministrations.

While not explicitly concerned with female religious, my dissertation will add a new dimension to

the role and nature of Catholic influence in twentieth-century Ireland.

The “outcast” women who are the subject of my dissertation are virtually ignored

in feminist historical literature. Maria Luddy and Cliona Murphy’s Women Surviving: Studies in

Women's History in the 19th and 20th Centuries includes essays on female religious and female

spirituality, poor women in workhouses, and women involved in twentieth-century political

debates.19 Only two essays, Luddy’s “Prostitution and Rescue Work in the Nineteenth Century,"

and Dympna McLoughlin’s “Workhouses and Irish Female Paupers 1840-1870," consider the lives

and experiences of poor or marginalized women, although Luddy’s essay is less concerned with

the prostitute than with the female religious who facilitated her “rehabilitation.” Luddy’s work is

valuable for the light it sheds on the nineteenth-century magdaien regime, which was the

mechanism by which the church sought to both control the spread of prostitution and “rehabilitate”

the prostitute; by the twentieth century these institutions mainly confined unmarried mothers and

other women whom family, friends, or priests feared would “fall way”. The nineteenth century

magdaien asylum mirrored in some ways that which prevailed in the twentieth century: it reminded

19Maria Luddy and Cliona Murphy, eds.,Women Surviving: Studies in Women’s History in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1990).

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women constantly of their sinful past and used hard work and prayer to effect repentance and

moral rehabilitation.

On the other hand, Luddy scarcely questions the charitable spirit or calling that

motivated philanthropists and female religious in their work:

The women who ran these refuges were motivated by Christian charity. Although life within these asylums was difficult, those who operated them did so with a genuine measure of humanitarianism and it was obvious to these philanthropists that prostitutes were certainly better off in the homes than on the streets. The function of the refuge was to provide ‘...a shelter from the scorn, derision and temptations of the world.’20

As the experiences of twentieth-century unmarried mothers suggest, women detained in the

asylums were as likely to suffer scorn and derision within the institution walls as outside of them.

And one of the primary differences between nineteenth- and twentieth-century asylum practices

was that nineteenth-century “inmates" typically entered voluntarily and could leave at any time

(although pressure would have been exerted to convince them to stay) while many of the

twentieth century’s institutional inmates were confined against their will and, while not bound

legally to remain, nonetheless were not free to leave. The transition from nineteenth-century

refuge for prostitutes to twentieth century-home for unmarried mothers was accompanied by a

shift from voluntary to coercive confinement, reflecting both the economic realities of the

institutional network and the growing trend of institutionalizing needy, vulnerable, and troublesome

populations.

Poor women also figure in Maria Luddy's Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth

Century Ireland, although not as central characters in their own right but as the objects of middle-

class benevolence and philanthropy. Luddy is primarily concerned with both the development of

middle-class philanthropy in the mid-nineteenth century along lines that mirrored similar impulses

elsewhere in Europe, and the shift from lay to religious control and oversight of philanthropic

20Luddy, “Prostitution and Rescue Work in the Nineteenth Century,” in Women Surviving, 68.

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institutions and agencies. Luddy argues that the early charitable work of both lay and religious

philanthropists contributed to the development of an extensive network of benevolent institutions

and agencies to deal with society’s most pressing social issues. Women were guided by a

Christian humanitarian spirit as well as the impulse to moderate the perceived anti-social

behaviors that they saw as the root of most social evils.21 While Luddy’s work was pathbreaking

at the time, given that it filled a gap in the history of social welfare in nineteenth-century Ireland,

Luddy does not consider the extent to which these philanthropic women helped to define and

perpetuate standards of moral and respectable behavior, and to impose them on women for

whom such values had little resonance. Luddy’s work fits within the “woman as victim” paradigm

in that it places women’s status and achievements within the context of an oppressive church and

state hierarchy. The idea that society’s failures, particularly in the way they cared for needy and

vulnerable populations, might be in some measure attributable to female agency is not

considered in Luddy’s analysis. Meanwhile the experiences of unmarried mothers and their

children suggest that their harsh treatment was largely the product of other women: mothers,

friends, and neighbors who condemned them for giving birth out of wedlock, and who viewed the

institutional regime as just punishment for their sins; and nuns who had complete authority within

the institution to perpetrate a regime that was respectful, dignified, and compassionate, or

punitive, brutal and unforgiving. Indeed, it was often women who held, articulated, and

perpetuated the condemning and judgmental attitudes toward morality and sexuality that made the

plight of unmarried mothers and their children so desperate, and the mothers and sisters of

women faced with an unwed pregnancy could be as harsh and unforgiving as even the harshest

member of the Catholic hierarchy. Women were not completely powerless in shaping their own

21 Maria Luddy,Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1-2.

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lives and experiences, or the values and assumptions that underpinned treatment of vulnerable

populations, nuns and middle-class women least of all.

Motherhood and Childhood in the West

Mothers and children, particularly poor and unmarried mothers and illegitimate

children, were among the most needy and socially marginalized groups in the mid-twentieth

century, and their marginalization has been perpetuated in historical scholarship. The only

monograph-length study of attitudes toward and treatment of children in Ireland is Joseph Robins

The Lost Children. A Study of Charity Children in Ireland.22 Robins traces the development, in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of official efforts to provide care and protection for

abandoned, illegitimate, orphaned, and poor children. By the middle of the nineteenth century,

social observers, influenced by English ideas about the “dangerous classes,” recognized the

need to create institutions for delinquent children, or children whose dire poverty made them

susceptible to crime and delinquency. In the 1860s the English system of industrial and

reformatory schools was extended to Ireland to address the problems of juvenile delinquency and

child poverty. The industrial school system continued in Ireland into the 1970s, under the

exclusive administration of a handful of male and female religious orders. With the founding of the

Irish Free State in 1922 administrative responsibility for the industrial school system shifted from

the English prison authority to the Irish Department of Education.

Jane Barnes’ work on the development in the 19th century of the industrial school

system complements Robin’s study, particularly in its emphasis on the adoption of the institutional

model under the strict moral guardianship of religious orders as the most effective means of

ameliorating the potentially dangerous results of childhood neglect or delinquency.23 Bames

^Joseph Robins, The Lost Children. A Study of Charity Children in Ireland (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1980).

23Jane Bames, Irish Industrial Schools, 1868-1908: Origins and Development (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989).

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suggests that lawmakers introduced the industrial school system into Ireland for the same

reasons that they established the system in England, official concern over a seeming increase in

the “dangerous classes”, although Irish religious imperatives determined the character and ethos

of those institutions in Ireland. The Catholic hierarchy initially resisted efforts to introduce a system

of state-sponsored schools based on their fear that the institutions would be merely cloaks for

proselytizing. Legislative safeguards that ensured that Catholic children would not be admitted to

Protestant schools and vice versa somewhat eased these fears. When the industrial school

system was extended to Ireland in 1868, religious orders eagerly undertook building projects, and

by 1880 56 schools had been established.24

Barnes’ work is particularly valuable for the light it sheds on the forces that

motivated religious orders to establish schools in the first place, and the struggles between the

religious orders and the various government bodies agencies that retained ultimate responsibility

for the children in institutional care. She also acknowledges that many of the school buildings

were drab, cold, and uncomfortable, that the regime could be harsh and regimented, and that the

managers of industrial schools pursued with a particular determination the practice of separating

children from their parents in spite of the fact that legislation gave school managers the option of

allowing children to return home in the evening. The institutional regime that Barnes describes

appears, on the surface, to be remarkably similar to the regime that prevailed into the 1960s,

reinforcing the suggestion that the state abdicated all responsibility for the care and protection of

vulnerable children even in the face of evidence that the institutions did not meet children's basic

physical, let alone educational or psychological, needs. Barnes' work is primarily a narrative

account of the development of the industrial school system, and she does not consider the

24Bames, Irish Industrial Schools, 42.

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political or religious agenda that prompted the establishment of schools or the insistence on the

part of religious orders that all ties between children and parents should be severed.

A recent monograph and television documentary have shed light on the fate of

children confined to industrial schools in the twentieth century, and it seems clear that in terms of

the treatment and care of children, little changed from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century

even as new theories of childhood psychological development pointed to the importance of love,

stability, and nurture in children’s physical and emotional development. The fate of abandoned

infants, or foundlings, was much more tenuous than those committed to industrial schools in the

nineteenth century, not necessarily because there was a greater concern on the part of carers or

the state for older children, but because foundlings likely were neglected and in poor health before

they even arrived in the foundling hospital, and the hospital did little to improve their health and

well-being.25 Foundling hospitals were prone to regular staff shortages, a negligent standard of

care, and an extraordinarily high infant mortality rate. The quality of care provided by foundling

hospitals epitomized the lack of concern, on the part of the government, medical professionals,

and social observers, with the plight and future welfare of foundling children, the majority of whom

likely were illegitimate. The foundling system ended in the 1830s with the closing of the last

hospital in Cork, and was replaced not by any official policy on the care of abandoned infants but

by the practice of sending foundling children to workhouses and, later, industrial schools. The

local authorities introduced a system of boarding-out to attempt to replicate, as much as possible,

a normal family environment for vulnerable children, but the majority of children who otherwise

would have been sent to foundling hospitals ended up in institutions that were not equipped to

meet their particular needs. Even when children were boarded out, their foster families typically

regarded them as free or cheap labor rather than as members of the family, or as individuals to be

25Robins, The Lost Children, 23.

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loved, cherished and nurtured in their own right, and thus it is not at all clear that children

benefited to a significant degree from the boarding-out system.

Rachel Fuchs' Abandoned Children. Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-

Century France offers an analysis similar to Robins' of the fate of abandoned children in France.26

The attitudes and beliefs that underscored the care of foundling children in France mirrored those

that prevailed in Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Officials in both

countries were concerned with the latent delinquent tendencies thought to be inherent in

illegitimate and poor children; at the same time local authorities worried about the cost to the

ratepayers of maintaining abandoned children. The best interests of the child rarely, if ever,

entered into official discussions about how to deal with problem or vulnerable children. The Irish

hierarchy articulated the added fear of proselytism by Protestant agencies bent, presumably, on

“stealing the souls” of innocent and defenseless Catholic children. Although both French and Irish

officials utilized boarding-out as a means of caring for some of the children who came into the

care of the state, Fuchs suggests that the French system was “unique" in its strenuous efforts to

shift children from hospices, foundling hospitals, and orphanages into “normal” family settings.27 It

also seems that religious orders did not exert the same level of influence over the care of poor

and abandoned children in France as did their Irish counterparts, which accounts in part for the

Irish preference for institutionalization over boarding-out as the primary method of caring for

vulnerable children. One could argue that economic issues drove the Irish system more centrally

than was the case in France. While local authorities worried about the burden that caring for

children placed on ratepayers, religious orders that had expanded considerably by the late

nineteenth century and expended significant sums of money in capital development and

26Rachel Fuchs, Abandoned Children. Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984).

27Fuchs, Abandoned Children and Foundlings, 154.

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improvement, sought appropriate "good works” to justify their existence and required a steady flow

of income from state maintenance grants in order to be economically viable.

For insight into the actual experiences of childhood in twentieth-century Ireland,

historians must look to those who have written autobiographies or partly fictionalized accounts of

their lives, which exist in considerable and ever-increasing numbers. One of the best-known

recent works is Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, which describes the McCourts’ working-class

life in Limerick and New York in the early decades of the twentieth century.28 McCourt paints a

grim picture of life for devastatingly poor families in urban Ireland and emphasizes the humiliation

to which some families were exposed when they sought assistance from Catholic charitable

agencies. According to McCourt's interpretation, charitable agencies evaluated a family's

neediness and worthiness based on a range of subjective criteria including cleanliness, sobriety,

and thrift. McCourt expresses a particular animosity toward Catholic aid workers who branded his

mother a “bad mother” because she could not prevent her husband from drinking away the money

that should have gone to provide for her children’s basic needs. Although McCourt's work has

been hailed by critics and readers alike, one must view with extreme caution his use of narrative

and dialogue. McCourt also has been taken to task by Limerick residents who resent his

exceedingly negative and inaccurate portrayal of neighbors, male and female religious orders, and

the church generally. While McCourt’s description of life for very poor families in Limerick likely

reflects a version of reality, it is a work of fiction, as much as McCourt and others would insist

otherwise.

Although Angela's Ashes is one of the best known “autobiographies", McCourt

was not the first to document troubled Irish childhood.29 Several former inmates of orphanages

28Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir of Childhood (London: HarperCollins, 1996).

29See Frank O’Connor, An Only Child (London: MacMillan, 1961) and Peter Sheridan, 44: A Dublin Memoir (London: MacMillan, 1999).

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and industrial schools have offered graphic insight into both the institutional regime and the kind of

society that existed in mid-twentieth-century Ireland that effectively sentenced children to

institutions for the “crimes" of illegitimacy and poverty.30 Taken together these accounts portray a

society and a system more concerned with eradicating “difference” and preserving the facade of

respectability at all costs, than with addressing the root causes of social ills such as poverty and

illegitimacy. Similarly, Sophia McColgan and Alison Cooper have published accounts of the

severe physical and sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of their parents in the 1960s, 1970s,

and 1980s.31 What is striking about their stories is that as late as the 1980s, parents perpetrated

violence against children with impunity; no laws existed to protect children from violent parents,

and doctors, social workers, and other family members often were reluctant to intervene in even

the most blatant and obvious cases of physical and sexual abuse. In 1997 the McColgan children

sued the Northwestern Health Board and their family physician for negligence, citing the state’s

and the medical profession's responsibility to care for vulnerable children. Both defendants settled

out of court although neither admitted liability or negligence. But in what can be seen as a victory

for abused children, and a firm commitment on the part of the state to prosecute child-abusers,

both Alison Cooper and the McColgans sought criminal convictions against their respective

fathers and won.

The mothers of poor and illegitimate children are equally invisible in the historical

record, although concern with unmarried motherhood was expressed regularly, throughout the

30See Mary Phil Drennan, You May Talk Now (Blarney, Co. Cork: On-Stream Publications, 1994); Mary Matley,Always in the Convent Shadow (West Sussex: Poppy Publications, 1991); Bernadette Fahy, Freedom of Angels: Surviving Goldenbridge Orphanage (Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 1999); Christina Noble, Bridge Across My Sorrows (London: John Murray, 1994); Paddy Doyle,The God Squad (London: Corgi Press, 1988); Mannix Flynn, Nothing to Say: A Novel (Swords, Co. Dublin: Ward River Press, 1983) and; Paul McGrath with Cathal Dervan, Ooh Aah Paul McGrath: the Black Pearl oflnchicore (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing Co., 1994).

31See Susan McKay, Sophia’s Story (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1998) and Kieron Wood, The Kilkenny Incest Case (Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1993).

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mid-twentieth century, in official and religious writings and legislative debates. Maria Luddy’s study

of nineteenth-century philanthropic women considers mothers only as objects of middle-class

benevolence, and not as individuals in their own right.32 As yet there have been no scholarly

examination, similar to Ellen Ross's work on poor mothers in London, or Rachel Fuch's

examination of the experiences of unmarried mothers in nineteenth-century France, in Irish

feminist and social historiography.33 Dympna McLoughlin’s essay on pauper women in Irish

workhouses, although not explicitly about motherhood, nonetheless is one of the few works in

Irish feminist history to consider poor mothers as worthy of study as individuals and mothers.

McLoughlin suggests, drawing on workhouse records, that examining the way women negotiated

their relationship with a major social institution facilitates a more in-depth and sophisticated

appreciation of how poor women and men conceived of family ties of affection and responsibility

while also highlighting women’s agency in exploiting the resources available to them in meeting

their family's immediate material needs:

...the portrayal of pauper women begs for re-evaluation of the traditional concept of the family, a belief in the maternal instinct, of women as dependents and men as wage earners. This accepted view does not explain why women emigrated alone leaving young children behind in the workhouse. It fails also to reveal different concepts of childhood where pauper children were not seen as dependents to be protected but often as unwelcome burdens on the subsistence nature of the family unit, and in particular as an obstacle to the mobility of the mother.34

McLoughlin's questions about definitions of maternity, childhood, and family roles are relevant in

the context of twentieth-century policies and philosophies of caring for vulnerable and illegitimate

children. As was true in the nineteenth century, official deliberations on the care and protection of

32Luddy, Women and Philanthropy.

33Ellen Ross, Love & Toil. Motherhood in Outcast London 1870-1910 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Rachel Fuchs, Poor and Pregnant in Paris. Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992)

34McLoughlin, “Workhouses and Irish Female Paupers," in Women Surviving, 142.

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women and vulnerable children drew on the nuclear, two-parent, economically viable family as the

basis for evaluating need and vulnerability, and centered on the social and economic costs of their

existence rather than on the needs and best interests of children and families who did not fit the

nuclear model.

Scholars working in European and U.S. history have produced an abundance of

work that, in its scope, analysis, and innovative use of sources, would be useful to Irish historians

anxious to move beyond the traditional issues and conservative use of sources that predominate

in twentieth-century Irish social and feminist historiography. Ellen Ross’s Love and Toil:

Motherhood in Outcast London is valuable in its exclusive focus on the lives and experiences of

poor mothers, not from the perspective of the middle-class philanthropists but from the

perspective of the mothers themselves. Ross examines in great detail, and with poignant insight,

the strategies that poor women adopted to fulfill the most basic tasks of feeding and clothing their

families, the ways they coped with illness and death within the family, and their interactions with

the state and charitable agencies that could assist them in caring for their families. Ross argues

against the view commonly put forth in prescriptive literature and early feminist historiography that

the family acted as a “bulwark” against the stresses of the capitalist system. In fact, mothers’

strategies and sacrifices, rather than men’s paid labor, often spelled the difference between utter

poverty and survival, and that reality shaped women’s relationships with their children and their

mates, indeed underscored virtually all interactions within the home. The poor women of London

were not the passive, victimized “angels of the house” depicted in Victorian prescriptive literature.

They were, in fact, strong-willed, creative, and determined to do the best for their families.

Although clearly they had great affection for their children, as evidenced by Ross’s examination of

the ways that parents coped when their children died, nurturing and affection often were

secondary to the sheer struggle to survive.35

35R oss, Love and Toil, 8 -9 .

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The challenges faced by poor women in London likely would have resonated with

poor mothers in Ireland. In the absence of a state-sponsored safety net in times of temporary or

long-term need, Irish mothers would have had to rely on their own ingenuity, the good-will of

neighbors and friends or, in urban centers, the benevolence of Catholic charitable agencies, to

provide for their family’s most basic needs. And, as Dympna McLoughlin has shown, the

workhouse also offered a viable short-term solution in periods of extreme poverty. In the twentieth

century, however, women who were unable to provide for their families’ needs were as likely to

have their children taken away from them as they were to receive adequate state or charitable

assistance. For unmarried mothers, losing custody of their children was almost inevitable.

Although scholars are beginning to explore the plight of poor and illegitimate children in twentieth-

century Ireland, there is not the same desire to consider their mothers: how they struggled to keep

hearth and home together, and how they coped and grieved when their children died or were

taken from them. Nor has there been a realization or acceptance on the part of feminist historians

that the treatment of marginalized and vulnerable women is more reflective of a society’s values,

ideals, and priorities than political debates, religious writings, or the outward benevolence of

middle-class and religious philanthropy.

Rachel Fuchs’ Poor and Pregnant in Paris, on the other hand, does consider the

links between unmarried motherhood and broader social and political debates.36 Fuchs argues

that the ways that poor and unmarried mothers coped with pregnancy and maternity, the services

available to them, official and popular attitudes toward them, and their options in caring for or

disposing of their children, all reflected the interplay of moral and ethical priorities and the

development of social and economic policy in nineteenth-century France. Fuchs’ work is

particularly relevant in the Irish context in its suggestion that official concern over unmarried

36Rachel Fuchs, Poor and Pregnant in Paris. Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

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motherhood and illegitimacy was rooted more in lawmakers' and social observers' fear of the

“dangerous classes," linked particularly in urban areas with rampant poverty and crime, than in

strict definitions and interpretations of morality. There were similar concerns in Ireland, although

discourses of poverty and illegitimacy framed the danger not explicitly in terms of criminality and

delinquency, but in the broader language of “social harmony”, the “moral fibre” of the Irish race,

and the threat of proselytizing. Although France and Ireland both were “Catholic” countries in a

demographic sense, the different options available to unmarried mothers and their treatment at

the hands of lawmakers and contemporaries, reflected the different social, moral, and even

religious priorities that underpinned official policy.

Unmarried motherhood has been examined extensively in the context of

nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history, and while the social and political climate of

American society differed vastly from the climate that prevailed in twentieth-century Ireland, this

scholarship provides some useful points of comparison and differentiation.37 Regina Kunzel’s

Fallen Women, Problem Girls, explores the shift in the method of providing assistance to

unmarried mothers from temporary refuges such as the Florence Crittenton homes, established in

the mid-nineteenth century spirit of evangelic reform and aimed at conversion as well as

benevolence, to the pathologizing of social issues such as unmarried motherhood and illegitimacy

with the growth and professionalization of social work in the first decades of the twentieth century.

While Kunzei is concerned as much with tracing the development of the field of social work as

with elucidating the experiences of unmarried mothers, she argues that the transformations that

occurred in maternity homes from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century-- in terms of

staffing and ethos— reflected changing definitions of both social work and unmarried motherhood:

37See Linda Gordon, Pitied but not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare 1890-1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994); Mary Odem, Delinquent Daughters. Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the U.S. 1885-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade (New York and London: Routledge, 1992).

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“The multiple and changing understandings of the unmarried mother - as innocent victim, sex

delinquent, unadjusted neurotic — suggests that evangelical women and social workers inscribed

their own anxieties and those of their time and place in the narratives of out-of-wedlock pregnancy

they popularized and promoted."38 In other words, definitions of unmarried motherhood were

transformed from conceptualizing individuals in need of assistance, protection, and rehabilitation,

to objects of study, analysis, and theorizing.

The root causes of unmarried motherhood no longer were seen strictly in moral

terms, but in psychological and clinical terms. The disdain for unmarried motherhood did not abate

with this shift, rather the stigma simply earned a different label. Those running the homes “actively

recruited” clients because, in spite of the moral and professional issues involved in ministering to

unmarried mothers, economic reality forced homes to retain paying clients in order to be

economically viable. The most prevalent institution for unmarried mothers in Ireland, the magdaien

asylum, also was driven by an economic bottom line, although in Ireland the “penitents” did not

pay for their maintenance but provided free labor in the financially lucrative laundry business.

Existing studies of Irish female religious highlight the spirit of charity and selflessness that

purportedly characterized the work of female religious, leaving the impression that financial

matters had no place in the daily concerns of those who catered to the needs of unmarried

mothers and their children.

Marian Morton’s book And Sin No More. Social Policy and Unwed Mothers in

Cleveland, 1855-1990, examines the evolution of policy relating to unmarried mothers in

Cleveland, Ohio, to trace shifting trends in conceptualizations of dependence in the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries.39 As definitions of dependence changed from the nineteenth to the

38Regina Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls. Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work 1890-1945 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1993), 5.

39Marian Morton, And Sin No More. Social Policy and Unwed Mothers in Cleveland, 1855-1990 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1993).

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twentieth century, so too did the strategies that lawmakers and voluntary agencies adopted to

deal with it. During the nineteenth century, institutionalization was the common method of

providing for dependent populations but by the mid-twentieth century the financial bottom line

dictated outdoor relief as a more cost effective, and thus more preferable, strategy. Similarly,

primary responsibility for “diagnosing” and alleviating dependence shifted from philanthropists to

professional social workers. But, as Morton also argues, the social welfare policy that began to

develop in the early decades of the twentieth century could not be all things to all people;

unmarried mothers were at the bottom of the ladder of dependent populations and thus reaped

few benefits. Morton suggests that lawmakers were reluctant to offer cash benefits to unmarried

mothers because their dependence could not be perceived in the same terms as the dependence

of the aged, the infirm, orphaned and abandoned children, and the chronically unemployed,

whose plight stemmed from circumstances beyond their control. Irish lawmakers were equally

reluctant to offer unmarried mothers financial assistance in providing for their children, lest it be

interpreted as a “reward" for or inducement to immorality. The introduction of lone parent

allowances in the 1970s likely had as much to do with a decline in the ability of ever-shrinking

religious orders to provide institutional or benevolent assistance to unmarried mothers or children

as with an acceptance of the principle that unmarried mothers were as deserving of state support

as any other needy or vulnerable group.

Much of the existing scholarship about unmarried mothers in the European and

U.S. contexts focuses on those mothers who brought their children to term and then gave them up

for adoption or attempted to raise them with or without state or family assistance. A small sub-set

of unmarried mothers chose another path to deal with their unwanted children, that of infanticide.

To date there has been no scholarly examination of infanticide in Ireland, although lawmakers,

jurists, and Catholic writers expressed the view that infanticide was an all-too-prevalent feature of

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mid-twentieth century Irish society. Scholarly examinations of the judicial treatment of infanticide in

France and Scotland suggest that although judicial procedures and punishments differed, juries

and judges were remarkably lenient in convicting and sentencing women accused of infanticide

and other crimes against newborn infants.40 According to James Donovan, French juries were

noted for high acquittal rates; their reluctance to convict stemmed not necessarily from a tolerance

of the crime of infanticide, but from a reluctance to send women to prison, as the law compelled

them to do. Acquittal rates for infanticide in French courts ranged from a low of 32 percent in the

period 1863-1890, to a high of 58 percent from 1902 to 1913 41 The leniency evident in the Irish

adjudication of infanticide was manifest not in a high acquittal rate but in a high rate of convictions

on lesser charges; in the period 1925-1960 juries acquitted only 16 percent of defendants, and

convicted on lesser charges in 84 percent of cases 42 In spite of these similarities, the Irish

experience of infanticide differed from those of other societies that are the subject of scholarly

investigations in the wide-spread practice of committing convicted women to magdaien asylums

rather than prisons, based on the assumption that infanticide was a moral failing rather than a

criminal act.

Deborah Symonds further argues that the extent of a family’s or community’s

support for a woman accused of infanticide could spell the difference between conviction and

death, or acquittal and forgiveness.43 Symonds astutely acknowledges that those who spoke out

40See James M. Donovan, “Infanticide and the Juries in France, 1825-1913,’’ Journal of Family History, vol.16, no. 2 (1991): 157-176; and Deborah Symonds, Weep Not For Me. Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modem Scotland (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).

41 Donovan, “Infanticide and the Juries in France, 1825-1913,” 162.

42This statistic derives from the author’s analysis of infanticide cases heard before the Central Criminal Court from 1925 to 1960.

43Deborah Symonds, “Reconstructing Rural Infanticide in Eighteenth-Century Scotland,” Journal of Women's History, vol. 10, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 63-84. See also Symonds, Weep Not for Me.

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either for or against women accused of infanticide “...were making strategic choices to preserve

their places in the community”, and that in many cases the guilt or innocence of the accused often

was “...dependent on the power of those both for and against her, not on her guilt or innocence.”44

Although the guilt or innocence of Irish infanticide defendants did not necessarily rest on a family’s

or community’s support, judges did make sentencing decisions based on their evaluation of

whether a woman convicted of infanticide would be accepted back into the family and community,

or whether she was likely to be rejected and ostracized. Symonds’ work is also useful in the Irish

context because she suggests that iocal communities were ruthless in seeking to uncover the

perpetrators when an infant’s body was discovered, and that between 1661 and 1821 roughly 350

women were investigated in relation to infanticide complaints. Although Irish communities were

not nearly so ruthless, and indeed often seem to have regarded the finding of an infant's body in a

field or bog-hole or well with a certain level of indifference, nearly 200 women were tried in

Ireland’s Central Criminal Court between 1925 and 1960 on charges of murder, manslaughter,

and concealment of birth. Combined with cases heard before circuit and district courts, for which

statistics do not exist, the incidence of infanticide in twentieth-century Ireland appears to be

extraordinarily high, and certainly higher than in eighteenth-century Scotland.

Conclusion

Chapter one considers the experiences of the thousands of women who did not

kill their infants, and who faced unwed motherhood with a mixture of joy, heartache, fear, and

resignation. Discourses of unmarried motherhood are remarkably strident when compared with

the official treatment of infanticide defendants, and this chapter offers some possible explanations

for this seeming disparity. Similarly, chapter four examines the fate of illegitimate children, and

children who for a variety of reasons could not be raised by their own parents. In the case of both

^Symonds, “Reconstructing Rural Infanticide in Eighteen-Century Scotland", 71- 72.

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unwed mothers and illegitimate children, the state adopted an official policy of institutionalization

that placed vulnerable women and children at the almost complete mercy of religious institutions

more concerned with saving souls and “rehabilitating” moral lapses than with the material or

emotional needs of the individuals involved. Both chapters also consider the responses of families

and communities, and the priorities of each that dictated how they treated their unwed, pregnant

daughters and the needy and “unwanted” children in their midst.

Chapters two and three consider infanticide, in the first instance from the official

perspective of legislation and judicial action, and in the second instance with attention to the

words and motivations of women accused of the crime and the responses of families and

communities. The official treatment of infanticide reflected a complex tug-of-war between

lawmakers and the hierarchy, concerned with protecting through legal initiative a fundamental

respect for human life, and judges and juries who, when confronted with the heartache, misery,

and frailty of human existence, attempted to balance legal and moral imperatives with an

appreciation of and compassion for the individuals who appeared in their courtrooms.

Trie epilogue considers more recent events, namely the 1983 abortion

referendum, the death in 1984 of a 15-year-old unwed mother, Ann Lovett, and the Kerry babies

scandal, in the context of both historical attitudes toward unwed pregnancy and sex outside of

marriage and the changes in attitudes, values, and policies that began to surface in the 1960s and

that allegedly flourished with Ireland’s entry in 1973 into the European Economic Community and

the growth of popular the media and press. In spite of liberalizing and secularizing trends that

were evident in Ireland in the 1970s, particularly a slight easing on the part of lawmakers of policy

relating to contraception, and a recognition of the need for concerted action to effect women's

equality in family, economic, social, and political life, the events of 1983 and 1984 suggested that

while many things had changed, fundamental attitudes had not. On the other hand, these events

marked a rupture between the “old”, conservative, isolated, and inward-looking Ireland and the

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“new”, more liberal and tolerant society in which individuals, rather than church and state,

determined how ordinary women and men should conduct their personal, sexual, reproductive,

and family lives.

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SOCIAL OUTCASTS I: UNMARRIED MOTHERS

Introduction

Unmarried motherhood historically has been stigmatized and labeled as

problematic in most Western societies; Ireland certainly is no different in that regard. What is

striking about the Irish case is the way that the church, with the full sanction and cooperation of

the state, “solved” the problems of unmarried motherhood and illegitimacy: the official policy

rested almost exclusively on institutionalization in a network of religious-run carceral institutions.

The stridency and rigidity of this policy cannot be interpreted only as a strong condemnation on

the part of church and state to behaviors that contravened Catholic teaching but rather fits within a

model of care that favored institutional rather than community-based methods of dealing with

dependent, vulnerable, or anti-social individuals and groups. But the policy also served the needs

of families and communities who were not willing to jeopardize their status and reputation by

supporting an unwed, pregnant daughter or sister, or by accepting an illegitimate child into their

home and family.

Drawing on official attitudes toward unmarried motherhood evident in policy

debates and social and religious commentary, as well women's experiences of unmarried

motherhood, this chapter argues that official policy on and popular responses to unmarried

motherhood reflected a complex interplay of Catholic moral teaching, eugenics cast in distinctly

Irish Catholic terms, political and religious aspirations to legitimacy on the international stage, and

popular (in other words family or communal) values and priorities. Although unmarried mothers

were not specifically excluded from the provided for in the various public assistance provisions,

local authorities generally were reluctant to offer those benefits to unmarried mothers, which thus

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made it difficult for them to keep and provide for their children. Catholic philanthropy was provided

almost exclusively in institutional form, which in most cases was given on the condition that

unmarried mothers relinquish all rights to their children.1 The network of religious-run institutions

evolved not out of but in a void of government action, policy, or legislative initiative in the areas of

poverty, dependence, and vulnerability. Religious institutions such as magdalen asylums and

mother and baby homes had no legal authority to confine women against their will, except when

sentenced by the courts, and yet the magdalen system operated as a carceral system, beyond

any state control or regulation but with the state's full sanction. Such a state of affairs developed

because lawmakers in the early decades of independence were preoccupied with building the

framework of the independent state, and left the tasks of education and social welfare to the

network of religious institutions and agencies that had begun to emerge with the revitalization of

the Catholic Church in the mid-nineteenth century.

But such a state of affairs also reflected the values and priorities of ordinary men

and women, because it was “ordinary” families who both produced the labor force that

administered the system and condemned their female relatives to it. The unofficial policy of

institutionalization could not have endured for as long as it did if families did not actively seek the

committal of their unwed, pregnant daughters and the resulting illegitimate children. Church and

state may have advocated the confinement of outcast groups such as unmarried mothers and

their children, but they could not have carried it out with such vigor if the policy did not enjoy

popular support. As was true with women accused of infanticide, some families and communities

supported unmarried mothers and helped them to keep and care for their children; for these

families the bonds of familial affection, loyalty, and mutual responsibility were stronger than the

1The Society of St. Vincent de Paul was the largest Catholic charitable agency under lay control and management, and it offered relief in the form of clothing, food and, occasionally, cash assistance. The majority of Catholic philanthropic endeavors operated under the auspices of female religious orders, primarily in the form of mother and baby homes, magdalen asylums, orphanages, and industrial schools.

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shame or disgrace that might attach to an unwed pregnancy.2 But many more families and

communities placed notions of respectability, status, and reputation above compassion,

forgiveness, and familial affection and mutual responsibility. Although outward displays of Catholic

piety informed local perceptions of status and respectability, this alone did not define who was

included or excluded, or who was forgiven for violating the norm and was not. Respectability at

the local level represented a complex mix of factors that could vary by community and that almost

defy definition: in some cases it depended solely on wealth or employment, but most typically it

also comprised thrift, sobriety, industriousness, and frugality, participation in local sport or politics,

ancestry or longevity in a locality, and whether or not one had relations in male or female religious

orders. Unmarried motherhood did not always represent a disastrous or immediate loss of status

but could, at times, be tolerated based on the community’s perceptions of the family’s standing,

worthiness and respectability.

Scholarly examinations of unmarried motherhood elsewhere in Europe, the U.S.,

and Latin America indicate that the marginalization, social, and economic vulnerability

experienced by unmarried mothers and their children in Ireland were not unique, and were rooted

in seemingly universal notions of appropriate family construction and a sexual double standard

that held only women responsible for sexual indiscretions. Rachel Fuchs and Ellen Ross

document the experiences of poor and unmarried mothers in the urban centers of London and

Paris; Fuch’s suggestion that informal networks of women could be a source of assistance and

support for unmarried mothers, but also a source of gossip, rumor, and betrayal, is particularly

relevant in the Irish context, where unmarried mothers often suffered most at the hands of other

2The case files of the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children reveal that many unmarried mothers and their children resided with, and were supported by, parents, siblings, and other relatives, although the financial burden of caring for illegitimate children often caused tension between unmarried mothers and their families. The ISPCC case files cannot be cited here because the author was given exclusive access to them on the basis of commissioned research unrelated to this dissertation.

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women: the mothers, siblings, friends, and neighbors who rejected them after they gave birth to

an illegitimate child, and the female religious who ran the mother and baby homes and magdalen

asylums in which they were confined.3 Fuchs also argues that an illegitimate child did not

necessarily spell disaster for poor women, especially if it was a “first offense." However, a second

illegitimate child could try the patience of even the most forgiving of families. Although unmarried

mothers in Ireland faced enormous social hostility and economic vulnerability, there is evidence to

suggest that lawmakers and religious institutions treated more harshly those who “fell" a second

time, and several of the women accused of infanticide seem to have been motivated in part by the

fear that families who already had accepted one illegitimate child simply would not tolerate

another.4

Although institutions to provide for unmarried mothers were not exclusive to

Ireland, the purpose, administration, and ethos of institutions such as the Florence Crittenton

homes in the U.S. reflected the diverse social and political agendas that underscored the

treatment of unmarried mothers in different Western societies. Regina Kunzel and Marian Morton

have examined the Crittenton homes, and in particular the links between the services available to

unmarried mothers and the “professionalization" of both social work and perceptions of

dependence and deviance.5 Regina Kunzel argues in Fallen Women, Problem Girls that the

3Rachel Fuchs, Poor and Pregnant in Pans. Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 15. See also Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London 1870-1910 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

4The 1927 Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor recommended that women who had a second illegitimate child be institutionalized to prevent further falls, and many mother and baby homes overseen by religious orders typically refused admission to “recidivists”. Report of the Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor (Dublin: Government Stationery Office, 1927).

5See Regina Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls. Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work 1890-1945 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993) and Marian Morton, And Sin No More. Social Policy and Unwed Mothers in Cleveland 1855- 1990 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993).

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Florence Crittenton homes had their origins in the nineteenth-century philanthropic impulse, but by

the early decades of the twentieth century had shifted from the control of “benevolent”

philanthropic ladies motivated by the joint aims of sheltering unmarried mothers and effecting their

religious or moral conversions, to professional social workers concerned with the material and

emotional ramifications of unmarried motherhood. Although philanthropists first established the

Crittenton homes to “protect" sexually vulnerable women, just as philanthropic women in Ireland

established magdalen homes as refuges for prostitutes, women entered the Crittenton homes

voluntarily and left of their own accord. The Crittenton homes were not carceral in nature, and

women were free to take their children with them or leave them to be adopted. While Irish

magdalen asylums, some of which remained in operation into the 1990s, reflected the endurance

of narrow and obsolete conceptualizations of deviance, vulnerability, and dependence, the

changing mission and staffing of the Crittenton homes in the middle decades of the twentieth

century illustrated changing attitudes to questions of sexual morality and a shift away from

pathologizing to professionalizing the problems presented by needy and vulnerable populations,

including unmarried mothers and their children.

Lawmakers and members of the Catholic hierarchy frequently discussed the

problems and dangers associated with unmarried motherhood; however, the hardships

experienced by unmarried mothers and their children typically were overshadowed by official

concern with the supposed links between unmarried motherhood and other “evils” including

prostitution and juvenile delinquency. Many of the stories of unmarried mothers who struggled to

raise their children against enormous social and financial odds, or who gave their children into the

care of religious orders or adoptive families, are lost forever given that few of them left first-hand

accounts. Many of the women accused of infanticide had other illegitimate children whom they

supported with the help of parents, siblings, or other family members. Many other women

voluntarily or under compulsion gave their children away, and a percentage of these women-- it is

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impossible to know how many— ended up in county homes, mother and baby homes, or magdalen

asylums. In recent years women confined in magdalen asylums and other religious institutions

have become visible through a series of radio and television documentaries as well as

autobiographies of former inmates and lay staff. While these accounts depict an institutional

regime that was rigid, punitive, and often short on compassion, they should not be evaluated with

the self-righteous outrage that has characterized contemporary reactions to recent revelations.

These institutions must be examined in the context of the official and popular values and priorities

that prevailed at the time, and that supported an institutional model to deal with deviance and

dependence. The institutional regime may have reflected middle-class codes of morality and

respectability, but given that the overwhelming majority of inmates were working-class women, it

could not have survived if poor families did not utilize it as a means of getting rid of unwanted

daughters and sisters. The unofficial policy of institutionalization, which enjoyed the full support of

the state as well as of the hierarchy, served the political agenda of the independent state as it

facilitated the preservation of law and order and the perpetuation of the veneer of piety and

morality. It allowed the church to exert its moral authority with autonomy but also with the full

sanction of the state. And it protected families from the loss of status and reputation that could

result from an unwed pregnancy.

Images of the “Bad" Mother in the Twentieth-Century

Lawmakers, religious leaders, and social observers implicitly framed motherhood

as a biological, civic, and spiritual duty that served the various, occasionally divergent, interests of

the burgeoning state. Women’s right to citizenship rested on their abundant fertility, maternal care

and solicitude, piety, chastity, and virtue. Although undergirded by idealistic nationalist rhetoric

glorifying Irish mothers as the lynchpins of ancient Gaelic culture and heritage, twentieth-century

conceptualizations of motherhood were informed most significantly by lawmakers' and religious

leaders' visions of independent Irish society as well as their fears about the potential for chaos

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and moral deterioration that women allegedly held in their hands. Just as women could ensure the

future well-being of the independent Irish state by living a life of virtue and chastity and raising

good Catholic citizens, so too their neglect, irresponsibility, or sexual licentiousness could effect

its destruction. All of church leaders’ and lawmakers’ fears about the potential dangers of human

sexuality and of the threats posed from without to the independent state's distinct socio-religious

climate, became encapsulated in constructions, definitions, and discourses of motherhood.

The Virgin Mary was the most pervasive and enduring symbol of womanhood in

twentieth-century Ireland. Religious discourse that contrasted Mary's virtue with the sinfulness of

Mary Magdalen reflected the extremes of official definitions of Irish womanhood and motherhood:

women either embraced the moral and sexual dictates of their faith, modeled their lives on the life

of Mary, and thus were “good mothers”, or they rejected God's law in favor of base worldly

pleasures, were unfit mothers and jeopardized the ideals of the independent state. The Catholic

hierarchy used the powerful mediums of the pulpit, pamphlets such as those published by the Irish

Messenger and Catholic Truth Society, and the popular Catholic press, to educate women on the

virtues of maternity and fertility, both sacred and sanctified because God crafted them especially

for women.6 Only in the fulfillment of their maternal role, modeled on the life of Mary, could women

hope to reach their full human potential while also meeting their spiritual obligations as the

guardians of their children’s eternal salvation.

Although the Virgin Mary epitomized Irish motherhood, religious discourse

highlighted Mary's chastity, purity, and supposed life-long virginity. According to Catholic theology,

6Such conceptualizations of women's “appropriate” role would have been pervasive enough that any woman who attended church on a regular basis, or read Catholic newspapers and pamphlets, would have been exposed to them. Individual parish priests had, for the most part, complete control over the sermons delivered at weekly masses, and these sermons often were aimed at specific problems that the priest identified within his locality. Diocesan sermons, such as Lenten pastorals, were delivered at all week-end masses within the diocese, and occasionally the Catholic Primate of Ail Ireland issued sermons to be delivered at all masses throughout the country. The Catholic press printed these sermons and pastorals so that they would have been widely disseminated.

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Mary’s status as a saint, religious icon, and intercessor between man and God, derived from her

virginity, both before and after the birth of Jesus, and from her own immaculate conception.

Marina Warner suggests that the deployment of the Virgin Mary as a model of female sexuality

coincided with the church’s changing fortunes over the centuries. Catholic hierarchies perpetuated

marian discourse and iconography most enthusiastically at precisely those moments when the

church as an institution was vulnerable to attack from within and without. In Ireland, the early

years of independence were politically and socially turbulent, which translated into a tremendous

opportunity for the Catholic hierarchy to consolidate its significant informal influence and authority

into formal political clout. Catholic writing and iconography co-opted the image of Mary as a model

of Irish motherhood in defining women’s role in and relationship to the new state; marianism was

useful because it stressed both the earthly biological reality of motherhood and the spiritual or

eternal function that was particular to Irish concepts of motherhood. Irish mothers’ sole function as

women and citizens was to bear and raise the future citizens of the independent state, and to

safeguard the souls of those future citizens for the eternal here-after.

In religious discourse, a mother’s physical care was no more important than,

indeed at times seems to have been secondary to, her spiritual guidance, as evidenced in a 1944

Catholic Standard article;

if you could come with me tonight into the dim hallways of one of the slum tenements, climb the filthy, broken, rickety stairs and enter a small, smelly, ill-lighted, damp, cold room, what would you see? Perhaps in that wretched den you would see an altar with a crucifix and the image of the Most Pure Mother of God - a lamp, it may be, burning before that humble shrine - pictures of the saints hanging on the bulging walls, and then, loveliest of all, little ones sparsely clad but with angelic faces and sweet manners. And you will meet a mother and father intensely attached to their children and with deep faith in their God. They are heroes.7

The idea that such poverty-stricken but pious mothers could be “heroes” underscores the

importance that the Catholic hierarchy placed on a child's eternal existence as opposed to the

7Catholic Standard, 31 March 1944,1.

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conditions of its actual physical existence, and masks the reality that children were often removed

from the kind of home described above and confined to religious institutions that placed their

moral training at the center of the regime, precisely because religious leaders believed that

unmarried mothers and poor parents were unfit moral guardians. Catholic writers consistently

faulted parents for neglecting their moral responsibilities, but rarely did the hierarchy speak out

against the dire poverty and economic stagnation that punctuated daily life for many Irish women

and men and often made the achievement of the ideal held up by church and state extremely

difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

Marina Warner suggests that the cult of the Virgin Mary had begun to flounder

somewhat in the Catholic world by the late nineteenth century, partly because papal declarations

on the immaculate conception rendered her inaccessible to ordinary Catholics who strove to be

good but found the marian ideal incompatible with their own human frailties and weaknesses.8 In

twentieth-century Ireland, ordinary women and men may have found Mary’s virtue impossible to

emulate, but reverence for Mary continued to flourish as an ordinary expression of the faith,

perhaps because popular religious literature and iconography projected a humanized image of

Mary that was accessible and palatable to Irish mothers.9 Penny pamphlets and pastoral sermons

depicted Mary as an “ordinary" housewife and mother, engaged in the same drudgery of task that

punctuated the lives of most Irish women:

In the Ideal Home, where we find Christ and His Mother and St. Joseph at Nazareth, there was moderation, there was prayer and work and recreation. Our Lady did not retire into privacy when she was pregnant; she went about her charitable work; she traveled and did housework for her cousin, St. Elizabeth. She did all the necessary things; she did not

8Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Picador, 1990), 252.

9Examples of the prevalence of mariolotry, or the reverence of Mary as an icon and intercessor, include the growth of sodalities devoted to Mary, the popularity of Child of Mary sodalities for schoolgirls, and the widespread practice of the daily rosary and regular Novenas. Additionally, shrines and statues dedicated to Mary exist throughout the country, in the center of large cities and towns as well as along sparsely traveled country lanes.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 51 become lazy. Modem girls will be very modem and truly women if they follow her example. They can go out to Holy Mass, remembering that the Mother of God went about the world...Our Lady would have been always cheerful, and the simple household possessions would always have been in order. At a distance all can follow her.10

Mary was “ordinary” because she endured pregnancy and childbirth, and engaged in the same

domestic and household tasks that women had performed throughout the ages.

But Mary could be followed only “at a distance” because she remained chaste

and virginal in conception - a biological impossibility for mere mortal women. Catholic writing

translated Mary’s perfect humanity into a common image of motherhood that ail women could

embrace without difficulty, and presumably without fear of failure:

We are creatures of flesh and blood and cannot companion long with those who are but of the stuff that dreams are made of. Therefore it is that we remember that Mary is both Virgin and Mother. The romance indicated by the Angelic salutation is not destroyed by its association with a babe nestled at a blue-veined breast. The ideal is not degraded by the fact that it moves amid household tasks. It is this unique combination which is the contribution of Christianity to the elevation of womanhood.11

Mary was at once the image of perfection and the human mother who performed her maternal

tasks with forbearance and dignity; the physical manifestations of her maternity— pregnancy and

lactation— were proof of her humanity and not a source of shame or embarrassment. Mary

reveled in the “ordinariness” of maternity because it was sanctified and made sacred through

God's will; religious discourse demanded no less of Irish mothers.

The humanized image of Mary also reminded Irish women that their maternal

responsibilities did not end when their children reached adulthood, and that motherhood was a

spiritual as well as a civic responsibility Just as Mary bore Jesus, trained him to love God and

fellow man, and raised him knowing that one day his life would be sacrificed to God’s will, so too

Irish mothers safeguarded their children's eternal souls to be returned to God unstained:

10A Medical Missionary of Mary, The Irish Mother (Dublin: Irish Messenger, 1945), 10.

11Stanley B. James, “Virgin and Mother," Irish Monthly, vol. ixii, no. 78 (December 1934): 753.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 52 Your child belongs, not to you and your husband, but to God. You have been instrumental in giving him life, but only God could give him life - a truth testified by many childless husbands and wives who long in vain for the happiness you enjoy. God gave you the child. An immortal soul, a gem from the treasury of Heaven, within the tender, mortal frame of your infant, has been entrusted to you. You must restore to God this gem unsullied, nay, more beautiful. Then treasure this soul for God; tend and foster it for Him. An exceedingly noble, difficult task which begins before the birth.12

The Irish mother's maternal and domestic tasks were inextricably linked with their moral and

spiritual responsibilities: they were expected to raise good citizens but they were also expected to

raise good Catholics - children who obeyed man-made laws and theological law, and whose

eternal life was never in doubt.

The positive rhetoric that glorified motherhood and placed Irish mothers on a

pedestal alongside the priest and the Virgin Mary represented an ideal that even the most

optimistic of Catholic writers realized did not reflect the reality of maternal behavior; the criticisms

of Irish mothers that issued forth from the pulpit, pamphlet, and newspapers underscored the

extent to which the church held women responsible for the problems that plagued Irish society in

the mid-twentieth century. In this negative discourse, all of society’s ills could be traced directly to

the mother who neglected her moral and maternal responsibilities, or whose maternity stemmed

from sin and lust rather than God's grace. Juvenile delinquency, child neglect and abuse, and

illegitimacy all were laid at the feet o f‘‘bad’' mothers, who were mothers in a purely biological

sense but not the “true” mothers who modeled their lives on Mary’s chaste and pious

subservience. These “bad” mothers jeopardized their own and their children’s eternal lives in favor

of the “pleasure craze” that Irish newspapers and pamphlets regularly railed against in the mid

twentieth century:

The true Irish woman will never forget that the best work of the nation is done within the walls of the home, in the training of the children in all the virtues which one day will make them good men and women. The modem woman is criminally prone to forget that she alone is the principle teacher of her own children, and that priests and other teachers can

12Rev. Father Sommer, Mother and Child: An Exhortation to Parents and Teachers. Authorized translation from the German by Isabel Garahan. (Dublin: Irish Messenger, 1933), 1-2.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 53 never be more than her assistants. She cannot shirk her responsibilities and remain unpunished even in this life. A true woman will make her power in the home supreme by her intelligent effort to sacrifice herself for those she loves, because she knows that sacrifice begets sacrifice on the part of husband and children.13

The idea that mothers who were not self-sacrificing, or who neglected their church-ordained

responsibilities, were “criminal" and required punishment throws into sharp relief the mindset that

dominated official discourses of unmarried motherhood. They were not "true mothers”, and could

never be so no matter how diligently they tended their children's physical, emotional, or spiritual

needs. Catholic writers’ strident accusatory rhetoric reflected a surface concern for children's

souls, but more centrally a concern for the church’s position of power and influence and their

ability to extend and preserve their moral authority at all levels.

Religious discourses of womanhood focused on maternity as the most important

contribution women made to the perpetuation of mankind and the eternal life of the Catholic

faithful. But simply being a mother in the biological sense was not enough for Catholic writers and

social observers: women also had to emulate, as much as possible, the ideals represented in the

life and maternity of the Virgin Mary. Those mothers who chose not to base their lives, and

particularly their sexual lives, on Mary’s example bore almost complete responsibility for the

perceived moral deteriorations that accompanied Ireland’s increasing contact with the “outside”

world, and particularly the infiltration into Ireland of feminist and non-Catholic values relating to

contraception, divorce, and sexuality. The way that Catholic writers perceived and wrote about

motherhood, their firm belief in the importance of the child’s soul and the mother’s role in shaping

and protecting it, helps to explain why unmarried mothers were treated with such hostility in

religious writing, and why the practice of institutionalizing them in an environment that protected

“respectable” society and focused on prayer and contemplation of their sin and shame, was

adopted with such a fervor in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

13P. Ivers Rigney, “Marriage in Ireland,” Irish Rosary, vol. xxxv, no. 3 (March 1931): 176.

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The Legal Position of Unmarried Mothers

Although few legislative initiatives prior to the 1960s specifically addressed

unmarried mothers and their children, unmarried motherhood as a social issue received significant

attention from lawmakers and government agencies, the Catholic hierarchy, and local public

assistance authorities. This official discourse focused exclusively on the moral and social

problems believed to derive from unmarried motherhood, and showed little concern for women

and their children as individuals. The earliest writings on the legal status of unmarried mothers in

the Irish Free State were those authored by Reverend Richard Devane in 1924 and 1925.14

Devane examined two issues that had a particular bearing on unmarried motherhood: the age of

consent and affiliations orders.15 One of the most extraordinary aspects of Devane’s argument

was his explicit insistence that Catholic teaching did not tolerate or condone male sexual

indiscretion any more than it tolerated sexual immorality among women: “On account of the moral

equality of the sexes the moral law for man and woman must also be the same. To assume a lax

morality for the man and a rigid one for the woman is an oppressive injustice even from the point

of common sense. Unfortunately, justice is not found in Ireland in this particular matter, as far as

the girl is concerned, but rather intolerable injustice."16 But Devane was concerned not with male

sexuality generally, but with men who preyed on the sexual innocence and vulnerability of young

14Devane was one of a handful of priests who regularly published articles on moral issues, church doctrine, and theology in a number of Catholic journals. See “The Unmarried Mother: Some Legal Aspects of the Problem. I: The Age of Consent," Irish Ecclesiastical Record, vol. 23 (January-June 1924): 55-68; “The Unmarried Mother: Some Legal Aspects of the Problem. II: The Legal Position of The Unmarried Mother in The Irish Free State," Irish Ecclesiastical Record, vol. 23 (January-June 1924): 172-188.

15ln theory, the Affiliations Orders Act allowed unmarried mothers to make claims for maintenance, on their own behalf, against the fathers of their children. In practice the burden of proof was so onerous that the measure was not often successful in making fathers financially responsible for their children.

16Devane, “The Legal Position of the Unmarried Mothers in the Irish Free State," 172.

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girls, or who refused to take responsibility for their illegitimate offspring. While Devane framed

female lapses in moral terms and emphasized the catastrophic social consequences of female

sexual immorality, he focused only on men's failure financially to support their children.

Devane did not advocate state support for unmarried mothers lest it be

interpreted as a “reward” for immorality. His enthusiasm for affiliations orders stemmed primarily

from the conviction that men should be held responsible financially for their extra-marital sexual

activities, combined with the belief that ratepayers should not have to bear the burden of

maintaining illegitimate children. Devane envisioned a relief scheme that revolved around

incarceration and “rehabilitation” in a host of religious institutions. The institutional regime isolated

“fallen” women, both to prevent further moral lapses and to warn women of the consequences of

sexual immorality:

To help towards the reformation of the girl it is not only very desirable, but in a sense necessary, that she should be deeply impressed with her sin, so that, with the royal sinner, her sin should, in the future, be always before her...the only real deterrent will be to bring the spiritual side of her fall before the girl, and impress her in no superficial way with the guilt of her sin, and leave her with an abiding memory and sorrow...the girl should, after her ‘trouble,’ have a few days retreat in which she and others like her should be gathered together and made to think deeply on their sin, and to realize what a woman has done when she has lost her virtue and her honour.17

The “abiding memory and sorrow” was a sorrow not merely for the unmarried mother’s own sin

and fall, but for the shame she inflicted on her family, friends, and neighbors, and the stain of

immorality she left on the character of respectable Irish-Catholic society. Keeping their sins

always before them reminded unmarried mothers that in their exclusion from “respectable” society

and their legal and social marginalization they had no one but themselves to blame, and that even

if God forgave their sins, they would always be fallen in society’s eyes.

The timing of Devane’s articles likely was not accidental and can be seen as part

of a broader religious discourse affirming the church’s claim to moral authority in the independent

17Devane, “The Legal Position of the Unmarried Mother in the Irish Free State,” 178.

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Irish state. Devane was among a group of Catholic writers in the 1920s who recognized the

unique opportunity that existed, with the inception of the Irish Free State, to implement social and

legislative policies that reflected a distinctly Irish Catholic ethos: “...what has been hinted already,

if not definitely stated, efforts should now be put forth to amend the laws relating to morality, not

piecemeal and sectionally, but an attempt should be made to codify, as far as possible, all such

laws, and thereby set up a national public standard of morality, in complete harmony with Irish

Catholic ideals.”18 These views represented an implicit attack on the perceived liberalism,

paganism, and lax moral standards attributed to British rule in Ireland prior to the early 1920s, but

also an astute understanding that the social and political turmoil of the mid-1920s placed the

Catholic Church in prime position to secure legal standing for Catholic moral values and beliefs

that previously were rooted only in custom, tradition, and faith.

Three years after the publication of Devane’s articles a native Irish government

discussed, for the first time, unmarried motherhood as a social issue, in the 1927 report of the

commission established to evaluate existing state provision for the sick and destitute poor. But

Devane's demands for affiliations orders and legal protection for girls were not realized

legislatively until the 1930s. The Report on the Sick and Destitute Poor identified unmarried

mothers as a distinctly needy and vulnerable group but recommended institutionalization as the

only strategy for alleviating their poverty, in keeping with the church’s insistence that home

assistance would only perpetuate immorality. The report advocated the detention of unmarried

mothers at the discretion of local authorities, based on the assessment of assistance officers (who

typically were men) of their need and the circumstances of their fall:

The term of detention we recommend is not an irreducible period and is not intended to be in any sense penal. It is primarily for the benefit of the woman and her child, and its duration will depend entirely on the individual necessities of each case. Ws are not in favour of the

18Devane, “The Legal Position of the Unmarried Mother in the Irish Free State," 188. See also E.J. Cahill, “Notes on Christian Sociology: The Family, General Principles," Irish Monthly, vol. 52, no. 614 (August 1924): 408-420.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 57 rigid application of fixed periods of detention; those we have mentioned are maximum periods within which the widest discretionary power should be exercised. The object of our recommendations is to regulate control according to individual requirements, or in the more degraded cases to segregate those who have become sources of evil, danger, and expense to the community.19

The report established the principle, that would be reinforced in the 1939 Public Assistance Act, of

institutionalization as a viable and effective method of dealing with “problem'' groups, including

unmarried mothers, illegitimate and poor children. In the absence of a formal policy to assist

unmarried mothers, or regulations governing their confinement institutions, religious orders and

charitable agencies effectively enjoyed complete and unchallenged jurisdiction over the lives of

one group of women who did not conform to societal norms.

One of the earliest legal initiatives reflecting and affecting the status of unmarried

mothers in the mid-twentieth century was the Illegitimate Children (Affiliation Orders) Act of 1930.

According to TD James Fitzgerald-Kenney, who introduced the bill in the Ddil, the measure would

“...make the fathers of illegitimate children liable for their support.”20 But the process put in place

to secure an affiliations order was so complex, and so loaded with assumptions about unmarried

mothers’ moral inadequacies, that it did little to ease their financial burden, nor did it embody an

official censure of male sexual immorality. The bill's sponsors were motivated not by a recognition

that prevailing policy and practice placed unmarried mothers in a particularly vulnerable position in

social and economic terms, but by a desire to shift financial responsibility for illegitimate children

from the state back on to parents. At the same time, lawmakers were careful not to give women

too much leeway in holding men accountable, or in eroding the sexual double-standard, lest

conniving women should attempt to exploit an opportunity to blackmail “innocent” men.

19Report of the Commission on the Sick and Destitute Poor (Dublin: Government Stationery Office, 1927), 69. TD stands for Teachta Dala, or Member of the Ddil (equivalent to the British Member of Parliament or the United States Congressman).

20D6il Debates, vol. 32 (30 October 1929), 519.

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The image of the seduced but respectable woman/victim dominated official

discussions of the Affiliations Orders bill. Virtually all TOs accepted the idea that a seduced

woman, who had “fallen” only once and otherwise was respectable, should be entitled to claim

maintenance from her seducer. Yet those who did not conform to the “victim” image— working-

class women and those who bore more than one illegitimate child— received no sympathy and

were vilified by some lawmakers as criminals. One TD suggested that the right to seek

maintenance should be curtailed if the applicant had more than one illegitimate child and, indeed,

that she should be incarcerated to protect society from her corrupting influence: “I think it is a pity

that the Minister did not include in the Bill some provision for the detention in some institution of

this class of mothers who becomes a repeated offender and who really is a danger to the

community.”21 It may be merely a reflection of the sexual double-standard that the idea that men

might father more than one illegitimate child scarcely entered the consciousness of the

predominantly male legislative establishment, while they regarded a “repeated female offender” as

not only sinful but criminal and dangerous as well. Yet it highlights the difficulty that lawmakers

faced, throughout the twentieth century, in attempting to minimize the financial and moral burdens

imposed on the resources of the state while maintaining the status quo that held only women

responsible for sexual indiscretions.

In spite of lawmakers’ intention that the Act would significantly improve the lot of

unmarried mothers and their children, it appears not to have been a viable option for most women

facing an unplanned pregnancy. Women who could have benefited most from the Act’s provisions

perhaps were reluctant to parade their “shame” in a public courtroom; more likely, however, the

Act's evidentiary requirements presented an insurmountable obstacle. Women had to provide

credible evidence, corroborated by a third party, that the accused man was in fact the father of

their children: “No Justice of the District Court shall be satisfied that a person is the putative father

21 Ddil Debates, vol. 33 (12 February 1930), 131.

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of an illegitimate child without hearing the evidence of the mother of such child and also evidence

corroborative in some material particulars of the evidence of such mother.”22 In other words, while

a man simply could deny the allegations and have his word accepted as truth, a woman’s

testimony could not stand on its own. In an age before ONA testing, the kind of proof required by

the courts, including testimony from an eye-witness, was almost impossible to obtain. Lawmakers’

insistence on corroborating evidence was intended to protect innocent men from being wrongly

accused: “I think that this is a very wise precaution, because it would leave open a very wide door

for blackmail and false proceedings if corroboration were not required.”23 if the evidence of the

Galway city and county district courts is any indication, the Act was not widely availed of, as only

one case was brought before the district court in Galway and surrounding areas in the ten-year

period 1930-1940 24

Department of Health inspectors of boarded-out and institutionalized children also

commented on the fact that women seemed not to utilize the Act to a significant degree. When

cases were undertaken the majority were unsuccessful, and in those that were successful it was

virtually impossible to compel men to pay.25 The most profitable suits were those brought by local

authorities to force fathers to maintain their children in industrial schools and county homes.26 The

Act did not make a difference in the lives of most unmarried mothers but neither, it seems, did

government officials intend that it would. Department of Health inspectors viewed maintenance

^Dfrl Debates, vol. 33 (13 February 1930). 172.

2zDeiil Debates, vol. 32 (30 October 1929, 521.

24Galway, Gort, and Athenry District Court,Justice's Minute Books, 1930-1940.

^Department of Local Government and Public Health, Annual Reports (Dublin: Government Stationery Office, 1930-35).

26Local newspapers such as the Connacht Tribune, Sligo Champion, Waterford Weekly Star and Insh Weekly Independent regularly published accounts of affiliations order cases, and in virtually all cases the local authorities were the complainant.

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orders not as an inducement to women to keep their children but as a means of improving the

quality of foster-home or institutional care available to illegitimate children:

It was hoped that an improvement in the class of foster-home would follow upon an increase in the amount available for maintenance of a number of illegitimate children by contributions from their fathers. Before the inception of the Act, in very few cases was any monetary assistance given by fathers of illegitimate children towards their support, where the mother herself placed the child at nurse, the whole burden of support fell upon her shoulders. Most frequently the unmarried mother is in receipt of a wage, which allows only a meagre sum for maintenance of her child; with the inevitable result, that the foster-home which will accept its care is not of the best. Unfortunately, the Illegitimate Children Act has made little difference in this respect.27

The Act maintained the status quo while contributing to the “myth” of Catholic Ireland because it

portrayed women who bore children out of wedlock as seduced and victimized, and projected the

fiction that the state was willing to spread the burdens of immorality and financial responsibility

equally among women and men.

Not surprisingly, little public debate occurred around the Affiliations Orders bill; no

outspoken public opinion compelled the government to act on the matter, nor was there significant

public commentary after the bill passed the Ddil. At the same time, a handful of letters and articles

published in the Irish Statesman in the late 1920s offered a surprisingly enlightened view of the

status of unmarried motherhood. One editorial acknowledged the double-standard and hypocrisy

inherent in the state’s treatment of unmarried mothers, particularly in light of the official image of

Catholic piety: “Too often there is an idea that a woman who has once taken a wrong step has lost

that respect which may still be her right. I am afraid through the centuries the world has got a long

way from the teaching and example of Our Lord in the New Testament in this attitude. And Ireland

has always been hard on women.”28 An earlier letter to the editor pointed out the constraints that

prevailing legislation placed on women seeking affiliations orders:

27Department of Local Government and Public Health, Annual Report 1931-32 (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1932), 300.

28The Irish Statesman, 7 December 1929, 267.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 61 Social workers of wide experience tell me that in the great majority of cases there is no real difficulty in determining the parentage of a child, but that the law on the subject leaves an open door for anyone who wants to evade responsibility. No one could object to the Government taking up the matter as, in theory, it already holds itself responsible for the health and education of the children in the State. Such legislation would help to lessen the intolerable social and economic handicap which, so often, the unmarried mother is left to bear alone and would be likely to have far-reaching effects in many directions.29

“Liberal” proponents of affiliations orders envisioned legislation that would assist unmarried

mothers and their children rather than throwing a host of technical obstacles in their path as the

Affiliations Orders Act did. Vet these liberal voices still insisted that unmarried mothers were guilty

of committing a “wrong act” in bearing children outside of wedlock. It is not surprising, in light of

the fact that even liberals deemed unmarried mothers blameworthy, that lawmakers were

reluctant to act on the issue in a practical or meaningful way. particularly if it meant that, in very

limited circumstances, men like themselves might also be held accountable.

The only other issue that involved an explicit discussion about unmarried

motherhood in the legislative arena, prior to the 1970s, was that of children’s allowances. In 1944

the Irish government instituted a system of children’s allowances to alleviate “want” among “larger

than normal” families. Although it is unlikely that a large percentage of unmarried mothers would

have met the qualifications of the bill (in particular, that the allowance was payable only after the

birth of a third child), the fact that the Act explicitly excluded them is noteworthy. But it was the

deafening silence on the question, rather than a heated or vociferous debate, that revealed the

government’s intentions in this regard. In Ddil debates, TD Michael Moran asked whether

children’s allowances would be payable to mothers of illegitimate children, and he received a

vitriolic response from TD Charles Fagan:

Deputy Moran mentioned that he hoped the Minister would include illegitimate children. I warn the Minister not to pay attention to what Deputy Moran suggests. I would be very reluctant to vote against this Bill, but I would certainly do so if that suggestion were adopted because, to my mind, you would then merely be passing a law to encourage people to have illegitimate children. If that suggestion were adopted, then people would need to have three illegitimate children before the mother could receive any allowance. In my opinion. Deputy

29The Irish Statesman, 5 February 1927, 526-27.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 62 Moran's suggestion would be encouraging the women of the country to have nothing but illegitimate children.30

This exchange between Fagan and Moran represented the extent of official discussions on the

matter. Sean Lemass, who as Minister for Industry and Commerce introduced the bill, made no

reply to Moran’s query or to Fagan’s response. It could be that Fagan's strong condemnation

served as a warning that the bill would fail if unmarried mothers were included; it is more likely,

though, that the minister never intended to include unmarried mothers under the bill’s provisions.

While unmarried mothers likely needed the children’s allowances more than most families, they

were the one group specifically denied, based on lawmakers’ fears, rooted in their own

assumptions more than in hard evidence, that such assistance would merely encourage further

“immorality.”

One legislative initiative that did not address unmarried motherhood explicitly but

nonetheless influenced official strategies to provide for unmarried mothers and their children, was

the 1939 Public Assistance Act. The Act invested local authorities in each county or urban district

with the responsibility to provide home or institutional assistance, from local rates, to needy

individuals and families. Local authorities, through Boards of Assistance and Public Assistance

Officers, retained complete discretion to determine the amount and method of assistance. The Act

had a particular relevance for unmarried mothers and their children, even though it did not name

them specifically, for two reasons. First, Section 47 permitted the transfer of parental authority to

local authorities when “...such authority is of the opinion that a parent of such child is, by reason of

mental deficiency or vicious habits, or mode of life, unfit to have the control of such child.”31

Second, the Act authorized poor relief in institutions under the control of local authorities, such as

county homes and children’s homes, as well as “extern” institutions, such as mother and baby

homes, magdalen asylums and industrial schools, that were under private, usually religious,

30DcW Debates, vol. 92 (24 November 1943), 201.

31Public Assistance Act, 1939 (Act 27 of 1939). Irish Statute Book, CD-Rom.

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control but that received capitation grants from public funds. The Act provided a legal justification

for the principle of institutionalization although it did not give any party the legal right to confine

unmarried mothers against their will for an undetermined period of time.

The lack of concern for unmarried mothers in legislative initiatives is not

surprising in light of the fact that the state deferred to the church’s authority on moral issues. The

hierarchy insisted, and lawmakers seem to have agreed, that the state’s legal responsibility for

maintaining unmarried mothers and their children should be limited to methods that would not be

seen as a “reward" for or an inducement to sexual immorality, and that facilitated surveillance of

and control over the moral behavior of a potentially dangerous population. The two pieces of

legislation that could have given unmarried mothers the material wherewithal to raise their children

were ineffective because, as in the case of Affiliations Orders, the process of securing support

was onerous, humiliating, and often unsuccessful and because children's allowances provisions

specifically excluded unmarried mothers. The Public Assistance Act of 1939 further sealed the

fate of many unmarried mothers and their children by establishing the legal principal that local

authorities could assume parental control, at their own discretion, and by authorizing institutional

as well as home assistance strategies to deal with “certain classes of people".

Social and Religious Discourses of Unmarried Motherhood

The legal marginalization of unmarried mothers reflected, but also perpetuated,

their status within the broader society and their permanently “fallen” status in the eyes of the

church. Official policy alone did not determine how women coped with unexpected or unwanted

pregnancies; the attitudes and values they encountered at the local level, from family, friends,

employers, and neighbors, also played a role. Families and neighbors reacted to unwed

pregnancies not solely from an uncritical and unquestioning acceptance of Catholic moral values,

but also from a consideration of their status within the community, and the impact of an unwed

pregnancy on that status and on the family’s financial circumstances. All parties involved weighed

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the importance of protecting reputations and preserving respectability, versus their affection for

and loyalty to their pregnant daughters, sisters, and friends. In some cases families and

communities had as much stake in institutionalizing their errant members as did a Catholic

hierarchy intent on regulating moral and sexual norms. While it appeared on the surface that the

church imposed a moral agenda on a compliant and quiescent flock, in fact ordinary women and

men assisted the church in the regulation of moral and sexual behavior because they derived

personal benefits from doing so. Unmarried daughters, sisters, and friends who became pregnant

outside of marriage were, in many cases, expendable in the family’s or community’s quest for

status and respectability.

The Catholic hierarchy’s attitude toward unmarried mothers and their children

was informed primarily by moral and spiritual considerations, but fear of proselytizing also fueled

their animosity toward unmarried mothers. The growth in the late nineteenth century of religious

agencies and institutions to care for unmarried mothers and illegitimate children derived from the

church’s determination to neutralize the threat to innocent souls of Protestant philanthropic. The

philanthropic impulse evident in middle-class Protestant communities in Europe and the U.S. had

all but faded in Ireland by the turn of the twentieth century, so that the overwhelming majority of

services available to unmarried mothers operated under the aegis of female religious orders. But

this fact did not ease the minds of certain members of the hierarchy who were convinced,

according to their sermons and Lenten pastorals, that Protestant proselytizers lurked around

every corner waiting to snatch innocent Catholic children from their desperate mothers, who in

turn would rather hand their children into the care of Protestant agencies that would guard the

secret of their pregnancies, than face the censure of their communities or the “rehabilitating”

efforts of their own church. This 1934 charity sermon on behalf of the Catholic Protection and

Rescue Society epitomized the anti-proselytizing rhetoric that underpinned Catholic attitudes

toward unmarried motherhood:

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 65 The unmarried mother often finds quite irresistible the temptation to bury herself from shame in a Protestant house of refuge and leave her child behind her to the care of those who promise to relieve her of all further anxiety about its fate. Such girls are already frivolous and unstable. Their own hold upon the faith may well have been weakened by their moral fail. They often feel an aversion from the child whose existence is a standard reproach and burden to them. Their chief desire is frequently just to be rid of it at any price and to be free to resume their former place in life. For the moment that is all that matters - remorse may come later. To give the baby over to the specious matron of the home is the easy way out of a difficulty, and they take it only too often.32

The irony of the above is that unmarried mothers often were “buried” against their will in Catholic

institutions, and they did not always willingly unburden themselves of their children but often were

forced or encouraged to give them into the care of adoption societies or industrial schools.33 It is

unlikely that women in great numbers utilized Protestant agencies to the extent that Catholic anti-

proselytizing rhetoric would suggest, if for no other reason than that few such services existed,

and those that did typically restricted their services to Protestant women and children.34 The

important point is that Catholic social observers assumed that all unmarried mothers did, or would

if they could, give custody of their children to Protestant agencies solely out of a desire to avoid

contemplating their shame, thus compounding their sin with the moral crime of selling their

children's souls. Emigration to England was one of the few options available to women who

32lrish Catholic, 3 February 1934, 5. This appeal on behalf of anti-proselytizing agencies is merely representative of the numerous appeals that appeared on a regular basis in both the Irish Catholic and the Standard. By the late 1950s and early 1960s the number and intensity of the appeals had waned somewhat, likely in relation to the growing number of children who were placed for adoption rather than maintained in religious-run institutions.

33Until the 1952 Adoption Act “adoption societies” such as the St. Patrick’s Guild, sent most of their charges to America for adoption.

MA 1884 guide to Dublin charities listed six “penitentiaries” or “homes for fallen women” under Protestant or lay administration, catering for a total of approximately 200 women. A further five institutions under the control of Catholic religious orders accommodated upwards of 600 women. Although the Protestant homes indicated that they accepted Catholic women and, indeed, that many of their inmates identified themselves as Roman Catholic, by the 1920s the Catholic hierarchy had exerted sufficient pressure that Protestant homes such as the Bethany Home in south Dublin refused to admit Catholic women. As a result most of the Protestant homes closed, leaving only the Bethany Home and St. Mary’s Magdalen Asylum in Leeson Street, each of which catered for less than 50 women. See Rosa Barrett, Guide to Dublin Charities (Dublin: Hodges Figgis & Co., 1884), 1-6.

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wanted to avoid the Catholic institutional regime, although here too the hierarchy established a

network of agencies to “rescue” and repatriate women who traveled to England to “hide their

shame." Catholic rescue societies in England and Ireland began the scheme as a joint effort in

1931, in response to complaints by the Catholic hierarchy in London that unmarried mothers from

Ireland stretched the resources of Catholic agencies in England and displaced “deserving” English

Catholic women.35 Unmarried mothers and their children were pawns in the church’s quest for

power and influence at home, and for respect in the eyes of the former Protestant colonizer.

The Catholic philosophy of charity was predicated on saving the immortal souls of

innocent children and rehabilitating unmarried mothers. The church's hostility to Protestant

charitable institutions and agencies derived from their deep suspicion of proselytizers' activities

but also the fear that non-Catholic agencies did not sufficiently punish unmarried mothers for their

sin, as Cecil Barrett clearly articulated in his 1952 book on adoption:

The efforts of non-Catholic social workers in other countries on behalf of unmarried mothers are tending more and more to become purely humanitarian. The emphasis is laid on her social and economic difficulties to the disregard of her moral problems. Whilst her fall may be deplored because she has a child to be provided for, only too often is it readily condoned and excused. Her condition is referred to as the unfortunate consequences of a slip or a mistake on her part. She has been the victim of bad luck resulting in an unhappy embarrassment and she is advised to be more careful the next time! No cognizance is taken of the gravity of the sin or the beauty of the virtue of purity. The very idea of sin would sometimes appear to be outside the ambit of their ministrations. The Catholic social worker, in addition to assisting the unmarried mother to overcome her social and economic difficulties, is concerned - and concerned especially - with her moral problems. Mere material assistance may be of no avail, unless the rents in the mother’s spiritual fabric have been repaired. The Catholic worker’s approach to the problems of the unmarried mother will at all times be kindly and charitable, mindful that Our Blessed Saviour, who hated sin, gave up His life to save the sinner.36

35John Charles McQuaid papers, government box 1, Dublin Diocesan Archives.

36Cecil J. Barrett, C.C., Adoption: The Parent, The Child, the Home (Dublin: Clonmore and Reynolds, Ltd., 1952), 23-24. Barrett, a Catholic scholar and influential member of the hierarchy, was Archbishop John Charles McQuaid's foremost advisor on matters relating to unmarried motherhood and illegitimacy, and considered an “expert” within the hierarchy on the adoption issue.

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Barrett’s concern epitomized the view, widely held within the hierarchy, that unmarried mothers

should pay for their “sins" long after their children had been taken from them. This unforgiving

stance is due in part to the overall moral climate that prevailed in Ireland in the mid-twentieth

century, but it also underscored the conviction that “unreformed” fallen women were destined at

best to “fall” again and at worst to slide into prostitution, thus giving further offence to the veneer

of respectability, and further threatening social harmony and stability.

The Institutionalization of Unmarried Motherhood

The system of poor relief that existed in Ireland in the mid-twentieth century

provided temporary relief for “deserving" individuals - women and men who were unemployed

through no fault of their own, the aged and infirm, and widows and orphans.37 The 1939 Public

Assistance Act authorized county councils to provide relief on an individual basis either through

home or institutional assistance, but left it to Boards of Assistance to determine the form that such

assistance would take.38 Institutionalization provided an easy solution, especially in the case of

unmarried mothers, illegitimate children, and other “problem” populations for whom a vast network

of religious-run institutions already existed. For the most part the work-house mentality inherited

from English poor law prevailed in Ireland into the late 1950s, and in the case of unmarried

mothers and their children the institutional impulse was reinforced by the church’s implicit

insistence that “rehabilitation” take precedence over relief. Because the records of institutions

catering for unmarried mothers are not open to the public, it is difficult to know with any degree of

37See National Health Insurance Act, 1923 (Act 20 of 1923); Unemployment Insurance Act, 1923 (Act 17 of 1923); Old Age Pension Act, 1924 (Act 19 of 1924); Unemployment Assistance Act 1933 (Act 46 of 1933), Widows and Orphan's Pensions Act, 1935 (Act 29 of 1935);and Social Welfare Act, 1948 (Act 17 of 1948). Irish Statute Book, CD-Rom.

38Home assistance involved direct cash payments to families during periods of temporary want; the amount of assistance paid varied by local authority. Institutional assistance involved the committal of the person seeking assistance and/or his spouse and children, to one of a number of institutions administered directly by the local authorities or “extern" institutions administered by religious orders but funded by capitation grants from local authorities.

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precision how many unmarried mothers were institutionalized in the mid-twentieth century, and

how many received home assistance or cared for their children with no public assistance.39

A variety of public and private institutions existed to provide for all phases of

unmarried motherhood from childbirth to “rehabilitation,” to the “disposal" through

institutionalization or overseas adoption of the “unwanted” child. Women who could afford private

medical care gave birth in local or maternity hospitals, but most likely gave birth at home, in

county homes or in mother and baby homes that received capitation grants from the state. Some

priests and county council members discouraged the admittance of unmarried mothers to regular

maternity wards (in other words those not set aside specifically for unmarried mothers) because of

alleged complaints from married women about having to give birth in wards with unmarried

mothers: “Mr. Lynch [member of the Galway Hospitals Committee] said it was not right that decent

married mothers should be compelled to go amongst the unfortunate who had given birth to

illegitimate children. The maternity hospital was not taken advantage of to the extent that it should

and the reason was not far to seek. Poor decent people did not want to come into a hospital and

to associate with fallen women.”40 The truth of this claim is impossible to substantiate but the

claim itself indicates that in official minds unmarried mothers should be separated from “poor

decent” mothers lest their immorality be a source of offense or bad influence.

County homes and mother and baby homes offered a short-term solution to one

of the problems facing unmarried mothers: an affordable place to give birth away from the prying

eyes of family and neighbors. These institutions met immediate needs but even the mother and

39The Department of Local Government and Public Health published statistics annually on the number of men, women, and children who received home assistance, and while these reports distinguished between legitimate and illegitimate children receiving assistance, they categorized women based on infirmity rather than maternal or marital status. The annual reports also included statistics on the number of unmarried mothers admitted to and discharged from county homes and extern institutions under the control of local public assistance authorities, but not of women confined to magdalen asylums.

40Galway Observer, 22 March 1930, 3.

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baby homes, with their two-year confinement period, did not allow for extensive, long-term

rehabilitation or surveillance of the unmarried mother’s moral and sexual behavior. The magdalen

asylum filled this gap. Magdalen asylums had their roots in the nineteenth-century Protestant

philanthropic impulse, beginning as refuges for prostitutes and other sexually vulnerable women.

By the last decades of the nineteenth century most of the magdalen asylums had been taken over

by Catholic religious orders and, while they continued to rehabilitate prostitutes, they also became

‘penitentiaries” for released female prisoners, as well as for women convicted of infanticide and

other “crimes" against morality. St. Patrick’s Refuge was founded in Bow Street, Dublin in 1798 by

a “poor tradesman who afterwards came into property”, and managed by a committee of ladies.41

In 1880 the asylum was moved from Bow Street to Dun Laoghaire, in south County Dublin, and

came under the oversight of the Sisters of Mercy. St. Mary’s Magdalen Asylum, Lower Gloucester

Street, had an even more interesting history. It was founded in 1822 by a committee of lay

women. In 1877 members of the committee formed themselves into a community of the Sisters of

Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, the same order that in 1853 established the magdalen asylum in

High Park, Drumcondra, the largest such institution in the United Kingdom 42 St. Mary’s Magdalen

Asylum was the longest-running magdalen asylum in Ireland, only closing its doors in 1996.

By the beginning of the twentieth century the “clientele” of these institutions

increasingly was comprised of unmarried mothers or other sexually vulnerable or troublesome

women sent by their families or the local authorities.43 Religious prescriptive literature

emphasized the contrast between the pure, chaste, virtuous woman of God and the debased

“fallen" women who sought refuge in the magdalen asylum: “A greater contrast is scarcely

41 Barrett, Guide to Dublin Charities, 6.

42 See Jacinta Prunty, Dublin Slums 1800-1925: A Study in Urban Geography (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998), 263-271.

43See Maria Luddy, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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possible. Innocence and guilt face to face! The bright cheerfulness of unsullied virtue so near to

the most abject wretchedness of multiplied sinfulness! The spotless lily side by side with the rank,

noxious, tomb! The consecrated nun speaking to the polluted outcast!"44 Such language

reinforced the gravity of the fallen woman’s condition, but it also foregrounded the “heroism” of the

female religious, whose own virtue offered a model of true Irish womanhood, and whose

willingness to sacrifice themselves to the work of God made the rehabilitation of fallen women

possible. In religious writings female religious were motivated by nothing more than a desire to

serve God and devote themselves selflessly to the care of the poor, the weak, and the “lost." But

the shift from offering a safe haven for prostitutes to rehabilitating unmarried mothers was a

financial as much as a moral decision and, indeed, the work performed by “penitents” was aimed

less at cleansing their sins than at providing a steady, if not always willing, labor pool for the

extensive and successful laundry industry.

The revenue generated by the laundry provided the institution’s primary source of

income, and anecdotal evidence suggests that such income was substantial. In March 1930 the

Good Shepherd Sisters in Waterford city lost an appeal in Waterford Circuit Court on the county

council's decision to assess the convent to pay rates of £218 based on the convent’s extensive

property and on the income derived from the laundry operation. Solicitors for the sisters argued

that the net annual profit of £1,300 was used solely to maintain the inmates and thus could not be

counted as income or assets. The Circuit Court's rejection of the appeal suggests that the laundry

enjoyed the legal status of a business rather than a charitable venture.45 According to the authors

of Suffer the Little Children, a recently published expose on Ireland’s industrial schools, the Good

^ O u r Dublin Charities IV - The Magdalens of High Park" Irish Rosary, July 1897: 179. The magdalen asylum of the nineteenth century became known in the common parlance in the twentieth century as the magdalen laundry, referring to the work that was performed by “penitents" in return for the financial burden for their upkeep.

45Waterford Weekly Star, 28 March 1930, 6; 4 April 1930, 3.

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Shepherd magdalen asylum in Cork enjoyed profits in the 1950s and 1960s that would be

equivalent to £100,000 in today’s money.46 While Raftery and O’Sullivan may over-estimate the

value in today’s currency of the asylum's income, it is clear based on their examination of the

account books that the income from the laundry business indeed was significant.

Religious orders and priests also made public appeals for donations to these

“worthy causes". In these solicitations, exemplified by the following charity sermon on behalf of

High Park Convent, Drumcondra, Dublin, the language of love and compassion on the part of the

female religious predominated:

Ladies of gentle birth and education, attracted by the love of God and the purity of His peerless Mother, sacrificed worldly prospects and friendships to be handmaidens of Christ, and for His sake to minister lovingly and gently to His beloved Magdalens, Mary Immaculate was their inspiration and model. And these dear Magdalens, living their lives beside those virgin spouses of Christ, could rest their wearied limbs and broken spirits, and with the wants of their bodies provided for could attend the need of their immortal souls.47

This image masks the fact that many of the “magdalens" were confined against their will, and that

rather than “resting their wearied limbs and broken spirits" they worked long hours in an enterprise

that was financially lucrative but from which they exacted no individual benefit, and certainly no

“rehabilitation”, “reformation” or training to fit them for life outside the laundry walls. The Joint

Committee of Women's Societies and Social Workers, which consisted of representatives of a

number women’s organizations as well as public assistance officers, expressed the concern, after

inspecting several of Dublin’s magdalen asylums, that the regime required women to perform

heavy laundry work but provided no other training that would suit them for life outside of the

institution 48

46Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan,Suffer the Little Children. The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools (Dublin: New Island Books, 1999), 290.

47The Standard, 24 September 1932, 2.

48 Joint Committee of Women’s Societies and Social Workers, Minutes 27 February 1947, JCWSSW File 98/14/4/2.

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The gap between the idealized image of the work of female religious, and the

financial realities that drove the magdalen laundry system, coupled with new revelations about

institutional abuse perpetrated by male and female religious orders, add another layer of insight

into the workings of the institutional church in the twentieth century, and raise fundamental

questions about the impulses that motivated individual women and men in pursuing a religious life.

The quest for power, wealth, and social control was one aspect of the institutional network

overseen by the Catholic Church, but for the women and men who chose the religious life the

network offered an escape from reality, access to employment and security, status and respect,

and an alternative to marriage, as much as it represented a call to serve God. Existing scholarship

on the lives and work of female religious emphasizes their charitable work, or the struggle of

individual women to establish orders in the face of pressure or resistance from the male hierarchy.

In this paradigm female religious were self-sacrificing, virtuous women of God, and historians

scarcely question their motivations for entering religious. Nor have feminist historians been willing

to challenge the tendency, in fact and in scholarly and religious discourse, to place female

religious on a pedestal that denies their human temptations, frustrations, and desires and that, in

essence stripped them of their humanity. The first-hand accounts of institutional life beg for a re-

evaluation of the received wisdom about the lives and experiences of female religious, and

demands attention for the women and children to whom they ministered, and for whom the

institutional regime was an extreme manifestation of their powerlessness and marginalization.

Until recently, the magdalen asylum was an aspect of Irish history that was visible

but invisible: asylums were mammoth, impressive complexes centrally located in the urban

centers of Dublin, Cork, Galway, Waterford, Wexford, and Limerick, readily identified by the tall

smokestacks and the high walls topped with barbed wire or shards of glass. The laundries in

Cork, Waterford, and Limerick also had industrial schools within the same complex, although

completely segregated from the laundries, and it was not unusual for women in the laundry to

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have their children committed to the attached industrial schools.49 Most ordinary women and men

likely knew of the existence of magdalen asylums in their communities, even knew that they

housed unmarried mothers and other "fallen" women, but few would acknowledge that they knew

what went on inside the laundry’s walls. Some women confined to these institutions remain there;

others died there without leaving any trace of their existence.50 Only recently has there been a

discussion of the role of the magdalen laundry in Irish society, and this public awareness was

raised by two events. In 1993 the Sisters of Charity sold their property in Drumcondra, a set of

buildings that once comprised High Park, one of the largest and most well-known laundry in

Ireland.51 In preparation for the sale the sisters authorized the exhumation, cremation, and re

interment of 133 “penitents" who died in institutional care from the late nineteenth to the late

twentieth centuries. According to press accounts, which the sisters did not refute, the bodies were

to be moved from Drumcondra to a mass grave in nearby Glasnevin Cemetery, under a veil of

silence and secrecy. Media attention to the proposed land sale prompted a public outcry and the

establishment of the Magdalen Memorial Committee by Patricia McDonnell, whose cousin was

49lf women gave birth in the magdalen asylums, as happened occasionally, their children would remain in the nursery until they reached at least their first birthday, at which point the sisters would seek their committal, through the courts, to the attached industrial schools so that they could avail of state capitation grants.

50When the Sisters of our Lady of Charity of Refuge, Good Shepherd Sisters, and Sisters of Mercy sold off land and laundry buildings in Dublin, Waterford, Cork, and Galway they used some of the proceeds to build sheltered housing to accommodate former “penitents". They also erected memorial tablets, on the grounds of the convents or in local cemeteries, with the names of the women who died while confined to the asylum. The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, who operated the asylum in Donnybrook, Dublin, buried former inmates in the same cemetery as the nuns’, although in a clearly segregated plot. This graveyard contains the remains of several hundred former inmates of the asylum. The Good Shepherd sisters in Limerick purchased a plot in the local cemetery in which they buried the inmates who died in their care. The plot is watched over by a statute of the Good Shepherd and also bears the names of the individual inmates. In some cases these tablets and gravemarkers are the only evidence that an individual woman lived and died within the confines of the institution.

51High Park was one of the largest convents and asylums in Ireland, and thus one of the most common destinations for women convicted of infanticide or concealment of birth.

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confined for 19 years in a laundry in Dun Laoghaire, south County Dublin, after the death of her

parents.52 For the first time in Irish history the fate of women, who literally had disappeared from

their homes and villages without a trace, was the subject of public discussion and anger, and in

the years following the High Park controversy a number of books and documentaries have

appeared that give greater insight into Ireland’s institutional past.53

In March 1998 Channel 4, a UK television station, aired the documentary Sex in a

Cold Climate, that chronicled the lives of four Irish women confined to Irish magdalen asylums in

the 1940s and 1950s. Perhaps more interesting than the fact that the documentary was produced

by an English network rather than the Irish broadcasting network RTE, is the fact that when the

producers put out a call in Ireland for women to share their stories of laundry life not a single

woman came forward, so they turned instead to Irish women then resident in England.54 Yet

within hours of the program’s screening thousands of Irish women contacted a helpline set up by

52The Sisters of our Lady of Charity of Refuge insisted that they had always intended giving the dis-interred women a proper burial in Glasnevin, but a spokesperson for Glasnevin Cemetery indicates that once the Sisters of Charity plans became public knowledge, initial plans for the re-interment of the remains was put on hold until the Sisters could decide how to handle the re-burial in a manner that would attract the least public attention. Throughout the “scandal” members of the order refused to speak with the press except to insist that their words and actions had been “misinterpreted” by the media. See Irish Times, 8 September 1993, 4.

53Although no individuals have written about their experiences as penitents in magdalen asylums, a number of documentaries include the testimony of former inmates. Sex in a Cold Climate, documenting the experiences of inmates of the Galway laundry, aired in Ireland on 16 March 1998: Witness: Sex in a Cold Climate, produced by Steven Humphries, Channel 4 UK (Testimony Films). Shortly after that RTE Radio re-broadcast a documentary first aired in 1996. See The Magdalen Laundry, produced by Julian Vignoles, Radio Telefis Eireann, Radio 1 Dublin. In January 1999 the American television program Sixty Minutes aired a segment on the Good Shepherd magdalen asylum in Sunday’s Well, Cork (CBS News, Sixty Minutes Transcript, vol. 31 no., 16: 3 January 1999). Two former staff of religious institutions for unmarried mothers also have published accounts, one fictional and one non-fiction, of their experiences. See Patricia Burke- Brogan, Eclipsed Galway:{ Salmon Publishing, 1994) and June Goulding,The Light in the Window (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1998). The magdalen asylum also has inspired novelists and songwriters. See Marita Conlon-McKenna, The Magdalen (London: Bantam Books, 1999); Joni Mitchell “The Magdalen Laundry,” on the Chieftains Tears of Stone, RCA Victor, 1999; and J. Mulhern, “Magdalen Laundry” on Mary Coughlan'sSentimental Killer, Warner Music UK Limited, 1992.

54Irish Independent On-Line, 18 March 1998.

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the television network, and all of the callers documented a litany of physical, psychological, and

sexual abuses at the hands of male and female religious in industrial schools and magdalen

asylums. Since then the issues of institutionalization and clerical sexual abuse have received

significant attention from government ministers and solicitors as well as from the media.55 The

media has dominated recent debates, and the sustained public outrage at the conditions revealed

by recent documentaries has created a sense of unease among government agencies and

religious orders who have consistently refused access to existing files relating to these institutions.

But the issue has become so polarized in terms of allocating blame on either the church or the

state that the question of why women and children were institutionalized in the first place, or what

the broader public might have gained from the system, have been lost.

Because the records belonging to religious orders that operated magdalen

asylums are closed to researchers, and the religious themselves are reluctant to speak publicly,

the picture that emerges of the laundry regime is one-sided and thus open to accusations of bias.

However, when examined in the light of contemporary discourses that emphasized the gravity of

the unmarried mother’s sin and shame, and that insisted on ‘‘rehabilitation” as well as punishment,

such an image is plausible and, in all likelihood, more than a little accurate. Virtually anyone who

was alive in the 1940s-1960s has memories of the “strange” communities of women who lived in

the magdalen asylums; one man who delivered laundry to an asylum in Dublin in the 1930s and

1940s recalls: “I remember bringing linen to the convent in Gloucester Street on a regular basis

for cleaning, and although it struck me as a strange and depressing place, I had no inkling of what

55The public debate about the institutionalization of vulnerable populations, particularly unmarried mothers and their children, was re-ignited in April 1999 with the airing on RTE 1 of a series of documentaries examining Ireland's industrial school system. Since that time the Irish Times, and Irish Independent carry regular stories highlighting personal experiences of the industrial school system, as well as ministerial and ecclesiastical responses. Additionally, radio call-in shows such as RTE radio's Pat Kenny and Marian Finucane shows regularly open up their phone lines to discuss the matter.

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was happening inside those four walls to these unfortunate women.”56 When the “penitents” went

outside convent grounds, for walks or to attend Mass, their cropped hairstyles and uniform-type

clothing immediately identified them as “penitents”, and ordinary people steered well clear of

them. Children were told not to speak to the women, and girls in particular were warned that the

institutions represented their fate if they transgressed the moral and sexual codes set forth by the

church, as illustrated by this participant in an RTE radio documentary: “It was common

knowledge, at least among women, that these were sinister, fearsome places.”57 The magdalen

laundry was symbolic of the power of the Catholic Church over the lives of ordinary women and

men, especially those who did not conform to prescriptions on sexual and moral behavior, or who

were in any way “different," but also of the place of women in mid-twentieth-century Irish society.

More than any other institution, the magdalen laundry represented the vehemence with which

officials of church and state sought to control women, and particularly the sexual and reproductive

activities of poor and working-class women.

It is impossible to know with any accuracy how many women were confined to

magdalen asylums in the mid-twentieth century, again because religious orders kept the most

comprehensive records of committals and releases. Inmates of magdalen asylums and other

institutions were enumerated on census forms, but detailed census data is only released to the

public ninety years after collection, and summary data does not distinguish magdalen asylum

inmates from the inmates of other institutions. Rough estimates, based on information supplied by

religious orders for publication in the annual Irish Catholic Directory, indicate that there were 11

magdalen laundries, each providing accommodation and work for anywhere from 100 to 200

women.58 Of the total number of women confined in any given year a tiny percentage would have

56Irish Times, 16 September 1993, 11.

57Sunday Independent, 22 March 1998, 6.

58Irish Catholic Directory, 1935. The Good Shepherd Sisters, whose founding mission was dedicated to the care and protection of “fallen women" operated magdalen asylums

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been committed by the courts for a specified period of time, while the rest comprised women,

confined by families, who remained until a family member came to claim responsibility for them

which, in some cases, never happened. Added to this are the number of women confined in

mother and baby homes, of which there were at least ten around the country, and in private

hostels such as the Regina Coeli and Sancta Maria hostels overseen by the Legion of Mary in

Dublin, and private hostels and nursing homes, and the number of unmarried mothers confined in

any given year easily could have exceeded 3.000.59

Regardless of the number of women confined on an annual basis, or whether

they were coerced or confined voluntarily, while in the institutions every aspect of their lives, right

down to whether or not they would be released, was controlled by the institution’s mother-

superior. Aside from those confined by the courts, the authority to confine women derived not from

legislative initiative or formal regulation, but from tacit agreement amongst church, state, and

“respectable'' society that the magdalen laundry was the best, most effective and efficient way of

dealing with the problem of unmarried motherhood in the mid-twentieth century.60 Although there

and laundries in Limerick, Cork, Waterford, and New Ross, County Wexford. Each of those institutions accommodated 150-200 women. The Sisters of Mercy had asylums in Galway and Dun Laoighaire, south Dublin, each of which catered for 100-150 women. The Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Refuge operated the laundries in Henrietta Street, Dublin and Donnybrook, each of which accommodated approximately 50 women; the Gloucester Street laundry providing for upwards of 100 women; and High Park, which catered to over 200 women. The Sisters of Charity (as distinct from the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity) oversaw an asylum in Cork that accommodated 50-100 women.

59The level of institutionalization of unmarried mothers becomes evident when one considers that the illegitimate birth-rate fluctuated between 1,800 and 2,600 from 1930 to 1960, and did not break the 3,000 mark until 1979. Anecdotal evidence suggests that at least a portion of unmarried mothers kept their children, and another small sub-set killed their newborn infants. Thus the institutionalization of 3,000 sexually vulnerable women in any given year suggests that the institutions were not merely places for women to give birth in protected environments, but incarcerated women for a period of years.

^N one of the names of the women who were confined by the courts to High Park Convent or the Good Shepherd Convent in Cork appear on the plaques erected in Glasnevin Cemetery and the back garden of the Cork convent, suggesting several possibilities; the women were released and thus did not die in the institutions; the women died in the institutions but were

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was no legal imperative in these cases preventing women from leaving, particularly once they had

reached the age of majority, available evidence suggests that the women themselves were told,

and believed, that they had no right to leave unless a family member consented to their release.61

Patricia Burke-Brogan, a former Sister of Mercy who spent a week in the Galway magdalen

laundry, illustrated the sense of imprisonment that pervaded in the asylum: “The most

extraordinary aspect of it is that they were told they were not allowed to leave. They were locked

in at night with double locks on the dormitory doors. Legally they could have walked out the gate

any time they wanted, but very few did. For many, there was no place to go. They lived and died

in a virtual prison."62 The physical reality of their imprisonment may have come at the hands of

female religious, but if women had nowhere else to go most likely it was because their families

refused to take them back after giving birth to an illegitimate child, and employers refused to hire

them in light of their “history”. In effect they were imprisoned by society although in recent debates

the blame has fallen squarely on the shoulders of female religious.

The women who participated in the making of Sex in a Cold Climate were sent to

the laundry for vastly different reasons, and in fact only one of them was “guilty” of giving birth out

of wedlock, but their experiences were remarkably similar and underscored the fate that awaited

women who fell outside society's moral codes either willfully or through male sexual aggression.

Christina Mulcahy’s family sent her to the Galway asylum in the 1950s after she gave birth to an

illegitimate child; Phyllis Valentine grew up in an industrial school and the nuns transferred her to

the asylum at the age of 16 because of their fear that she would “fall away”; a cousin molested

Martha Cooney when she was fourteen, and her parents sent her to the Galway asylum to spare

buried by their families (an unlikely alternative if the families were unwilling to take them out in the first place); or the women are still alive and still in the care of the nuns.

61Ireland on Sunday, 22 March 1998. See also Sex in a Cold Climate.

62lrish Times, 4 September 1993, week-end section, 1.

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themselves the disgrace of having to confront the abuse or the abuser; Brigid Young grew up in

an industrial school and worked for a time in the asylum before leaving voluntarily to marry and

raise a family. Phyllis Valentine and Brigid Young's experiences are striking in that both grew up in

industrial schools and ultimately ended up in magdalen asylums because of real or imagined

transgressions. Mary Norris, who participated in RTE’s documentary about industrial schools,

States of Fear, and who also was transferred from an industrial school to a magdalen asylum,

suggested that the relationship between industrial schools and magdalen laundries was a sinister

one in which: “...one load of nuns [gave] servants, skivvies, to another lot of nuns to run their

laundry, their workroom.”63 While Norris’ hostility to the church and female religious orders are

rooted in her experiences of industrial school and magdalen asylum life, there likely is some truth

to the notion that female religious actively encouraged the sending of women to magdalen

asylums because the financial success of the laundry industry rested on a steady and cheap

source of labor. While not denying that female religious likely were infused with a charitable or

humanitarian spirit, there also is a case for the argument that the idea of the “problem" woman—

the unmarried mother or sexually vulnerable girl— was fueled by the needs of the laundry system,

rather than vice-versa. Perhaps it is no accident that the growth of a network of Catholic-run

institutions coincided with a significant growth in professions to religious life, just as alternative

models of assistance and care began to emerge at the same time that religious orders began to

face a crisis in professions.

Christina Mulcahy’s account of her life in the Galway magdalen asylum has been

echoed in radio and television narratives and reinforced by June Goulding's account of her work

as a midwife in the mother and baby home in Bessboro, outside of Cork city.64 Mulcahy dated a

63Raftery and O’Sullivan, Suffer the Little Children, p. 38. See also States of Fear, written and produced by Mary Raftery, Radio Telefis Eireann, RTE 1 Dublin.

^June Goulding, The Light in the Window (Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1998).

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British soldier in the 1940s and became pregnant. She gave birth in a mother and baby home.

where she remained with her child for ten months. During that time she nursed and cared for her

child and worked in the home in return for room and board. She also corresponded with the father

of the child but never received replies from him. Years later she discovered that he had, in fact.

wanted to marry her. but the nuns confiscated his letters. In all likelihood the soldier was

Protestant and. thus, not a suitable husband or father for Catholic women and children. Although

Mulcahy insisted that her child would not be placed for adoption, the child was taken from her

abruptly, with no advance warning: He was only ten months old when she [the mother superior of the mother and baby home] said to me one day as soon as you're finished in the nursery come to my office and you are going home today. And I was breast-feeding the baby at the time and I said can I go back and say good-bye to the baby. ‘What does he know about anything...go back and upset him. You’re not going back there’s a car waiting. And I said ‘No time to say good-bye?' No time to say good-bye.65

The nuns sent Mulcahy home but her father refused to take her back: “My father

came to the gate and two little brothers and little sister and they stopped and he said to me ‘What

do you think you want?’ I said I want to come home. ‘You’ll not come into this house. You’ll not

come into this house. You disgraced us. You’re not right in the head. You can’t be right in your

head to bring a child into this world and you deserve punishment."66 Mr. Mulcahy’s attitude was

not unusual and, like countless other women, Mulcahy ended up in a magdalen laundry.67 Initially

Mulcahy believed that she would be released in a matter of months and reunited with her infant

son: “ I thought maybe you do six months there and then be let out and that I would be allowed to

go and see my baby. And when I went, the first place they put me, they put me into the laundry,

65Sex in a Cold Climate

^ S ex in a Cold Climate

67ln the days following the airing of Sex in a Coia Ciimate, RTE Radio chat shows such as The Pat Kenny Show and Liveline, hosted by Marian Finucane, devoted significant portions of their broadcasts to women who telephoned the shows and shared similar stories; newspapers also carried first-hand accounts that coincided with Mulcahy’s experiences.

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so I used to keep saying when do you think I'll be going home or when will I be going out? And

one day one girl said to me. Once you come here you won’t be going out.”68 Mulcahy escaped

from the laundry and fled to Belfast, where she established herself as a nurse, married, and bore

several more children. Given her father's attitude, there is no telling how long Mulcahy would have

remained in the laundry had she not escaped. But the next time Mulcahy saw her son she was an

elderly woman who had kept his existence a secret for over fifty years. “Martina’s” story resembled Mulcahy’s in significant ways. Martina entered a

mother and baby home to give birth out of wedlock; after three years the mother superior

instructed her to bathe and dress the child in preparation for handing over to an adoptive family:

So the next morning I was given a pink outfit that her adopted parents had sent in to be put on her. I dressed her, and I was given my case of nearly three years, with the odd bits and pieces. I got into a Ford Prefect, there was a priest driving it, I sat in the front and a nun in the back with my daughter. And they dropped me at my grandparents, and that was the last I seen of my daughter.69

While Catholic priests denigrated unmarried mothers who gave their children up as somehow

unnatural and lacking in “normal” maternal feelings, the experiences of women like Mulcahy and

Martina highlight the fact that unmarried mothers did want to keep their children, were willing to

make enormous sacrifices to do so, and suffered enormously when their children were taken from

them; in some cases the pain and grief stayed with them throughout their lives.70 Their grief was

so intense that some women, including Christina Mulcahy, kept the secret of their children, and of

their confinement in the magdalen laundry, for their entire lives. Mulcahy, who died in 1997, only

told her family about her past shortly before taping Sex in a Cold Climate: “I’ve lost shame and

respect, and pride, and everything that went with it. I thought that any girl that has a baby out of

68 Sex in a Cold Climate

69"The Magdalen Laundry,” Radio 1.

70Women who called in to the Channel 4 helpline, or to radio chat shows in the days after the airing of Sex in a Cold Climate, expressed a common grief not only at having to give up their children, but at having kept the secret, sometimes for as long as 40 or 50 years, as Christina Mulcahy did.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 82 wedlock is a fallen person and they have no luck, they lose their respect, i didn’t tell my family. I

didn't tell anybody ‘til I told them six months ago. I’ve suffered badly through it all.’*71 These

accounts, although an insufficient basis from which to draw conclusions about the experiences of

all unmarried mothers, adds another layer to the foundation, laid by the stories of women who

committed infanticide. While official discourses presented a rigid, sterile, almost pathological

image of unmarried motherhood, the diverse strategies women adopted to deal with unexpected

pregnancies, the ways that women coped with fear, anger, shame, abandonment, and loss, reveal

the complexity of experiences of unmarried motherhood, familial affection and loyalty, romantic

love, and basic human frailty. Unmarried motherhood was not the black-and-white moral issue

defined in official discourse, nor were all or even a majority of unmarried mothers “bad” mothers.

Similarly, the way church, state, and society dealt with unmarried mothers reveals compassion in

some quarters, but more commonly a sense of moral superiority that bred contempt and facilitated

the abuses of the system that have come to light in recent years.

Bearing children out of wedlock was not the only “sin” for which women could be

institutionalized in a mid-twentieth-century Irish society obsessed with modesty, purity and

respectability; the merest hint of sexual indiscretion could be grounds for banishment to the

magdalen laundry. Incest was a particularly distasteful subject, and one that families seem to

have dealt with by ignoring it altogether or burying the victim away where she could be silenced.

Martha Cooney went to work for a male cousin as a domestic servant, and that cousin molested

her:

When I was fourteen I was sent to a cousin to help on the farm, and he took me to a farm fair and he had a lot to drink and on the way home he indecently assaulted me and I told a cousin what happened and the cousin reported the matter and they got rid of me very quickly. The biggest sin in Ireland, well apart from having baby in them days without being married, was to talk. You never let the neighbours know. And get rid of you, there’s no talk, there's no scandal, and they weren’t sure so that was the safest bet.72

71 Sex in a Cold Climate

72Sex in a Cold Climate

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Cooney’s story offers a rare insight into the extent to which church, state, and society were

unwilling to address the problem of incest even as they tried to prevent it by isolating vulnerable

women. Just as some mothers who assisted their daughters in doing away with illegitimate

children believed their crime was preferable to accepting an illegitimate child into the home, so

some families chose to send away the young, innocent female victims of sexual assault rather

than risk that the secret would be revealed and threaten their status or reputation in the

community.

Catholic writing articulated a particular fear of incest, which comprised part of the

larger problem of working-class male sexuality. Parish priests were particularly suspicious of the

relationships between young unmarried women and their fathers and brothers, especially when

there was no other female presence in the household; they seem to have assumed that men

could not be trusted to respect and protect their daughters’ and sisters' virtue. It was not unusual

for young girls to be sent industrial schools on the death of their mother, and this was based less

on the belief that male relatives could not care for children than on the notion that a man living on

his own with young girls simply was “not right.”73 “Patricia” was sent to a magdalen laundry at the

age of 16, at the request of the parish priest who felt that she was in “moral danger”, allegedly

because she was staying out late but, in reality, because her parents had died and she lived with

her unmarried brothers.74 The “moral danger” perceived by the priest was not Patricia’s immorality

but the church’s suspicion of her brother’s motivations, and the presumed potential for incest. The

experiences of women like Cooney and “Patricia" reinforce the extent to which women were held

responsible for the sexual transgressions of men. Both were regarded as problematic within their

communities, either because, as in the case of Cooney, she was victimized and thus “stained”, or

73lrish Times, 4 September 1993, Week-end section, 1.

74GirIs younger than 16 whose mothers had died could be sent to industrial schools rather than left at home with fathers and other male relatives. This perhaps accounts for the fact that the number of girls in industrial schools far exceeded the number of boys.

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as in “Patricia’s" case because her mere presence was a temptation to her brothers.75 These

attitudes were bolstered by legislation that gave local health authorities the power to confine

young women to industrial schools or extern institutions, including magdalen asylums, if their

fathers were convicted of incest under the 1935 Criminal Law Amendment Act.76 Given that men

convicted of incest could be imprisoned for up to five years, sending victimized daughters to

institutions was not merely or even primarily a protective measure. Victims of incest were tainted

and sexually experienced, in spite of their victimization, and thus a potentially bad influence on

younger sisters, “respectable" female relations, and friends.

Phyllis Valentine grew up in an industrial school in County Clare. At the age of

sixteen Valentine was sent to the Galway laundry allegedly as an employee. Soon after her arrival

in Galway Valentine realized that the nuns had not, in fact, placed her in employment but had

confined her to a magdalen asylum. Valentine asked repeatedly why she had been sent to the

laundry and finally was told the truth:

When I was young I was thought to be pretty, well some of the girls thought I was quite pretty, I had quite nice hair. And I did ask sister once why I was sent from the orphanage straight to the magdalen laundry. And this sister said to me. You’re as pretty as a picture. And I hadn't heard what she said first and I asked her to repeat it. And she repeated, You’re as pretty as a picture, she said. And she said. The nuns sent you here because they were afraid you’d fall away. Falling away meant you'd get pregnant and that would be another

75Fathers were also suspect, as evidenced in a story that was told in confidence to the author. “Mary” recalls that as a child she spent several months in an orphanage, along with her younger sisters, while her mother recovered in hospital from a serious illness. Mary’s father was quite willing and able to look after his daughters, and Mary spoke with enormous affection of her father’s love and care during that difficult time. A neighbor, realizing that a man was living on his own with three young girls, contacted the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and Mary and her siblings were visited by an ISPCC inspector. Although the inspector concluded that the girls’ father was a competent and loving parent, and that the girls were in no physical or moral danger, Mary’s parents decided that to avoid further “scandal" the girls should be sent to the orphanage until their mother recovered. In an interesting and revealing aside, when the ISPCC inspector visited the home he interviewed the girls in Irish, knowing that their father did not have Irish and thus was excluded entirely from the conversation that took place between his young children and the inspector. Mary Halligan, interview by author, personal interview, 25 November 1998.

76Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1935 (Act 6 of 1935).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 85 mouth for them to feed. So it was best for you to go to the magdalen laundry, stay there, which was dominated by nuns and priests, and they knew then that you wouldn't get into any trouble. So I was put to the magdalen laundry for that reason only.77

Valentine was regarded as a temptation to men, and the fact that she likely was illegitimate

rendered her morally weak in the eyes of the nuns, and thus unable to preserve her purity and

chastity; Valentine was sent to the laundry “for her own good,” and for the good of the society to

which her burgeoning sexuality posed a threat.

While male and female religious orders have remained silent as allegations of

abuse mount, individual nuns and former nuns have spoken out, and their views suggest that the

institutional behaviors of male and female cannot be dismissed simply as “the ethos” of the time,

and that some nuns were uneasy with the institutional regime even if they felt powerless to resist.

Sister Lucy Bruton, Reverend Mother of the magdalen laundry in Gloucester Street, Dublin,

reflected the ambivalence that some nuns felt about their work in the laundry;

What we tried to do, in some cases successfully, was to provide money and protection for women in need. Of course we failed, we made mistakes. One of my greatest regrets is that we continued with the status quo rather than pioneering change. If a woman came in today with her daughter I'd tell her to get lost. I’m not saying I'd refuse to take the girl but I’d indicate that you don’t hide people away.78

Patricia Burke-Brogan, former member of the Sisters of Mercy, expressed similar regret over an

institutional regime that abused women and compounded the suffering they had already

experienced in being rejected by family, friends, and community, and in having their children taken

from them. As a young postulant Burke-Brogan spent one week in the Galway laundry, an

experience that compelled her to leave the Mercy order and, later, to write a play about the

magdalen laundry experience.79 She points out the constraints under which female religious

worked, but she also admits that they were misguided:

77 Sex in a Cold Climate

76lrish Times On-Line, 25 September 1996.

79Patricia Burke-Brogan, Eclipsed (Galway; Salmon Publishing, 1994).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 86 The title [of her play. Eclipsed] has many layers of meaning. It is talking about the dark side of the lives of these Irishwomen. The nuns were also imprisoned, and did not see clearly either. As a society we are often eclipsed, not seeing our own spirituality, not seeing the suffering of other people, these are the issues I was looking at. I wrote the play to give these women a voice. I was one of the few who entered the laundry, who came out again and could speak up. Why did we do it? I don’t know. It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for a long time, and I’m still in dialogue.'80

The play focused on the experiences of four inmates, unmarried mothers confined to the laundry

by families unwilling to accept their “sin,” but the inner turmoil of Sister Virginia, a young postulant,

reveals a deeper conflict. Sister Virginia is caught between her true spirituality, on the one hand,

and the unquestioning obedience demanded from her profession, on the other. Sister Virginia

acknowledged the gap between “reality", and her image of what her life and work as a nun would

entail:

You’re supposed to be a Loving Father! Are you a God of Love? A God of Justice? I thought I’d be working for the poor! Am I being brainwashed? Will I become dehumanised too, if I stay here long enough? Locked in by Obedience? The Rule? Why are there changes in Our Holy Founder’s Book? Was early Christian History rewritten too? Woman’s witness submerged? Christ Crucified! Help them! For a woman bore you, carried you for nine months! Mother of Jesus, do something about Cathy, Mandy, Nellie-Nora and the others! When you arose from that tomb, women were your first witnesses! Your fist miracle was performed at your Mother’s request! Help us! Help me!81

Sister Virginia's doubts were Burke-Brogan's doubts, and perhaps the doubts of other young

women who entered religious life out of a genuine sense of calling only to be disillusioned or

defeated by a regime that was rigid and unforgiving and that lacked the compassion and humanity

that were central, or should have been, to their faith.

Burke-Brogan and Bruton cannot be the only women who contemplated religious

life in the 1930s-1960s only to experience doubts about the way Catholic institutions dealt with

vulnerable women and children. It would be easy to fault male and female religious, as victims of

institutional abuse have done in recent documentaries, for inflicting abuse, or for not speaking out

when they saw others inflicting abuse. But it is only in recent months that women like Bruton and

80lrish Times, 4 September 1993, week-end section, 1.

81 Burke-Brogan, Eclipsed, 31.

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Burke-Brogan have felt the freedom to articulate their doubts and misgivings about an institutional

system in which they had a personal stake during their lives as professed nuns. The apparently

blind acceptance of the institutional regime that prevailed in some magdalen laundries and

industrial schools derived in part from the vows that female religious made upon profession.

Patricia Burke Brogan suggests that within the Mercy order, which operated two magdalen

asylums and the majority of industrial schools for girls, the vow of obedience was as important as,

if not more important than, the other vows taken by fully-professed nuns. The vow meant that you

did not challenge superiors within the order, nor did you question behaviors engaged in by

colleagues:

What defined you as a good nun was that you obeyed the rules. There were the three vows - poverty, chastity and obedience. But if you were obedient, that covered everything. The only way I can explain it to myself now is that the order was a kind of institution in itself and we were all institutionalised within it. There was a God of fear at the top, and then you had a Reverend Mother, a figure of fear, and the top always sends the messages down. And that it was sort of a reign of terror instead of a reign of love. It was supposed to be about conscience and love, wasn't it? But here we are dealing with conscience as obedience.82

The institutional regime that Bruton and Burke-Brogan experienced reflected the rigid, institutional

nature of Irish society as a whole, and a more general intolerance of difference and non

conformity, of individuals who threatened the status quo. The state accepted the regime because

it was the most sensible, least costly mechanism for dealing with immorality, non-conformity, and

poverty; ordinary families embraced it as a means of disposing of daughters, sisters, and

illegitimate children who jeopardized their standing, status, and reputation within the community;

and the Catholic hierarchy derived obvious benefits in terms of moral control and authority,

political influence, and financial rewards. Woman who entered the religious orders that oversaw

the institutional regime in the middle decades of the century may have been driven by a genuine

calling to serve the needy, or they may have been motivated by more pragmatic, less selfless

concerns. It should also be remembered that likely their values, attitudes, and priorities reflected

82Raftery and O’Sullivan, Suffer the Little Children, 285.

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those of their families and communities. The network of carceral religious-run institutions must be

examined and understood within the context both of the ethos that allowed such a regime to take

root and flourish, and of the women and men who comprised the orders involved, their individual

motivations, agenda, strengths, and weaknesses.

Conclusion

Exploring the experiences of unmarried mothers, and the magdalen laundry

system in mid-twentieth century Ireland elucidates the tensions between and among the realities

and priorities of daily life, the demands of Irish Catholicism, and a political agenda that rested on a

veneer of piety and respectability and thus the tight control of “difference” or “deviance" which

typically was defined in moral or sexual terms). The absence, until the 1970s, of specific

proposals to provide for unmarried mothers and their children, meant that voluntary agencies,

predominantly under the auspices of female religious orders, were free to step into the void and

provide relief— typically in the form of institutionalization— that served political and religious ends

more than the needs of the individuals for whom the institutions existed in the first place.

The magdalen laundry was a complex institution that served a variety of social

and political needs. At its most basic level it did provide refuge for women, including prostitutes,

unmarried mothers, and poor women, whose families turned them out for actual, alleged, or

potential infractions of sexual moral codes. On the rare occasions when members of religious

orders speak out publicly about the recent allegations of physical and sexual abuse in religious

institutions, they point out that they offered assistance to “unwanted” women when no one else,

including the state, would. And yet these vulnerable women were rejected precisely because the

church constantly reinforced their immorality and sin, and emphasized the dangers they posed to

“respectable” society. If families believed that their daughters, sisters, and other female relatives

were sinners who deserved to be punished, it was in part because they took the Irish Catholic

Church’s teaching to heart in an uncritical and unquestioning way. But families faced other

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pressures, from within their own families and communities, that made the magdalen asylum an

attractive solution to the problem of an unwed and pregnant daughter or sister.

As a means of social control, the magdalen laundry, in tandem with industrial

schools, neutralized the potentially dangerous influence of two of the most socially disruptive

groups in Irish society: unmarried mothers and illegitimate children. These groups were

dangerous not only because of the immorality that they represented, but also because of the

moral weakness that was thought to be inherent in unmarried mothers and illegitimate children

that contributed to a host of social ills including prostitution and juvenile delinquency. Although the

stated aim of religious institutions was the care and rehabilitation of those who strayed from the

correct path, in fact that were no efforts, and apparently no intention, to help women and children

get back on their feet and return to society, and again this was based on the church’s belief that

these populations were fundamentally genetically flawed and needed to be cut off permanently

from respectable society. The magdalen laundry also reflected the church's suspicion of working-

class male sexuality, although the method of controlling the potentially harmful effects of male

sexual aggression was to remove vulnerable women.

The magdalen laundry was regarded by both church and state as a satisfactory

solution to the problem of unmarried motherhood not only for the social benefits it provided, but

also because it served the political aspirations of both church and state. By placing full

responsibility for and authority over unmarried mothers in the hands of the church, the state was

relieved of the need to legislate social or financial measures to combat the problems that

unmarried mothers and their children both experienced and presented. The Irish state historically

has lagged behind other Western states in the development of social welfare, partly because the

church had already developed a vast network of charities and agencies to fill the void, but also

because most lawmakers placed political and economic matters above social policy. The church

was only too happy to step fill the void created by state inaction because not only did the network

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of religious institutions give the church greater control over its flocks, but in a sense it provided the

church with a moral authority that was rooted in law as well as in faith. It seems clear that from the

time of the establishment of the Irish Free State the church was intent on securing a formal place

for itself in the new political structure, and co-opting social welfare policy fueled and facilitated the

realization of that aspiration

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 2

CRIMINAL, SINNER, OR VICTIM?

OFFICIAL RESPONSES TO INFANTICIDE

Introduction

In February 1929 Mary O ’Leary stood trial in the Limerick Circuit Court for the

infanticide of her newborn infant. Although O’Leary likely played an active role in the death of her

infant she was convicted of the lesser charge of concealment of birth, and the judge’s response to

O ’Leary’s crime illustrates the ambivalence that characterized both official responses to the crime

of infanticide and official concern for the lives of poor, illegitimate, and vulnerable children in mid

twentieth century Ireland: “These cases are becoming too common in the country, but I am not

going to inflict any punishment on the accused. I will take her own bail in £1 to keep the peace for

two years and pass a suspensory sentence of four months."1 Only the barest of details are

available in this case, so it is impossible fully to appreciate the judge’s decision essentially to free

O ’Leary while acknowledging the gravity of her crime. The incongruity of this outcome epitomized

the adjudication of infanticide in the twentieth-century. Until the introduction in 1949 of the

infanticide act, women suspected of murdering or concealing the birth of their infants were

charged with murder under the 1803 Offences Against the Person Act; judges had no choice but

to impose a death sentence in murder convictions.2 Yet court records reveal that only rarely were

1Limerick Weekly Echo, 18 February 1929, 4. Note that the names of defendants and family members have been changed.

2Until 1949 infanticide was not an official category of crime although it was used commonly prior to 1949 in legal and legislative parlance. Prior to 1949 the majority of defendants in Central Criminal Court trials were charged with murder but they could be convicted of murder, manslaughter, or concealment of birth. Murder implied a willful act. manslaughter suggested negligence rather than malice, and concealment of birth indicated insufficient evidence to link the defendant with the infant’s death. 91

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women convicted on a murder charge, and every death sentence that was imposed in the

twentieth century was commuted to life imprisonment.3 The Infanticide Act of 1949 introduced the

crime of infanticide, or the killing of an infant under twelve months old, as distinct from murder,

based on the belief that women in the final stages of pregnancy, labor, and childbirth were not “in

their right mind" and thus could not be held entirely responsible for their actions. And yet, the lack

of parliamentary debate around the infanticide issue suggests that lawmakers did not want

infanticide legislation to be interpreted as a disregard for infant life, but as a pragmatic if implicit

acknowledgment of current judicial practice.

This chapter examines legislative, religious, and judicial discourses of infanticide

to argue that the legislation and adjudication of infanticide represented a complex mix of

humanitarianism, compassion, and pragmatism on the one hand, and strict Catholic dogma and

moralism on the other. While legislative and religious initiatives to deal with unmarried mothers

and their children focused almost exclusively on the moral implications, the judicial treatment of

women accused of infanticide managed to strike a balance between the church's insistence on

the sanctity of human life and an acknowledgment of human fallibility and weakness. Examining

official responses to infanticide reveals the limits of the image, fostered by Catholic nationalist

discourse and perpetuated by historians, of Ireland as a strictly confessional state in which

Catholic-influenced legislative and social initiatives exacted conformity from an acquiescent

population to narrowly defined and strictly enforced codes of moral and sexual behavior.

Infanticide was one of the few crimes that lawmakers and jurists assumed was an exclusively

3Central Criminal Court records relating to infanticide consist of Trial Record Books that summarized charges, convictions, and sentences of all trials heard before the Court, as well as depositions and statements in individual cases. All of the records in which the death sentence was imposed, except one, are appended with a handwritten note in the Trial Record Book indicating the commutation of the death sentence to life imprisonment. In the exceptional case, newspaper coverage of the trial indicated that the sentence had been commuted. See Appendix for sentencing statistics.

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female one, and one in which female defendants interfaced with judicial institutions in ways that

differed from female and male defendants of other crimes. Infanticide legislation may have

reflected and reinforced assumptions about female sexuality and biological inferiority, but it also

implicitly acknowledged that human beings, no matter how hard they strove, simply were not

capable of the perfection demanded of them by Catholic teaching.

Judges and juries evaluated individual acts of infanticide not solely or even

primarily with reference to legal or moral interpretations, but with reference to the motivation of the

accused, the circumstances of her “fall", and her demeanor in the courtroom. The Catholic

moralism evident in official responses to infanticide surfaced not in the courtroom, or even in

legislation, but in the institutions to which the courts sentenced many of the women convicted of

infanticide. Court justices shared the hierarchy’s concern for the rehabilitation of convicted

women, and many of the sentences handed down to female defendants aimed less at punishing

crimes than at rehabilitating moral lapses. The leniency that characterized the judicial treatment of

infanticide in mid-twentieth-century Ireland was mirrored its treatment elsewhere in Western

Europe. The Irish case was distinguished in part by sentencing patterns that involved a complex

negotiation of Catholic notions of sin, shame, redemption, and forgiveness, and the court’s

humanitarian and compassionate impulses.

Infanticide is a particularly valuable lens through which to examine the moral and

ethical values that underpinned twentieth century Irish society, because it encompassed a broad

range of issues including morality, sexuality, sin and forgiveness, crime and punishment.

Experiences of and responses to infanticide also highlight the danger of viewing a society’s social

history only within the context of those values or official efforts to enforce them. But if judges and

juries attempted to balance legal and moral imperatives with compassion, they also reflected the

values, priorities, and assumptions of the middle-class society from which they hailed, and

infanticide trials often represented a clash between middle-class standards of respectability and

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working-class, predominantly rural, notions of acceptable or “normal" behavior. While some male

jurists reacted to alleged cases of infanticide with repugnance, even if they expressed sympathy

for accused women, among some of the accused and their families infanticide was regarded with,

if not indifference, then certainly a tolerance bom of pragmatism: poverty was a fact of life for

most of the population, and each new mouth to feed stretched a family’s already meager

resources. It is clear from both infanticide records and the way the state dealt with illegitimate or

neglected children that there were limits to the Catholic insistence on the sanctity of child life. The

way that the courts dealt with infanticide, as opposed to the enormous hostility shown to

unmarried mothers who did not “do away" with their children, suggests that respect for life was not

a hard and fast rule, but was limited in its appeal and its application. Child life was valued only

insofar as it conformed to the state's expectations of appropriate maternal and family life, so that

illegitimate children have historically been politically and socially marginalized, and infanticide

unofficially and implicitly tolerated in spite of public proclamations to the contrary.

The leniency of the judicial treatment of women accused of infanticide is

particularly striking when juxtaposed with official expressions of concern over alarmingly high

rates of infant mortality, especially among illegitimate infants. The Commission on Emigration and

other Population Problems, convened in 1948 to investigate the roots of Ireland's growing

demographic crisis, reported that until the turn of the century Ireland’s infant mortality rate

compared favorably with rates for Northern Ireland, England and Wales, and Scotland. But while

infant mortality continued to decline in Ireland into the twentieth century, it dropped more

dramatically elsewhere in the UK, so that by 1952 the Irish rate, at 41 per 1,000, was considerably

higher than Northern Ireland (39 per 1,000), England and Wales (28 per 1,000) and Scotland (35

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per 1,000).4 The report also noted that Irish rates of infant mortality reflected significant

differences in the deaths of legitimate and illegitimate children:

Important features of infant mortality in the Twenty-Six Counties are the wide difference between the death rates for legitimate children and for illegitimate children - the difference is wider than in other countries - and, in particular, the disparity between the death rates for illegitimate children here and in neighbouring countries. Deaths of illegitimate children are not always recorded as such, so that it would not be correct to attach too much importance to comparisons. Nevertheless, it is significant that, while the general infant mortality rate for the Twenty-Six Counties in 1950 was 46, the legitimate rate was 45 and the illegitimate rate 78. Full registration of deaths of illegitimate children would, no doubt, increase the disparity, a fact which is confirmed by a sample investigation made by us of the infant mortality rate in situations which provide specially for the care of illegitimate infants. While adequate information is lacking as to the extent of infanticide we believe that its incidence is not sufficiently significant to require comment from us. As to the contrast with the neighbouring counties, our illegitimate death rate in 1950 was 78 compared with 65 in the Six Counties, 53 in Scotland and 39 in England and Wales.5

While pre- and post-natal neglect likely were most responsible for high rates of infant mortality

among illegitimate infants, it is telling that the Commission dismissed infanticide as a significant

contributing factor. What the Commission failed to recognize was that the general tolerance of

infanticide reflected a more general under-valuing of child life that also likely contributed to high

rates of illegitimate infant mortality. Other government officials and social observers also

commented on the particular problem of infant mortality among illegitimate children, and called on

the government to take measures to stem the tide of deaths among illegitimate infants.6

Contemporary cases of infanticide typically are greeted with revulsion and

incredulity among an Irish population firm in the conviction that such things were and are rare and

extraordinary, and certainly not a common feature of mid-twentieth-century life, and smug in their

4 Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems, Reports 1948-54 (Dublin:Government Stationery Office, 1955), 111.

Commission on Emigration, Reports, 112.

6See Brian Crichton, “Infant Mortality in Dublin," Irish Journal of Medical Science, 4th series, no. 42 (July 1925): 302-305; H.M., “Illegitimate,” The Bell, vol. 2, no. 3 (June 1941): 78- 87; Department of Health, File M18/1; Department of Health Annual Reports (Dublin: Government Stationery Office, 1946-52) and; National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Annual Reports of the Dublin Branch (Dublin: NSPCC, 1930), 7-8.

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supposed compassion for and acceptance of unmarried motherhood in modem times. This

contrasts sharply with the frequent statements by judges in the 1920s-1950s that infanticide was

an unfortunate and unpalatable, but inevitable, fact of life. It is virtually impossible to quantify the

extent of infanticide in the twentieth century not only because it was not always detected, but also

because there are discrepancies between the number of cases heard in the Central Criminal

Court on an annual basis and official statistics published annually in Garda (police) reports. Many

cases were heard in circuit and district courts that might not have been included in garda

statistics. Additionally, national and local newspapers regularly reported the finding of infants'

bodies in bog holes, rivers, and gardens, many of which deaths were never accounted for, and the

mothers of those infants not identified.7 However, the actual statistical instance of infanticide is

less important than the concern, among lawmakers and church leaders, that it was all too

prevalent in the mid-twentieth century, and an all-too-easy solution to unwed and unwanted

pregnancies.

The difficulty of viewing contemporary infanticide cases as part of a historical

pattern stems from the absence of scholarly research on infanticide in nineteenth- or twentieth-

century Ireland; feminist and social historians have shown little interest in infanticide or other

aspects of motherhood and childhood. A number of studies of infanticide elsewhere in Europe

indicate that Irish experiences mirrors European trends, but they also elucidate significant

differences, help to elucidate the similarities and differences in the Irish context. James Donovan

and Deborah Symonds treat infanticide in France and Scotland respectively, and both suggest

that the vast majority of infanticide perpetrators were young unmarried women whose employment

Statistical information is based on the infanticide cases heard in the Central Criminal Court, a survey of newspaper reports of infanticide cases, and statistics presented in annual reports of the Garda commissioner. The Central Criminal Court files housed at the National Archives contain files on 209 cases of murder, manslaughter, infanticide and concealment of birth, involving 234 defendants. See appendices for statistical data on defendants, charges, convictions, and sentences.

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circumstances made them particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation.8 French and Scottish

judges and juries were sympathetic to women charged with infanticide, both because they

assumed that childbirth diminished women’s mental capacities, and because they viewed

infanticide perpetrators as the innocent victims of male seduction. Symonds further argues that

the accused woman's status in the community influenced the outcome of infanticide trials; women

whom the community supported were more likely to be acquitted, while “outsiders” or women with

few advocates typically were treated harshly. One significant difference between Scottish and Irish

infanticide was the frequency with which it occurred. Symonds estimates that the number of cases

investigated in Scotland in the period 1661 to 1821 was 347; the Central Criminal Court in Ireland

heard over 200 cases from 1925 to 1960. The instance of infanticide seems to have been

unusually high in mid-twentieth century Ireland, a somewhat surprising conclusion if one assumes

that attitudes and social conditions in Western societies improved steadily in the twentieth century

with a parallel reduction in the stigmatization of unmarried motherhood and illegitimacy.

Donovan’s research indicates that in some respects, particularly the “punishment”

meted out to convicted women, the Irish experience of infanticide differed in significant ways from

its European counterparts. According to Donovan French juries were far more likely to acquit

women charged with infanticide than women charged with other crimes, and by the first decade of

the twentieth century the acquittal rate hovered at approximately 60 percent.9 Given that an

infanticide conviction carried a mandatory prison sentence, Donovan posits that the low conviction

rate reflected the jury’s reluctance to send women to prison for the crime. The acquittal rate in

8James M. Donovan, “Infanticide and the Juries in France, 1825-1913," Journal of Family History, vol., 16, no. 2: 157-176; Deborah A. Symonds, “Reconstructing Rural Infanticide in Eighteenth Century Scotland,” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 10, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 63-84. See also Jeffrey S. Richter, “Infanticide, Child Abandonment, and Abortion in Imperial Germany,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 28, no. 4 (Summer 1998): 511-551.

9Donovan, “Infanticide and the Juries in France,” 162.

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Ireland was nothing like that in France; of the 236 cases heard before the Central Criminal Court

from 1925 to 1960, only 16 percent of defendants were acquitted while 77 percent were convicted

on the lesser charges of manslaughter or concealment of birth. While France's high acquittal rate

meant that the majority of defendants walked free, the tendency of Irish juries to convict on lesser

charges afforded judges the discretion to sentence convicted women to magdalen asylums rather

than prison: of the 198 convictions, 7 percent were sentenced to death, although all of those

sentences were commuted to life in prison, 23 percent to penal servitude or hard labor, and 40

percent to periods of confinement in magdalen asylums.

Peter Hoffer and Lionel Rose examine various aspects of infanticide in the early

modern and modern period. Hoffer attempts to compare the instance of infanticide and the

methods to deal with it in Puritan New England and seventeenth and eighteenth-century England.

The stridency of judicial treatment of infanticide in early modem England coincided with official

efforts to eradicate all forms of “immoral" or licentious behavior including illicit sex, gambling, and

drinking. The poor law of the period offered little assistance to unmarried mothers to support their

children, which may have compelled some of them to kill their children out of sheer desperation.10

The attitudes that guided the treatment of infanticide in early modem England were transplanted

to colonial New England, where an extreme puritan fear of the deficits of human nature resulted in

an even stronger intolerance of infanticide. In the early decades of the nineteenth century,

according to Lionel Rose, infanticide was regarded with an indifference that stemmed from high

infant mortality and an almost fatalistic attitude toward life and death.11 By the late nineteenth

century, Victorian reformers had “discovered" childhood, which led to a greater concern generally

10Peter C. Hoffer and N.E.H. Hull, Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England 1558-1803 (New York and London: New York University Press, 1981), 13.

11 Lionel Rose, The Massacre of the Innocents, Infanticide in Britain 1800-1939 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 22-34.

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with the health and well-being of children, and with the needless death of innocent infants. But this

discovery was accompanied by a recognition of the plight of unmarried mothers, and particular the

image of the “seduced” woman having to bear the shame and scandal of unmarried motherhood

on her own. Rose does not deal in depth with the judicial treatment of infanticide, but he does

indicate that the proliferation of the popular press resulted in increased coverage of infanticide

trials and the development of a popular image of unmarried mothers as the victims of a harsh and

punitive poor law as well as of unscrupulous men. What emerges in the Irish treatment of

infanticide is less the victim of seduction and predatory men than of a female victim of her own

weakness and passion. The magdalen asylum was intended to strengthen the weaknesses and

curb the passions of women who had caved to the temptations of the flesh, but could still, in the

eyes of the court anyway, be salvaged.

Infanticide Legislation

Prior to the 1949 infanticide bill the murder of infants was tried under the 1803

British Offences Against the Person Act. The 1803 act reflected a shift in official attitudes toward

infanticide, as it placed the onus on the state to prove the guilt of the accused where previous

legislation compelled accused women to prove their innocence. Aside from scant references to

infanticide in Irish folklore, no scholarship exists on the nature, extent, or adjudication of

infanticide in eighteenth, nineteenth or twentieth-century Ireland.12 Until 1922 infanticide was tried

under the British criminal justice system, although popular and jury responses likely differed based

12A survey of the collection of the Department of Folklore at University College Dublin (formerly the Irish Folklore Commission, established in 1935 to document Ireland’s rich folk tradition), reveals numerous stories, handed down through the ages, of illegitimacy and infanticide. Most of the stories deal with illegitimate children who were killed before being baptized. One story, however, tells of the death of a priest who refused to help an unmarried mother; the priest's death was attributed to God's displeasure at his un-Christian behavior. See UCD Folklore Department, Manuscript Volume 389, 340-344. Also see Anne O'Connor, Child Murderess and Dead Child Traditions: A Comparative Study (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1991).

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on the Catholic ethos that prevailed in Ireland. Lionel Rose suggests that for most of the

nineteenth century infanticide was regarded officially with a certain level of complacency: infant

mortality was high and dead babies easily replaced.13 At the same time, changes in the poor law

placed sole responsibility for the maintenance of illegitimate children on mothers, compounding

their financial and psychological stress and, perhaps, their inclination towards infanticide. While it

is impossible to assess the relevance of Rose's study in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland

given the dearth of research, it is likely that the leniency evident in the twentieth-century

prosecution of infanticide began in the nineteenth century. Certainly a slight softening of attitudes

is evident in the 1803 Offences Against the Person Act, even if the 1803 Act stipulated an

obligatory death penalty in murder convictions.

By the early twentieth century, death sentences no longer were enforced even if

statute obliged judges; all death sentences passed on women convicted of infanticide after 1925

were commuted to life imprisonment. Thus the introduction of the infanticide bill in 1949 could be

seen as an effort on the part of lawmakers to bring statute into line with standard judicial practice.

The debate on the infanticide bill epitomized lawmakers' pragmatic acceptance of the fact that

actual individual behavior rarely conformed to their own idealized expectations or to the moral and

ethical values that underpinned legislation and social policy. Many deputies welcomed the bill

because of its “humanitarian" and enlightened approach to the crime of infanticide. Minister for

Justice MacEoin articulated the majority view in his presentation of the bill: “Now, it will, I think, be

agreed on all sides that it is desirable that the law should be altered so as to eliminate, in

appropriate cases, the pronouncement of the death sentence in these cases in which everybody

knows that the sentence will not be carried out.”14 At the same time, Minister MacEoin warned his

13Rose, Massacre of the Innocents.

u D6il Debates, vol. 115 (28 April 1949), 265.

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colleagues not to give the impression that they condoned the crime: “But, in framing our legislative

proposals to deal with the situation, we must, I submit, be careful to avoid any suggestion that the

Legislature of this country has become less conscious of, or less concerned about, the sanctity of

human life."15 The challenge of implementing an infanticide bill that embraced modern criminal

justice principles while preserving Ireland’s self-perceived distinct moral fabric reflected the more

general tension between their own image of Ireland as rural, simple, and self-sufficient, and the

economic and social conditions in which the majority of people lived that made it almost

impossible to achieve the ideal.

Not all lawmakers agreed with the “leniency" of the proposed bill, arguing that the

state had a responsibility to uphold at all costs Catholic social and moral principles. Some

prominent politicians, including Eamon de Valera, insisted that objective codes of right and wrong

not only existed, but could and should underpin the legislative process and judicial proceedings.

De Valera argued that reducing the punishment for infanticide offered an inducement to unmarried

women to engage in illicit sex and then commit infanticide to hide their moral lapses. He further

argued that the bill conflicted with the state's fundamental respect for the sanctity of human life,

and that it directly conflicted with God’s law, in which the state had no right to interfere. In this view

the Catholic state’s responsibility to protect its citizens’ spiritual well-being was as important as, if

not more important than, efforts to safeguard their material existence.16 While the majority of

lawmakers agreed in theory in the links between Catholic social teaching and legislative and

social policy, the debate over some aspects of the infanticide bill suggest that disagreement

existed about the lengths to which a state realistically could or should go in legislating moral and

ethical behavior. The infanticide bill in its final form represented a blending of the theological and

15ibid.

16D<5// Debates, vol. 115 (28 April 1949), 279-280.

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theoretical respect for life and allowances for human fallibility and imperfection. But it also left

wide discretion to the courts to decide how to implement the law in individual cases.

The infanticide debate also evoked the tension that lawmakers inevitably felt

between preserving what they perceived as distinctly or inherently Irish values and traditions, and

foreign, “modem” vaiues. Lawmakers expressed a particular unease with what they perceived to

be a decidedly liberal or English bias in the bill, which was understandable given that the language

of the two bills was virtually identical.17 Although framed in the language of conflicting moral

values, these objections were based on little more than the fact that the bill was modeled after,

even inspired by, its English counterpart: “I would not be too happy blindly to subscribe to anything

resembling from the traditions of English liberal thought on this matter...this word ‘infanticide’

savours a bit too much to my mind of English liberal thought"18 Even Justice Minister MacEoin,

the bill’s author, felt compelled to defend the bill against the perceived intrusion into Irish social

policy of English liberalism: “I am not bringing it in because the British have brought in similar

legislation, and I do not bring it in in the spirit of liberalism that some may attach to it; I bring it in in

a spirit of humanity and charity to people who are among the poorest of our community."19 The

Irish infanticide bill resembled its English counterpart in most aspects, particularly in the creation

of a new category of crime, but under British law all women accused of killing their infants

automatically were charged with infanticide while the Irish law left it to the discretion of the district

or circuit court judges to reduce a murder charge to infanticide. This difference reflected the

desire on the part of lawmakers to project an image of humanitarianism while theoretically

17Public General Acts of 1922, Public General Acts of 1937-38 (British Infanticide Act); Infanticide Act, 1949 (Act 16 of 1949). Republic of Ireland. Irish Statute Book: Acts of the Oireachtas 1922-1997 (Oxfordshire, UK: Jutastat UK, 1999), CD-Rom.

18D«§//Debates, vol. 115 (28 April 1949), 276-278.

19Da// Debates, vol. 115 (28 April 1949), 283.

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maintaining the fundamental Catholic respect for infant life and the need to punish the criminals

and sinners who perpetrated the crime.

The infanticide bill passed the Dai I with a minimum of fanfare. Official discussions

encompassed a mere nine pages of text in the published record, compared with the almost fifty

pages comprising parliamentary debate on the adoption bill, which also was accompanied by a

significant level of intervention and comment by the Catholic hierarchy. Similarly, the infanticide bill

elicited only passing notice in the pages of the Catholic or mainstream press. The fact that the

proposed legislation prompted no input from either the Catholic Standard or the Irish Catholic

suggests that the hierarchy assented to, or at least did not oppose, either the principle or form of

the proposed legislation. There appears to have been little of the direct communication and

negotiation between church and state that occurred in debates around other “moral" issues such

as adoption, affiliations orders, and the mother and child health scheme. It would seem that

church leaders and lawmakers were more concerned with the souls of living children than with the

fate of illegitimate newborns who might die at the hands of their own mothers.

Catholic Responses to Infanticide

Catholic moralist rhetoric consistently emphasized the dangers to Irish social

stability, and to the moral fiber of Irish people, of inappropriate expressions of sexuality, and

especially of female sexuality. In focusing on female sexuality the church was not simply

projecting the Victorian sexual double standard or constructions of femininity and masculinity that

demanded chastity of women but excused male sexual transgressions. Catholic moral teaching

did not condone or excuse male sexual indiscretions, and Catholic writers expressed a particular

suspicion of working-class male sexuality. In practical terms, however, it was easier to monitor

and regulate the sexual and reproductive activities of women, through indirect means such as

sermons, pamphlets, and other religious literature extolling the virtues of chastity and emphasizing

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the sin of lust, or directly through the confinement of unmarried mothers and other problem or

“dangerous" women in institutions overseen by female religious. Although religious discourse

rarely discussed infanticide explicitly, implicitly it was seen as an inevitable side-effect of female

sexual immorality.

The Catholic hierarchy has been consistent, sustained, and unwavering in its

condemnation of abortion while they have virtually ignored the problem of infanticide and the roots

of the problem - abject poverty and the social stigmatization of unwed motherhood. Abortion and

infanticide may have represented the willful and pre-meditated destruction of human life, but

abortion was far more worrying because it enabled women to control their sexual and reproductive

activities privately and secretly, entirely outside of the church’s surveilling and carceral efforts. The

legal and constitutional bans on abortion in Ireland historically have compounded this problem

given that scores of women have, since the 1950s, availed themselves of legal abortion facilities

in England. Infanticide, on the other hand, did not always go undetected, and many of the women

who committed the crime were delivered by the courts into the church’s hands for punishment and

rehabilitation. Sermons and other Catholic writings often portrayed women accused of infanticide

as modern-day Mary Magdalens, as sinner-saints who could “...return, like the Prodigal, to the feet

of the Father..." if they acknowledged their sin, sought redemption, and returned to the “correct

path" of virtue and purity.20 Only the church’s “supernatural" moralizing influence could repair the

rents in their moral fabric and cleanse their souls sufficiently that they could aspire to eternal life in

Heaven. The ambiguity evident in infanticide legislation, combined with the tendency of judges to

commit female offenders to magdalen asylums rather than prison, facilitated the church’s almost

Z0Catholic Standard, 17 January 1931, 2. This image of the fallen woman as sinner-saint appeared frequently in the Catholic Standard, especially in annual fund-raising sermons on behalf of convents and magdalen asylums.

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complete and unchallenged authority over a select group of troublesome women in ways that

otherwise would have been beyond its reach.

Religious leaders’ reactions to infanticide represented a mixture of theology and

pragmatism that occasionally conflicted with official Catholic dogma. The theological response is

evident in the recognition that illegitimate children were at particular risk of being murdered by

their mothers and in the conviction, articulated by Reverend Devane, that courts tended to

discount the seriousness of the death of illegitimate children. Devane insisted that Catholic

theology did not distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate children in asserting the

fundamental right to life:

While making all due allowances and extending pity to the unmarried mother at such a time, we must not be sentimentalized into forgetting or whittling down the Law of God, and we cannot help marvelling at the treatment frequently allotted to those cases in our Courts. It would seem as if the Law did not value the life of the illegitimate child, principally because there is no one to make a case or stand up for it: and certainly it is less valued than the life of the ordinary child. This is not law or morality. People must take the consequences of their acts.21

But even the hierarchy expressed a certain pragmatism in its response to infanticide that

contrasted sharply with the strong condemnation heaped upon unmarried mothers and their

children. Infanticide might have violated a basic church teaching and was thus morally abhorrent,

but it relieved church and state of what otherwise would have been a serious burden on material

and spiritual resources. On the other hand, illegitimate children posed a constant threat to

twentieth-century social harmony and stability, and lawmakers and the hierarchy devised

numerous schemes to board out, institutionalize, and even “export" them for adoption in America

in an effort to contain the threat.

Although rarely vocalized explicitly, the problem of infanticide was woven into

discussions about the disintegration of moral standards and a decline in traditional concepts of

21 Rev. Richard Devane, “The Dance Hall,” Irish Ecclesiastical Record, vol. xxxvii (January-June 1931): 80.

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community and mutual responsibility. Infanticide was seen as the inevitable result when Irish

Catholics rejected traditional, “acceptable" forms of amusement and interactions in favor of

“foreign” amusements such as the dance hall and the cinema where women and men mingled in

“impure" environments that threatened their virtue. Father Aloysius articulated this view in a fund-

raising sermon on behalf of the Good Shepard magdalen asylum: “...in many cases their sad lot

might be traced to the want of a Christian home, to a cruel liberty to do as they would and go

where they liked. They fell prey to the diabolical heartlessness of some foul wretch and too late

they learnt how little they were prepared to battle with the foes of their virtue and their

happiness.’’22 Reverend Devane, in an article on the evils of dance halls, explicitly linked

infanticide and illegitimacy with the dance hall: “It is clear that one of the immediate and chief

causes of the immorality of recent times, involving particularly the unmarried mother, is the

commercialized dance-halls.J think it well to direct attention to the appalling crime of the murder

of the illegitimate by its own unnatural mother, about which there may be a danger of a maudlin

sentimentality growing."23 Religious discourse implicitly assumed that “true" Irish women were

inherently chaste and virtuous but were susceptible to outside forces, especially those emanating

from Britain, that threatened their virtue and that undermined the church’s moral authority.

The hierarchy’s fears of the perceived threat from foreign influences to Ireland’s

“traditional" virtue and piety cannot be underestimated. In religious and nationalist rhetoric Ireland

was a traditional, pious and frugal society, insulated and safe from the dangers and pressures of

the “outside" world. Infanticide, unmarried motherhood, and illegitimacy were not intrinsically Irish

phenomena but, rather, could be traced directly to the influence of “pagan” (in other words.

22Catholic Standard, 24 September 1932, 2.

23Devane, “The Dance Hall,” 178.

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English) ideas about sexuality, marriage, and family life.24 In this vein, religious leaders portrayed

the dance hall as the single biggest threat to twentieth-century Irish culture: dance halls replaced

“traditional” Irish music and dance with more modem and pagan forms but, more importantly,

dance halls undermined customary practices of rural socializing that monitored and regulated

interactions between women and men. The free mingling, in an unchaperoned and impure

atmosphere, of young unmarried men and women was, according to Devane, bound to give rise

to illicit sexual encounters that inevitably led to shame, scandal and, ultimately, infanticide. If

Devane is to believed, the dance hall was singularly responsible for the majority of infanticide

cases in Ireland. Those women who did not commit infanticide, according to Devane, “exported"

their shame to England and brought still greater shame on Ireland. The Catholic Standard and

Irish Catholic newspapers emphasized the alleged links between immorality and the dance halls

to lobby the government for tighter controls on dance halls, resulting in the 1936 Public Dance Hall

Act.25 Even after the passage of the Act the church continued to insist, through the pages of the

Catholic press, that dance halls posed a constant danger to Irish girls' maidenhood. In reality, a

survey of central criminal court cases suggests that only a fraction of the sexual encounters that

resulted in infanticide occurred at dance halls.26 But the rise in popularity of dance halls reflected

the church's worst fears about female sexuality, a decline in respect for “traditional" Irish values

24The term “pagan” was used frequently in religious and legislative rhetoric, and typically was applied to any idea or trend that was seen as distinctly “British," and thus inherently contrary to Irish values.

25The 1935 Public Dance Halls Act required individuals wishing to hold a dance for commercial purposes to apply to the district court justice for a license. Upon granting of a license the person responsible for the dance hall had to abide by a series of regulations as to the serving of alcohol, start and end times, and car parking facilities. See Public Dance Halls Act (Act 2 of 1935), Irish Statute Book, CD-Rom.

26ln only 4 of the 209 cases heard before the Central Criminal Court did the defendant indicate that she had met her sexual partner at a dance hall, or that the sexual encounter that led to pregnancy occurred at or on the way home from a dance hall.

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and customs, and the invasion into Irish social and cultural life of foreign values that undermined

the church's moral authority.

Perhaps it is telling of the overall attitude toward infanticide that the Catholic

hierarchy lobbied far more vocally and vehemently for dance halls legislation than for or against

the infanticide bill. At the same time, John Charles McQuaid did not miss an opportunity to place

his views before the Dail. In a strongly-worded statement McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin, rejected

the premise of the infanticide bill, particularly the idea that infanticide could be distinguished from

murder; in fact, McQuaid regarded infanticide as “...an aggravated form of murder. It adds to the

crime of murder a violation of the virtue of pietas."27 McQuaid also expressed regret that the

courts typically commuted the death penalty and that the proposed legislation eliminated it

altogether, believing that the imposition of the penalty, even if not carried out, conveyed the gravity

of the crime of child-murder. But another unattributed brief on the infanticide bill included in the

same diocesan archive file articulates an indifferent response to the proposed legislation; “...the

writer is of opinion that the passage into law of the Infanticide Bill, 1949, would not be likely to

result in an increase either in sexual immorality or of infant killing, provided that juries

conscientiously perform their duties and judges impose sentences consistent with justice and

humanity."28 These two views, incompatible on the surface, suggest that the hierarchy was less

concerned with eradicating the crime of infanticide than with ensuring that women convicted of the

crime be subject to penalties sufficient enough to punish them for their own sins and crimes, and

to deter other women from committing similar crimes. These two briefs appear to be the extent of

the hierarchy's involvement in official infanticide discussions.

27"John Charles McQuaid Papers, government box 3, Dublin Diocesan Archives.

28Untitled, unattributed handwritten memorandum, John Charles McQuaid Papers, government box 3, Dublin Diocesan Archives.

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Infanticide in the Judicial Arena

The 1949 infanticide bill, unlike other moral issues such as abortion,

contraception, adoption, and divorce, owed less to the influence of the Catholic Church than to a

combination of English criminal justice principles, current judicial practice, and basic pragmatism.

Throughout the twentieth century the church maintained its pressure on lawmakers to enact

constitutional and legal prohibitions on abortion and contraception, but no such pressure was

exerted on the question of infanticide. Thus to fully appreciate official responses to infanticide one

must look to the courts, and the way judges’ and juries’ own perceptions of the crime intersected

with legislation and Catholic moral teaching. The most compelling insight into the adjudication of

infanticide emerges from newspaper accounts of central criminal court trials and court of criminal

appeal records, which include accused and witness testimonies, judges’ instructions to juries, and

insight into judges' sentencing decisions. The majority of central criminal court records consist of

written depositions, recorded by gardai in the course of their investigations; full transcripts are

available only when a defendant appealed her/his conviction or sentence. A survey of the cases

heard before the central criminal court, and the sentences handed down by various judges,

suggests that there was no “typical" infanticide case, and no legal or judicial precedent that guided

judges in presiding over individual cases. Judges seem to have gone to great lengths to ensure

that the sentences not only “fit the crime" but also took into account of the defendant's

circumstances, behavior, and backgrounds.

A variety of factors influenced juries’ determinations of guilt and innocence and

judges sentencing practices. For the most part judges and juries assumed that the “typical”

defendant was a young unmarried woman who, before her “fall," was sexually ignorant and

innocent. Judges expected women appearing before the courts to display modesty, guilt, shame,

and remorse, and often treated harshly those who did not conform to these expectations. Judges

also penalized male defendants, and female defendants who were not the mothers of the dead

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infants, although exceptions to general rule reflected how juries conceived of the ties of affection,

loyalty, and mutual responsibility that presumably bound families and communities together.

Clearly defendants’ character and background affected their treatment at the hands of judges and

juries, and they were regarded with more sympathy and leniency if they conformed to the

standards of respectability and decency deemed appropriate by the all male, largely middle-class

court system.29

The process by which juries arrived at verdicts is inaccessible to the historian, so

it is only possible to ascribe meaning to verdicts within the context of the original charge and the

accused's account of the crime. Except in cases of a murder conviction that required the death

penalty, judges exercised wide discretion in passing sentence, and often attempted to strike a

balance between and among law and order, morality, and ethics, and the set of circumstances

that compelled individual women to take their infants’ lives. On the one hand, judges frequently

voiced the opinion that infant life was precious and not to be disregarded whatever the

defendant’s circumstances. On the other hand they acknowledged that many women were victims

of thoughtless and uncaring men and of family, community, and social environments that did not

tolerate or forgive their moral lapses. In general, judges sentenced convicted women based on

their appreciation of the moral rather than criminal motivations that often underpinned the crime of

infanticide. When the accused was an unmarried mother who had “fallen" only once, judges and

juries interpreted her actions as a moral lapse that could be forgiven and redeemed if she showed

remorse and a willingness to repent. A typical sentence for this category of defendant was

confinement in a magdalen asylum, a sentence that aimed less at punishing the accused's crime

29lt was not unusual forjudges, in passing sentence, to suggest that they would “go easy" on the defendant either because prior to her fall her behavior had been exemplary, or because she came from a “respectable" family that was highly regarded in the community. For example, Margaret Gilbert pled guilty to manslaughter and, while the judge was inclined to set her free given her previous “good character," he was not convinced that her family could safeguard her future moral conduct. See Longford News, 8 June 1940, 1.

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than in atoning for her sins and repairing the rents in her moral fabric. Married women who

murdered newborn infants in an effort to hide extra-marital sexual affairs, and women who did not

fit the court’s image of the “typical” defendant, were exceptions to this general sentencing rule.30

Of the 198 people convicted of infanticide or concealment of birth, 79 were committed to

magdalen asylums in lieu of a prison sentence, while another 37 were released on their own

recognizance with a fine and/or an order to keep the peace, or were released with no penalty at

all. Although in retrospect the magdalen asylum regime was at times as harsh and punitive as

any prison environment, judges clearly believed that they were, in fact, acting out of sympathy and

compassion, and in the best interests of the accused, when they sentenced women to terms of

confinement in magdalen asylums rather than prison.

The circuit court case of Nora Donovan highlights the tension evident in the

courtroom between strict Catholic moralism and humanitarianism. Donovan was charged with

manslaughter in the death of her newborn infant and convicted of concealment of birth. Donovan's

case was unusual in that her brothers stood by her during the trial and were willing to take

responsibility for her. The judge seemed inclined to release Donovan into her family’s custody until

he learned that the brothers were unmarried, at which point he imposed a convent sentence: “This

girl will have to go into a convent or go to jail, one or the other. I won’t have this slaughtering of

infants going on in this country. There must be an end to it."31 Donovan was sentenced to twelve

months in a magdalen asylum, a comparatively lenient sentence when one considers that the

30ln 1934 Rita and Eliza Egan were convicted of murder in the death of Eliza's child in spite of the fact that the infant's body was never found and there was no evidence that a crime had been committed. Both women claimed that the child died on the day Eliza left the county home after giving birth, and that they buried it in a field. Rita was particularly bold and uncooperative; at one point gardai asked her how she dug the hole and she replied “Well, it wasn't with my face, was it?" It is likely that these women were convicted based on circumstantial evidence, but also on their attitude and behavior in the course of the investigation and in court. See Central Criminal Court, File 1D 56 24.

31Cork Examiner, 5 June 1929, 12.

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majority of sentences lasted two to three years. Donovan was a sympathetic defendant whose

plight stemmed more from ignorance than lust or malice, and her brothers’ support was a factor in

her favor. But Donovan’s brothers were unmarried, and even sympathetic judges could not

countenance sending a young unmarried woman, whose sexual vulnerability was patently

obvious, to live unchaperoned in a house full of unmarried men, even if those men were her

brothers.

Molly Lacey's case virtually mirrored Donovan’s. Lacey pleaded guilty to

concealing the birth of her child and her solicitor, in his request for leniency, stressed her remorse

and her willingness to accept the consequences of her actions. He also argued that Lacey was a

respectable young woman whose action reflected a temporary moral lapse rather than malicious

criminal behavior

Mr. Budd [appearing for the defense) then told his Lordship a pitiable tale of a girl's misfortune. Her people, he said, lived at Kilmeaden, he*- mother and several brothers and sisters living together. They were people of the labouring class, but were a decent, hard working family against whom there was nothing to be said in the neighbourhood. This girl, too, was a hard working girl, and was in employment up to the time this misfortune befell her. He asked His Lordship, under the circumstances, to have mercy on her, to think of the state of mind and the anguish she must have suffered in her great misfortune.32

Mr. Budd’s statement reflects the assumptions about class and respectability that underscored

official attitudes toward infanticide. Although Lacey and her family were poor they were highly

regarded in their community, worked hard, and strove to maintain standards of decency and

respectability. Lacey’s actions were interpreted not as a selfish desire to protect herself from the

scorn of friends and neighbors but an effort to protect her family’s reputation and material well

being. Lacey received a suspended prison sentence on the condition that her family accepted

responsibility for her:

Addressing her, his Lordship said he was inclined to take a merciful view of the case. The girl had suffered a lot already, and must now realise the position in which she found herself. Apparently she had a good character up to the present. He should pay attention, as Mr.

32Waterford Standard, 31 January 1931, 5.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 113 Budd requested, to what she suffered on that night, and he was not now going to send her to prison. But. lest she might be inclined to do anything wrong, he would pass a suspensory sentence of six months’ imprisonment with hard labour but if she was a good girl she would not be called upon to serve that sentence, and if she misbehaved herself she would be called upon to serve it. He left her to her mother now to do the best possible she could for her.33

It is noteworthy that the judge in this case allowed Lacey to return to her family while the judge in

Donovan’s case did not. The judge likely was influenced in both cases not only by the defendants,

the circumstances of their particular cases, and their potential for rehabilitation, but also by their

family circumstances and their continued sexual vulnerability. While Lacey’s family was seen as a

protection against a second “fall,” prevailing suspicion of working-class male sexuality meant that

the judge likely would have regarded Donovan’s unmarried brothers less as a source of protection

than a possible source of sexual exploitation or temptation.

Like Lacey, Maureen Mullen was given a suspended prison sentence after

pleading guilty to concealing the birth of her illegitimate child. Mullen’s defense stressed her

previous good character and the fact that she came from a respectable family as reasons for

leniency and sympathy:

His Honor said that he was very much affected by what Counsel had said on behalf of the defendant. He also appreciated that she had suffered a lot and from what Counsel had stated and what also appeared on the deposition, she was a girl of good character otherwise, and he thought she probably would behave well in the future. He would impose a suspensory sentence of six months’ imprisonment, which defendant would not have to serve unless she committed an offence in the future.34

Although Mullen enjoyed the support of her family, the judge also may have been moved by the

defense's description of her ordeal:

In the pain and anguish which are associated with the giving of birth to a child, she undoubtedly did not observe what the law required of her to observe, and undoubtedly the birth of the child was concealed on that occasion, but your Lordship will see from the depositions that there is no sinister suggestion in regard to the deposition of this child, that anything that was connected with her was a matter of mere incompetence and inattention

33ibid.

34Tipperary Star, 24 June 1939, 5.

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This was the classic defense in infanticide cases: the temporary “insanity’’ thought to attach to

labor and childbirth were compounded among unmarried defendants by the fact that often they

gave birth in secret, with no medical assistance, to a child that would be a source of shame and

embarrassment rather than joy and pride. In allowing Mullen to go home to her family the judge

acknowledged that Mullen’s actions represented a sin of omission— failure to report the birth and

death of her child— than one of commission. The physical and mental suffering described by her

defense, coupled with the embarrassment of the court trial, were punishment enough, and

presumably a sufficient corrective against future lapses.

Like lawmakers responsible for legislating infanticide, judges, juries, and lawyers

assumed that infanticide was a “female" crime, and thus sometimes were at a loss when

confronted in court with male defendants. Of the 234 individuals involved in the cases heard

before the Central Criminal Court 14 were men, all of whom were related to the dead infants: 9

were the fathers, 2 the grandfathers, 2 were uncles, and 1 man denied that he was the father of

the infant although he was married to the child’s mother. In only 2 cases were the men

exonerated, and the circumstances in these cases seem to reinforce the assumptions about the

motivation and demeanor of female defendants that guided jurists in their treatment of infanticide:

both men were single and involved in affairs with married women. Only 1 man, the father of the

dead infant, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death; his willful murder of the child was

juxtaposed against the mother's efforts to support the child in the face of her family's anger and

censure.

Given the small number of men who appeared before the courts on infanticide

charges, and the diverse conditions under which these cases occurred, it is impossible to make

35lbid.

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broad generalizations about how the courts interpreted the crimes of male defendants in

comparison with female defendants, although some trends are apparent. Male defendants,

particularly the fathers of the dead infants, normally faced greater hostility and contempt than

female defendants, because their actions were interpreted as crimes against their children but

also as implicit refusals to accept their moral and parental responsibilities. Some male defendants

struck a chord of sympathy with juries and judges, particularly if they made genuine efforts to care

for expectant mothers and newborn infants. In these cases defense solicitors depicted their

actions as the natural ignorance and clumsiness of men confronting situations that were utterly

foreign to them. Male defendants were treated least harshly, and were more likely to be

exonerated even in the face of overwhelming evidence of their guilt, if the mothers of the dead

infants were married women engaged in adulterous affairs.

The case of Joseph Larkin and his girlfriend Marie Sullivan illustrates the hostility

that could confront male defendants in the courtroom. Male defendants could not argue that their

crime was the result of diminished mental capacity, and their participation in the death or

concealment of illegitimate children epitomized their refusal to accept responsibility for their

actions. Court justices frequently voiced the concern that women bore an inordinate share of the

blame for infanticide while the men responsible for their condition essentially “got off.” When men

did appear before the court, judges and juries may have seized the opportunity to make an

example of them: “Mr. Carrigan, K.C., in opening the case, said that although the crime of

infanticide was unhappily, but too frequently, the source of investigation in the court, the

circumstances here were of an exceptional character, in as much as here it was the man, the

origin of the wrong-doing, who was in the dock. It was a disgustingly barbarous murder.”36 Judges

were among the few participants in the twentieth-century battle against infanticide and immorality

ZGTipperary Star, 21 July 1928, 3.

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who both raised the issue of male responsibility and occasionally had the opportunity to hold men

accountable.

Medical evidence suggested that Sullivan's infant died of inattention at birth, and

although Larkin was convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter, which implied negligence or

ignorance more than malice, he was sentenced to three years' penal servitude, a harsh sentence

not only in comparison to women but also relative to other male defendants. The exchange

between Larkin's defense and the judge epitomizes the clash between urban and rural values,

and in particular official ignorance of the conditions under which many rural women and men lived

in the middle decades of the twentieth century:

Mr. Sheehy [for the defense] said there were no doubt ugly features in the case and some of its features were abhorrent to decent human feelings. But he asked the jury to consider the type of man they were dealing with in this case. I suggest to you, he said, that this man is a mere country yokel, and that he acted more through stupidity than anything else. He is, in fact, a rather innocent, stupid kind of man - a man of rather primitive type. You are not trying a moral issue in this case. You are dealing with the serious charge of murder. I suggest to you that in all the circumstances [Larkin] didn't behave so very badly. There are lots of very fine gentlemen in the rich higher walks of life - men who are looked upon as respectable citizens - who when they get a girl like this into trouble in this way they don’t bother to see about her or her child and, in fact, repudiate any idea of association with the mother at all. I will admit that poor [Joseph Larkin] acted in a rather clumsy way, but still in his own clumsy way he was all the time about this poor woman lending a helping hand as best he could during this terrible time. 37

Larkin’s solicitor attempted to cast him as an ignorant, backward but well-meaning and

sympathetic character who did the best he could under the circumstances. But the raw

primitiveness of the conditions in which Sullivan gave birth were shocking and offensive to the

middle-class, predominantly urban judicial system, as illustrated in the judge's assessment of

Larkin: “Mr. Justice Hanna - Why did no you not try to get some kind of medical assistance

instead of leaving the woman lying in a ditch? - 1 did my best. Mr. Justice Hanna - You did your

best? It is in savage Africa you should be!”38 The prosecution shared the judge’s dim view of

37ibid.

^Limerick Weekly Echo, 21 July 1928, 3.

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Larkin and his efforts on behalf of Sullivan: “The savages in Africa wouldn’t do it! They would be

very indignant if such a thing happened in their midst!"39 Inherent in the court’s evaluation of

Larkin's guilt or innocence is a glimpse of standards of middle-class respectability to which Larkin

and most other defendants were held. Had Larkin been able to provide more adequately for

Sullivan’s confinement, indeed, had Sullivan not been discovered lying in a field just two days after

giving birth, Larkin might have been regarded more sympathetically.

In all likelihood Larkin did the best he could for Sullivan and the child under the

circumstances. His ignorance of the processes of pregnancy and childbirth would have rendered

him useless as an attendant at Sullivan's confinement, and the fact that he was present at all,

visiting her regularly and providing food, drink, and clothing, was more than most men in similar

situations had done. Yet the circumstances of Sullivan's confinement were primitive, which

perhaps offended the sensibilities of the middle-class male court. Sullivan and Larkin appear to

have been homeless, and Sullivan gave birth and apparently lived in a field until she was

discovered by gardai. Even if Larkin knew enough to secure a doctor for Sullivan, neither of them

could have afforded medical attention or basic necessities for the child. This case highlights the

fundamental conflict between official perceptions of appropriate and respectable behavior, and the

practical concerns, and the acute poverty, that confronted “average” Irish women and men on a

daily basis. It was difficult for the middle-class, male jury to admit that such dire poverty existed in

their midst, not only because it contradicted the image of the frugal simplicity and contentment

with which official Ireland regarded the poor classes, but also because it provided stark evidence

that such notions of respectability, “decency” and morality were irrelevant in the basic struggle to

survive.

39Tipperary Star, 21 July 1928, 3.

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Of the 14 men accused of murder, manslaughter, or concealment of birth, only

one was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, and the judge and jury seem to have

interpreted the defendant’s actions as a blatant attempt to avoid parental and moral responsibility.

Larkin may have been given a particularly harsh sentence, but the manslaughter conviction

indicated an acknowledgment on the jury’s part that he did not intentionally effect the child’s death

or seek to evade his duties to Sullivan and the child. On the other hand, Edmond O ’Neill willfully

murdered the child bom to his girlfriend Philomena Stack.40 When Stack first discovered she was

pregnant she confronted O'Neill, who refused to marry or provide for her. After the child was bom

Stack and her family pressured O’Neill to find a foster home for the child. At first O ’Neill refused

but eventually bowed to the pressure and took the child from Stack, assuring her that he had

found a good home for him. Within hours the child was dead. Connor did not appeal his conviction

or sentence, so it is impossible to know what swayed the jury in reaching a murder conviction.

While this sentence is the harshest passed on male defendants, O'Neill appears to have

embodied the “typical" male defendant who seduced an otherwise innocent young woman and

then abandoned her and denied responsibility for the child. O’Neill acted not out of shame,

desperation, or ignorance, but from resentment at having to bear his share of the burden of caring

for the child, and a willful and conscious rejection of the consequences of his sexual indiscretion.

Larkin and O'Neill were treated with particular harshness by judges and juries

unused to encountering male defendants in infanticide cases and anxious to make men

accountable. But Peter Murphy's case suggests that even male defendants were not always

evaluated in black and white terms. Murphy admitted suffocating the infant recently born to his

girlfriend Kate Lawlor.41 When Lawlor first informed Murphy that she was pregnant, he agreed to

40Central Criminal Court, File 1D 29 3.

41Central Criminal Court, File 1D 27 4.

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marry her, but he was a minor and his mother refused to consent to the marriage. Murphy already

had several previous convictions for petty theft and assault, which under normal circumstances

would have swayed judge and jury against him. But despite his prior record and his admission of

guilt in the death of the infant the charges against him were dropped. Likely the judge considered

Murphy’s willingness to marry Lawlor, and his acceptance of responsibility for the child, in

dismissing the case. It is useful to consider the harsh sentence passed on Joseph Larkin in light

of the dismissal of charges against Murphy. Both men attempted to do right by their partners, but

Murphy’s efforts were less primitive and therefore more tolerable, more in keeping with middle-

class standards of decency and respectability, than Larkin’s.

Judges and juries seem to have faced a particular difficulty when confronted with

male defendants who were involved in affairs with married women, as illustrated by the case of

James Moran and Eileen Kelly.42 Kelly and Moran were charged with murder and, although Moran

admitted that he was the father of the infant and that he deliberately murdered it, he was acquitted

while Eileen Kelly was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The judge, in his charge to

the jury, did not explicitly direct them to acquit Moran but did stress Kelly’s adultery as a mitigating

factor in the crime:

...you are not trying this woman for any offenses she may be guilty of in the eyes of the moralist. The association between unmarried girls and men have unhappy consequences and are cases that we are all fairly familiar with. Unhappy and unfortunate associations of this kind do not so frequently come to our notice and I should imagine that you do agree that it is a shocking thing that this woman should betray her husband who was so conscientious in regard to his wife and children that he remitted fortnightly the sum of £3.10; and I am sure you feel that whatever party was responsible for bringing about that association that both of them should feel sorrow and shame for what they had done apart from the betrayal of the unfortunate husband over in England by his own wife and the man who was his friend 43

42Central Criminal Court, File 1D 24 131.

43Court of Criminal Appeals, File 1944/56.

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While critical of Moran’s behavior, this judge reserved his contempt for Kelly, insisting on the

distinctions between “unfortunate" unmarried women confronted with unexpected and unwanted

pregnancies and the less sympathy-inducing plight of married women bearing children in

adulterous affairs. Even if the child died by Moran's hand, Kelly clearly had a stake in its death,

and her involvement in the child’s death was compounded by the sin of adultery. What was more,

Kelly had betrayed a husband who had done his best to provide for his family, exacerbating the

seriousness of her crime in the eyes of the court. Kelly’s behavior was evaluated in criminal rather

than moral terms, which perhaps accounts for her conviction on the capital murder charge in spite

of Moran's admission of guilt.

The Kelly verdict reveals the judges' and juries' assumptions about what

constituted “normal" or appropriate maternal behavior. Many unmarried defendants were excused

based on the belief that the strain of pregnancy and childbirth altered their mental statement and

impaired their judgment. Married mothers, on the other hand, were expected to “know better.”

The prosecution argued that even if Kelly did not kill her child or dispose of its body, only a “bad”

mother would allow her newborn child to be taken away without complaint or resistance. In other

words, Kelly was guilty because she took no action to preserve her child's life. In his charge to the

jury the judge clearly paved the way for finding her guilty of murder even in the absence of clear

evidence:

It is startling that a mother should have her baby taken from her without protest and put in a sack. Is there any interpretation of such a thing except that the mother acquiesced and if not actively assisting was ready and willing to assist if assistance was necessary? Even on the story told here, if you believe that it’s more correct than what she said in the statement, how can you hold that this woman was a party to a design that this child should live its life?44

In failing to protect her child, Kelly failed in her most fundamental responsibility as a mother.

Kelly’s murder conviction and death sentence, examined in light of similar cases in which

44Court of Criminal Appeals, File 1944/56.

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unmarried women were acquitted or convicted on lesser charges in spite of overwhelming

evidence against them, suggests that juries operated on the belief that there was a natural

connection between married motherhood and maternal instinct, and also a natural connection

between unmarried motherhood and fear, shame, and desperation.

James Moran was not the only male charged with infanticide following an affair

with a married woman. In February 1934, Patrick Farrell was convicted of concealment of birth

following the death of Bridget Clarke’s child and sentenced to twelve months imprisonment, a

harsh sentence for a concealment conviction among male defendants. Clarke admitted killing the

child but claimed that Farrell dug the hole in which she buried it. It is not clear why judge and jury

took such a dim view of Farrell’s actions while the jury in the Moran case essentially freed a

confessed child killer. Because Farrell's case also was heard before the Central Criminal Court

while Clarke’s also was addressed in the Court of Criminal Appeals, much more is known of the

proceedings in her case.45 Ironically, Bridget Clarke was initially found guilty of manslaughter and

sentenced to three years' penal servitude, but on appeal her conviction was quashed and she was

acquitted. Meanwhile Farrell, who did not appeal his conviction or sentence, served the full

sentence for a crime for which, in essence, he was only marginally responsible. One unusual

aspect of this case that may account for Farrell’s conviction and sentence was that three jurors

sought to be discharged from the case based on a “conscientious objection” to participating in a

murder trial involving a child victim 46 The judge refused to excuse them, and it could be that the

jurors’ personal moral aversion to the crimes involved influenced their decision to convict Farrell.

It is not clear why Clarke chose to appeal her conviction while Farrell did not,

particularly in light of the fact that the judge in the Central Criminal Court case had no doubt but

45Court of Criminal Appeals, File 1934/31.

46lrish Times, 22 June 1934, 2.

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that Clarke was responsible for the child's death. In any event, the attitude of the judge on appeal

reflects the gender assumptions that were inherent in the treatment of infanticide, and might

explain why Farrell was regarded so harshly while Clarke ultimately was freed. The judge in the

original case assumed that Clarke would want to do away with the child to avoid revealing her

affair to her husband. On the other hand, the appeals judge took a much more sympathetic view

of Clarke's plight, arguing that “...whatever shame was hanging over her,” the fact that Clarke had

arranged in advance for an ambulance to take her to the county home for confinement indicated

that her act was not pre-meditated.47 She performed a private baptism on the child, “having

regard to her own faith," which could be interpreted as an effort to fulfill her duty as a mother and

as a Catholic. While most women who committed infanticide presumably ignored their children’

spiritual needs and, in theological terms, destined them to an eternity of limbo because they were

unbaptized, Clarke at least ensured her child’s eternal life even as she denied its earthly

existence. Farrell, on the other hand, had little to lose in allowing the child to live; the fact that he

dug the hole in which Clarke buried the child suggested malice and callousness that was criminal

rather than immoral, and that required punishment rather than sympathy and compassion.

The difference between the original judge's and the appeal judge's assessments

of Clarke's case illustrates the extent to which judges were guided by individual, rather than

universal, assumptions about right and wrong, guilt and innocence, punishment and forgiveness.

In this case two judges and juries heard identical evidence but reached entirely different

conclusions. Neither court doubted that Clarke was at least partially responsible for the death of

her child; what was in doubt, however, was whether Clarke’s behavior represented malicious and

willful criminal behavior, or the desperate act of a woman conscious of the seriousness of her sin.

While the judge in the criminal case emphasized Clarke’s age, experience, and adultery as

47Court of Criminal Appeal, File 1934/31.

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evidence that she had willfully murdered her child and thus committed a criminal act, the appeals

judge focused on the steps she took to prepare for the birth, and to ensure after death that the

child enjoyed eternal life, as “proof that she had done all she could as a mother and a Catholic.

While many acts of infanticide were committed by women whose sexual liaisons

presumably were matters of choice, courts also dealt with victims of incest and rape. In only one

case, that of Nellie Harris, was incest mentioned explicitly, although it is likely that incest was a

factor in several other cases. The judge and jury trying Ham's rejected as “abominable" the claim

that her pregnancy was the result of incest, although surviving records of the case offer no insight

into the court's refusal to countenance her claim.48 Possibly the jury simply did not believe that her

74-year-old father was capable of fathering a child, or that at age 25 Ham's was a “typical" incest

victim. More likely the court was unprepared to confront such allegations, particularly as it would

have forced a more self-conscious examination of their assumptions about the nature of female

sexual vulnerability and victimization. Harris was sentenced to two years in a magdalen asylum,

and interestingly she was one of the few defendants who refused to serve a convent sentence.

The judge then imposed a sentence of two years' penal servitude with hard labor that he promptly

commuted, essentially freeing Ham's.49 Harris's case is unusual not only because of the

suggestion of incest, but also because she refused to serve the sentence imposed by the court.

The fact that the much harsher sentence was commuted suggests that the court was not inclined

to address the question of incest and instead gave Harris the benefit of the doubt.

The issue of rape surfaced more frequently than incest, with five defendants

claiming that their pregnancies resulted from rape.50 As in the case of incest, courts rejected

48Waterford Standard, 20 June 1931, 10.

49Central Criminal Court, File 1C 94 73.

50This seemingly low incidence of rape should not be regarded as an accurate indication of the occurrence of rape in the mid-twentieth century, or the links between rape and infanticide. Women accused of infanticide often were reluctant to discuss the circumstances

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outright women’s claims of rape: in four cases the accused women were convicted of infanticide

or concealment of birth, while in one case the accused was convicted of murder and sentenced to

death. In no case did gardai pursue a rape conviction against the named men. Because full

transcripts are unavailable in these cases, it is impossible to know why the courts discounted the

claims of rape, or whether the defendants' accounts were credible and trustworthy in the eyes of

the court. Some of the women accused of infanticide likely were victims of rape or incest, and the

court's reluctance to acknowledge this facet of infanticide reflects a more general reluctance

within Irish society to treat female sexual vulnerability as a legitimate social issue. Like unmarried

motherhood and illegitimacy, rape and incest were taboo subjects to be hidden away and ignored.

At the same time, women who were victims of rape and incest fueled the court’s general

impression that most female defendants were victims more than criminals - victims of

unscrupulous and abusive men, or of their own passions. But whether women were victims of

criminal sexual assault or simply gave in to pressure or lust, the official response was to control

and regulate female sexuality, which lawmakers and religious leaders linked to social breakdown

and the degeneration of the Irish moral fiber. While courts evaluated and sentenced female

defendants as much on their illicit sexual behavior as on the fact that they had murdered or

concealed the birth of their infants, they judged male defendants almost exclusively on the fact

that they sought to shirk their parental responsibilities, and not on the basis of their own illicit

sexual liaisons or even of the death of an innocent child.

Conclusion

The prevalence of infanticide in the twentieth century perhaps is not overtly

surprising in a society that offered young unmarried women few alternatives in coping with

under which they became pregnant, and even more reluctant to name the men responsible. It is possible that a much higher percentage of defendants were the victims of rape, and even of incest, but were too ashamed or frightened to admit it.

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unwanted or unexpected pregnancies, and that stigmatized illegitimacy to such an extent that

institutionalization was seen as the most appropriate and effective method of dealing with it.

Although the overall picture of infanticide mirrored that elsewhere in Europe, most particularly in

the demographic patterns of defendants and the general sympathy and leniency with which courts

dealt with female defendants, there also were significant differences in the Irish context, and most

especially in sentencing trends. Unlike in France, where acquittals were the norm, Irish courts

were far more likely to convict accused women, but they also were more likely to convict on lesser

charges. Irish judges were more likely to commit convicted women to magdalen asylums than to

prison, reflecting the belief that infanticide exposed rents in the accused woman’s moral fabric that

required repair rather than inherent criminal tendencies that demanded punishment.

Although legislative and religious discourses of infanticide reflected the same

pragmatism evident in judicial proceedings, it is not accurate to suggest that lawmakers and

church leaders condoned the murder of newborn infants, or that they necessarily felt any

sympathy for accused women. In passing infanticide legislation in the fashion of British statute

lawmakers were not initiating or projecting a change in attitude on basic questions of morality.

Rather, they merely gave weight of law to trends that had been standard practice in the judicial

arena for at least three decades. Religious writing portrayed infanticide as a problem that was not

inherently Irish but rather stemmed from the influence of “pagan" (in other words, British) social

and cultural forces that undermined the traditional Irish values of piety, chastity, and purity. If

religious leaders could not stem the tide of infanticide, at least they could bring the offenders back

“into the fold", by isolating them in magdalen asylums that shielded them from potentially harmful

“foreign" influences and from the temptations of the flesh, and that demanded serious and

sustained periods of prayer, reflection, and penitence.

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DESPERATE ACT OR WILLFUL CHOICE:

INFANTICIDE AND UNWANTED PREGNANCY

Introduction

In examining religious, legislative, and judicial discourses of and responses to

infanticide, the previous chapter has argued that the judges acted as a balance to rigid Catholic

moralism that insisted on the sanctity of infant life, and legislative ambivalence driven less by

ethical, moral, or humanitarian considerations than a pragmatic acknowledgment of current

judicial practice combined with a dogged determination not to mimic English “liberalism”. But the

significance of infanticide cannot be assessed only with reference to official attitudes and

responses. An important aspect of infanticide, that rarely is considered in historical research, is

the fact that while thousands of women coped with unwanted pregnancies in legal and “moral”

ways, a small subset of women adopted extreme and seemingly desperate methods. While

lawmakers and jurists struggled to reconcile moral and ethical considerations with

humanitarianism, compassion, and their own impressions of defendants, women themselves had

to negotiate possible legal sanctions, the disapproval of family and friends, and their own human

desires and weaknesses.

This chapter argues, drawing on the testimonies of women and men accused of

the crime, that infanticide should not be viewed only as the act of desperate women confronted

with an unwed pregnancy in a society that placed a high premium on pre-marita! celibacy and

stigmatized unmarried mothers and their children. Infanticide also must be examined within the

context of a general disregard for the life and well-being of illegitimate, poor, and vulnerable

children, and of the values and priorities that dominated family and community life. This chapter 126

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also argues that the image, perpetrated in popular literature as well as scholarly writing, of a mid-

twentieth century society dominated solely by the Catholic Church and characterized by repressive

and oppressive attitudes and practices relating to sexuality is not entirely accurate. Admittedly

Catholic moral codes influenced legislative and social policy, and the church hierarchy certainly

attempted to exact conformity to narrowly defined codes of sexuality, maternity, and family life.

And without doubt the refusal on the part of lawmakers into the 1970s to lift prohibitions on the

importation and availability of contraception, coupled with the near impossibility of securing

abortion and the strong popular disapproval of unmarried motherhood, meant that sexual activity

among unmarried couples was a risky proposition. But unmarried women and men tempted fate

and engaged in unmarried sex more frequency than social and feminist historians have thus far

acknowledged, and women were not always passive in these encounters. Nor were they always

the victims of male seduction or sexual aggression portrayed in religious and moralist literature,

and many of them found ways to reconcile sexual desire and activity, and even infanticide, with

their Catholic faith.

The way that unmarried women reacted to unwed pregnancies and the way that

their families and communities responded were informed to some extent by their faith and

religious beliefs. But the transcripts of infanticide trials suggest that ordinary women and men

embraced Catholicism for vastly different reasons, and not always as a faith system or way of life.

For many individuals and families, outward shows of piety suited their aspirations to status and

acceptance within their communities. They embraced Catholicism in part because they derived

some benefit, real or imagined and not only spiritual, from it. And women killed their newborn

infants, perhaps out of desperation, fear, and shame, but also, in many cases, as a substitute for

contraception or abortion. The testimonies of those involved in infanticide trials— as perpetrators,

witnesses, and co-conspirators— portray individuals, families, and communities strong in their

faith, sometimes to the point of fanaticism, but also struggling to determine for themselves what

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constituted right and wrong, to reconcile Catholic teaching on sin and forgiveness with the realities

of their daily lives, their individual and collective values and priorities, and their human frailties and

weaknesses.

The records of infanticide cases also suggest that the sexually ignorant, innocent,

and demure woman so common in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prescriptive

literature, and late twentieth-century historical research, does not necessarily reflect the

experiences and motivations of ordinary Irish women. In official rhetoric women who experienced

sex outside of marriage were either prostitutes or victims of male sexual aggression, which

coincided with a mid-twentieth-century social policy that effectively gave women two options:

celibacy or married motherhood. Catholic teaching insisted on pre-marital chastity for unmarried

women, and on the mutually exclusive demands of purity and abundant fertility for married

women, whose sexuality was framed by the Marian ideal that defined sex as a perfunctory act of

procreation rather than an expression of sexual desire or physical and emotional intimacy. This

paradigm has scarcely been questioned by scholars, feminist or otherwise, and thus it has been

taken for granted that women, and indeed men, acquiesced in the moral demands made by the

Catholic Church. Lawmakers, jurists, and members of the church hierarchy assumed that the

“typical" infanticide perpetrator was a young, unmarried, sexually innocent and ignorant woman

who was seduced and then abandoned to cope alone with the consequences. While this depiction

is evident in some infanticide cases heard before district, circuit, and central criminal courts it is by

no means accurate for all, or even a majority. Trial records reveal that many women were active

agents in the sexual liaisons that led to unwed pregnancy, that they had numerous sexual

partners before they became pregnant, and that for some of them sex was an accepted part of

courting relationships and infanticide an effective, if primitive, method of birth control. Historians

must be careful not to accept uncritically the assumption that infanticide was only or inherently a

desperate act committed by frightened or victimized women who believed they had no other

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option. The level of violence perpetrated on some newborn infants, the complicity of family and

friends, the number of women who committed infanticide repeatedly over a number of years,

suggest a less benign interpretation of the crime, even if justices and juries often gave women the

benefit of the doubt.

Contemporary observers point with alarm to increased sexual activity among

teenagers and young unmarried women and men, and to a rise in births outside of marriage,

assuming that such phenomena are particular characteristics of “modem” society.1 Statistical

evidence supports the conclusion that unmarried motherhood is on the rise, but the true extent of

illegitimacy and unmarried motherhood in a historical context is difficult to gauge and should not

be discounted as a feature of mid-twentieth century fife. Statistics on illegitimacy include only

those births that were registered and where no father was identified on birth certificates.2 It is

impossible to know how many women committed infanticide and “got away with it,” gave birth to

illegitimate children and did not register the births, put false names on birth certificates, or had the

children registered as the legitimate children of married women who then adopted the children

overseas. Anecdotal evidence presented in infanticide trial records hints that sexual activity was a

not uncommon feature of relationships between unmarried women and men in courting, long

standing unions or casual liaisons. Many of the women accused of infanticide had more than one

sexual partner before becoming pregnant, and others committed multiple infanticides over a

period of years. Women had fewer options in dealing with unwed pregnancy in the middle

decades of the century, and thus may have entered into sexual relationships with greater

1ln the first quarter of 1999 one in three births in the Irish Republic occurred outside of marriage. This trend, according to the Irish Independent, “...represents a significant social change in Irish life ..and it is a change, moreover, which has swept upon us so suddenly as to almost pass unnoticed." Sunday Independent, 19 September 1999, 4.

2Retums of the Registrar General (Dublin: Government Stationery Office, 1900- 1981). From 1925 to 1980 the percentage of births occurring outside of marriage nearly doubled, from 2.8% to almost 5%.

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trepidation than their contemporary counterparts, but this did not stop women from engaging in

sexual relationships that, presumably, they did not want to have end in pregnancy.

Women’s testimonies highlight the diversity of social, personal, religious, and

financial circumstances that compelled them to kill or conceal the births of their newborn infants.

Some conformed to lawmakers’ and jurists’ image of the desperate, shamed, and guilt-ridden

woman who murdered her child immediately after birth to hide it from family and friends. Others,

according to medical professionals, succumbed to the temporary insanity or hysteria that was

thought to attach to pregnancy, particularly among unmarried mothers. Still others contemplated

infanticide with a mixture of regret and pragmatism: even if they wanted to keep their children they

could not support them. Yet there is ample basis for concluding that some women also committed

infanticide to exercise a measure of control over their sexual and reproductive lives, attempting to

balance the material and moral constraints that militated against sex outside of marriage with their

own sexual needs and desires.

Infanticide as Desperate Act

According to official assumptions, women accused of infanticide took the drastic

state of murdering their newborn infants because they had been seduced by unscrupulous men

uttering promises of marriage, but who were then abandoned to deal alone with the

consequences of their seduction. While arguing against traditional conceptualizations of both

infanticide and female sexual agency, it is important to acknowledge that for some women

infanticide was, in fact, a desperate act committed “in the heat of the moment,’’ or as the least

unpalatable of a range of unattractive options. Moral, social, and economic circumstances

militated against sex outside of marriage and likely contributed to a sense of desperation among

women who committed infanticide. Given the harsh treatment that some unmarried mothers

endured at the hands of family, community, and religious institutions, the decision of some women

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to kill their children is less incomprehensible. It is important to note that, while it is impossible to

know precisely what women were thinking when they committed infanticide, one can attempt to

ascribe some meaning to their words and actions in the context of legal and judicial proceedings,

social climate, family environment, and their individual circumstances. Those women who killed

their children out of fear or desperation voiced a striking sense of defeatism that only served to

underscore their desperation and helplessness. While they articulated a desire to keep their

children, their own survival often rested on getting rid of illegitimate children. It was a difficult

dilemma, and one that women faced largely with resignation, as reflected by Kathleen Daly’s

statement upon arrest: “I was worrying about it all the time since it was a nice baby but I couldn’t

manage to keep it.”3

Agnes Hogan's story is a particularly moving illustration of the dire circumstances

that often confronted unmarried mothers, even those who consciously flouted sexual and moral

conventions and bore several illegitimate children. Hogan was the mother of one illegitimate child

and neighbors gossiped openly about the alleged birth of another child at Easter 1928. When

gardai investigated these rumors Hogan admitted that they were true, and she also confessed to

killing another child three years previously. While Hogan might have appeared to act with

willfulness and calculation in doing away with two illegitimate children, she also seems to have

suffered enormous physical and psychological trauma in pregnancy and childbirth:

On that morning after the baby was bom I left it lying beside me, and it was alive when born, on a field where I lay at the time I gave birth. I then put the baby alive into a seven stone flour bag, and placed it in a rabbits hole in a fence of Miss Hale's field. When I put the bag with the baby in it, in the hole the baby was squealing, and I then placed a few big stones outside the bag so that the dogs would not get it. Three days after I again went to the hole where the baby was buried by me, and I could not find the baby, as I believe the dogs must have taken it away. The reason why I done away with the baby was that I could not support it. But I cried after doing all this, and I feel sorry for doing this now. But I cannot help it.4

3Central Criminal Court, File 1D 56 31.

4Central Criminal Court, File 1C 90 22.

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Later, in the garda station, Hogan began to cry and, according to a servant, said that: “...she done

away with two babies as she had no food to give them to eat. In reply I said she was a bad woman

to do that. She made no reply."5 It is striking to note the lack of violence evident in Hogan's

actions; many victims of infanticide were found with strings tied around their neck, paper or cloth

stuffed down their throats, stab wounds, or other marks of violence. Hogan, on the other hand, hid

her live baby, probably assuming it would die of starvation, and took pains to protect it from wild

dogs, suggesting at least some reluctance, remorse, and perhaps even tenderness. While

Hogan's testimony provides the only evidence of her desperate circumstances she was acquitted,

suggesting that the jury found her a credible and sympathetic witness.

Hogan's testimony does not indicate whether she was engaged in a long-term

relationship or a series of casual encounters, but it appears that poverty, more than concern for

her reputation, was the impetus for allowing her child to die. It also seems clear, based on the

absence of testimony, that Hogan had no family and few friends in the community to whom she

could turn for support. Kate O ’Shea’s narrative further underscores the interplay of poverty and

isolation in fueling women's sense of desperation. O’Shea was married to a man who refused to

live with or provide for her. The couple already had two daughters who, interestingly, resided with

their father and paternal grandparents rather than with O ’Shea. When O’Shea discovered she

was pregnant she wrote to her husband asking him to provide a home for herself and the children;

Mr. O’Shea's response, apparently, was that he would “...swing by the neck..." before he would

reconcile with her, an indication perhaps that he was not the father of the child.6 O’Shea had no

family of her own, and her husband’s departure left her homeless and without means of

subsistence. O’Shea blamed her husband’s neglect for her plight: “I would not have done this only

5ibid.

6Central Criminal Court, File 1D 20 103.

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through my husband’s fault He drove me to it He would not make a home for me. I wrote to him

to make a home. No one wanted me when I had the baby."7 If in fact Mr. O'Shea was not the

child’s father, the community would have had little sympathy for Kate O’Shea and in all likelihood

would have been reluctant to risk the censure of other family and community members to offer

assistance. The court’s response is difficult to interpret. On the one hand, O’Shea was convicted

of manslaughter, which implies at least a partial responsibility for the child’s death. On the other

hand the judge sentenced O'Shea to a magdalen asylum in lieu of imprisonment, a sentence that

suggested solicitude and compassion on the judge’s part.

O’Shea’s case is unique for the glimpse it gives into intimate marital relationships

among ordinary women and men, particularly when those relationships were troubled or unstable.

In the absence of divorce, and of historical scholarship that suggests otherwise, it would be easy

to assume that married couples stayed together, perhaps miserable but resigned to their fate. Yet

most of the married women accused of infanticide were engaged in adulterous unions, some of

long standing; in many cases the husbands either had emigrated seasonally to find work, or were

ill or otherwise infirm. It would not be a far stretch to assume that these marriages were troubled,

or that many other similarly troubled marriages existed that did not lead to infanticide.8 Mamed

couples were not always willing to remain in unhappy relationships, even though civil and

ecclesiastical law compelled them to do so, and seem to have adopted a variety of strategies to

find companionship and fulfillment.9 The presence in infanticide records of married women

7ibid.

8 One must also consider the possibility that married women committed adultery as a matter of survival. Anecdotal evidence suggests that poor married women engaged in sex, with the knowledge and consent of their husbands, to provide for their families' material needs. This evidence is supported by material in the ISPCC case files which include, for example, a letter from a man to his wife suggesting that a neighbor might provide her with a weekly supply of turf if she agreed to have sex with him once a week.

9Divorce was introduced in Ireland with the Family Law (Divorce Act), 1996, with effect from January 1997. Prior to this act, couples experiencing marital breakdown made informal

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engaged in adulterous affairs essentially turns on its head the official image of infanticide

defendants. While a pregnancy outside of marriage immediately placed women on the margins of

social, political, and family life, marriage conferred respectability, stability, protection, and the right

to engage in a sexual relationship. And yet, as O'Shea and other married defendants

demonstrates, in some cases marriage could be as much of an inducement to infanticide as an

unwed pregnancy.

Married women's desperation to hide illegitimate pregnancies cannot be

underestimated, even if they were estranged from their husbands.10 Married women pregnant as

the result of an adulterous affair likely would have experienced greater ostracization and moral

outrage because it could be interpreted as a sign of sexual agency not normally attributed to Irish

women. Catriona Fagan was married with two children and became pregnant while her husband

worked abroad. Fagan claimed that she was raped although she refused, under interrogation, to

identify the rapist, nor did she report the assault at the time. Although the fact that Fagan sought

medical advice during her pregnancy indicates an absence of pre-meditation, Fagan’s physician,

Dr. Patrick Keane, testified that he advised Fagan to enter the county home as she neared her

due date, so that she could give birth away and discretely have the child adopted or boarded out.

Fagan refused, fearing that as a married woman she would be forced to keep the child, or that

she would not be able to hid it from her husband: “If I don’t do away with this child I will have no

separation arrangements or applied for a legal separation, but neither option permitted re marriage and legal responsibilities and obligations between the married couple remained. The Catholic Church does not recognize divorce, considers that those who secured a civil divorce are still married in ecclesiastical law, and thus does not permit divorced persons to be re-married in a church ceremony. Among the 234 defendants who appeared before the Central Criminal Court on various charges relating to their newborn infants, 23 were married women.

10Of the 23 married women accused of infanticide 6 were pregnant prior to marriage: 7 were married to husbands who were away for long periods of time (in some cases 3 or more years): 5 were separated from their husbands; 2 were widows; 2 were found insane, and one had a husband who was infirm.

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life with him."11 Keane warned her that: “...it would be murder to take the child’s life and that she

would regret the consequences. She asked me to baptize the child and I refused to do so and told

her that it was unnecessary because the child was not in danger of death and that it could be

brought down to the Church and be baptized.”12 Fagan’s request that the doctor baptize the child

could be seen as an indication of intent, as “lay” or “private" baptism was a common feature in

infanticide cases where the mother wanted to ensure the eternal life of her illegitimate newborn

child even as she denied it an earthly existence. But what is particularly striking was her fear that

she would have “no life” with her husband if she did not do away with the child, perhaps

suggesting her belief that as a rape victim she was “tainted" and thus her husband would no

longer want her. It is also possible, however, that Fagan fabricated the rape claim to hide the fact

that she had betrayed her husband.

The jury acquitted Fagan although medical evidence indicated that the child had

been suffocated.13 It could be that the jury believed that she had been raped, or they might have

been swayed by a neighbor’s testimony that Fagan had given her money to prepare clothes for

the child - evidence that she intended keeping and caring for the child. It is impossible to know

with certainty if Fagan was raped, but her story highlights the desperation and fear that confronted

married women dealing with unwanted pregnancies. Some women may have used rape as an

excuse to conceal affairs and sexual indiscretions, but many married and unmarried women

probably were raped, and it would not be misguided to assume that some of these women ended

up pregnant as a result. Aside from statistics published annually in garda reports there was little

official discussion about rape or sexual assault, and nothing has been written on the subject in a

11Central Criminal Court, File 1D 33 65.

12ibid.

13Central Criminal Court, File 1D 33 65.

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historical context, so it is difficult to know how women who brought rape charges fared in the

courtroom. Charges of rape and incest made by women in the context of infanticide cases were

almost always discounted by the courts.14 Until the 1981 Criminal Law (Rape) Act, the 1861

Offences Against the Person Act governed the adjudication of rape, and the difficulty under the

law of proving a case likely encouraged women to remain silent rather than make a claim that

might not be believed but that would be a source of shame and disgrace within the community. On

the other hand, women also may have made allegations of rape to hide sexual behavior that

would have been a source of even greater shame and disgrace.

For the most part the husbands of women accused of infanticide are little more

than background players in the courtroom drama. Jane Williams’s husband’s reaction to his wife’s

predicament offers a rare and poignant insight into the realities of marriage and family life among

poor women and men. Williams gave birth in January 1943 to a child who she claimed was the

result of rape. She did not inform her husband of the rape, nor did she report it to gardai, because

she did not want to worry her husband and because “...I thought at that time that there was no

harm done."15 Williams’s mother-in-law gossiped in the community about Williams’s pregnancy,

undermining her status and credibility and perhaps driving her to the seemingly drastic step of

infanticide. But the most compelling evidence came from Williams’ husband, who wrote a letter to

the judge on his wife’s behalf:

14A survey of local newspapers turned up extensive coverage of infanticide, murder, and other types of trials, which often were reported in sensationalist fashion. Yet coverage of rape trials was virtually non-existent, making it difficult to elucidate official discourses of rape or individual experiences of rape and rape trials. A survey of the trial record books for the Dublin Circuit Court for the years 1931-32 revealed 8 cases of indecent assault (all on girls under 13 years of age) and 1 of rape. The rape case and 6 of the 8 indecent assault cases were discharged. These statistics indicate both a low incidence of reported rape and a high acquittal rate. See Dublin Circuit Court Trial Record Book, 1932-33, 1D 33 118.

15Central Criminal Court, File 1D 20 103. Williams's reference to “harm" being done perhaps is the most insightful statement as to popular attitudes toward rape. The harm, in Williams's eyes, was not the fact that she had been sexually assaulted but the possibility that she might become pregnant as a result.

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This morning I received a letter from my wife making a full confession of her crime. As she has always been a good wife and a really good mother to my children I have forgiven her, but as the law has to be satisfied I am pleading for mercy on her behalf and for the sake of my children, as they are the ones who will suffer most if they are deprived of their mother. And for that reason I ask you to be as lenient as possible in your prosecution of the case. By being merciful it will lighten this terrible burden a little and enable me to start life anew in some other country. So whatever about the justice in this case I ask you once again for God’s sake and the sake of my children be merciful.16

This letter represented an extraordinary and unique defense, and likely contributed to the judge's

decision to suspend Williams's sentence so that she could return to her family. In this case the

possible disgrace or shame attached to both the pregnancy and infanticide were secondary to the

family’s survival; in all likelihood Williams's family would have been broken up, and the children

parceled out to relatives or sent to industrial schools, if Williams was sent to prison or a magdalen

asylum. Mr. Williams's letter certainly conveys the bonds of affection, loyalty, and mutual

responsibility that tied many poor married couples together, but it also reflects a pragmatic

understanding that sometimes sheer survival was more important than love, forgiveness, or even

fidelity. The Williams case offers a rare insight into the gap between “official" assumptions and

expectations and their relevance in the lives of poor women and men.

The emotional and financial stress that women accused of infanticide endured is

palpable in their testimonies. In many cases, the affection they may have felt for their infants was

overshadowed by the stark reality of their precarious social and financial position. Indeed, the daily

struggle to survive was a fact of life for most mothers, married or unmarried, and as Ellen Ross

demonstrates in Love and Toil, poor mothers did not always have the luxury of indulging their

nurturing or maternal “instincts."17 In some cases their financial stress was compounded by their

partners’ refusal to marry them or support them financially. The majority of women seem not to

16Central Criminal Court, File 1D 20 103.

17Ellen Ross, Love and Toil. Motherhood in Outcast London 1870-1910 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 166-168.

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have informed their partners of their pregnancies, but some defendants did request assistance or

support, in most cases to no avail.18 In these cases the men’s refusal to offer financial or moral

support seems to have exacerbated women's feelings of rejection and helplessness, and perhaps

drove them to the desperate act of infanticide. Hogan’s testimony exemplifies the experience of

women who sought their partners’ assistance only to be rebuffed. Halligan, who was charged in

September 1931 with the murder of her newborn infant, admitted that she had sexual relations

with a man called Hodgins. She consented because he promised to marry her but Hodgins

abandoned her when he learned of her pregnancy. Halligan’s employer dismissed her when she

suspected that Halligan was pregnant: “...I [Halligan’s employer] was afraid of her condition. I...told

her I decided to make a change."19 Halligan was acquitted even though she confessed that the

child was born alive and that she killed it by tying a belt around its neck.20 The jury’s acquittal is

puzzling, except that in their minds Halligan epitomized the typical infanticide accused who was as

much a victim as a perpetrator. Given that Halligan was abandoned by both her partner and her

employer the jury, in acquitting her, perhaps acknowledged her isolation and desperation as

mitigating factors in her crime.

Betty Coogan's circumstances bore remarkable similarities to Halligan's. Coogan

kept company with a man called James Walker, the father of the infant that Coogan was accused

of killing: “Sometime before October I found I was in the family way and I told Walker that he was

the father of the child and he did not want to own it at all and we had a falling out. W e did not keep

company since and he did not speak to me since about a month ago."21 Like Halligan, Coogan’s

18Of the 196 women tried before the Central Criminal Court for killing or concealing the birth of their babies, only 10 testified that they had notified the fathers of their babies, and of that number only two of the men offered assistance.

19Central Criminal Court, File 1C 94 66.

20ibid.

21 Central Criminal Court, File 1D 11 95.

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desperation derived in part from her partner's rejection; she worked as a live-in domestic servant

and likely would have lost her job and her home if her employer discovered her pregnancy. The

father of the child refused to marry her or provide for the child. Coogan pleaded guilty to

manslaughter, so it is impossible to know if a jury would have been as sympathetic as the jury in

the Halligan case to the plight of unmarried, abandoned mothers. She was sentenced to eighteen

months in a magdalen asylum, which was common in such cases, suggesting that in her

abandonment and desperation the judge regarded her as a “typical” defendant.

Women committed the apparently irrational act of infanticide for a variety of

reasons that reflected their tenuous financial position and their marginalized social status in the

mid-twentieth century. Many women’s actions stemmed from sheer desperation, poverty, fear of

family and community reactions, and extreme isolation. Kate O’Shea’s lament that “no one wanted

me when I had the baby” could have been the lament of any number of infanticide accused who

were rejected by family, lovers, and employers, or who feared that they would be, if news of their

pregnancy spread. These personal narratives of infanticide also highlight the constraints married

women faced when their husbands failed them, or when their marriages were troubled and they

sought solace and companionship elsewhere. But this evidence offers a brief glimpse at the

bonds of affection, loyalty, and mutual responsibility that kept couples together as well as the

pragmatism, survival instinct, or sheer lust that could drive them apart. While the records of

infanticide are not a sufficient basis from which to draw firm conclusions about the nature of

romantic and sexual relationships between women and men, they do offer some tantalizing

insights that offer possibilities for future scholarship.

Infanticide as Willful Choice

The alarmist rhetoric of contemporary social observers concerned with the

growing rate of unwed pregnancy, especially among teenagers, may leave one with the

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impression that sexual immorality or promiscuity are distinctly late twentieth-century or modem

social phenomena that can be linked to the emergence of popular culture and the “disintegration

of the family". Certainly statistical evidence indicates that the number of births outside of marriage

has risen sharply since the 1980s even as contraceptive methods have become more readily

available. But recent trends should not obscure the fact that sex, and births outside of marriage,

were more common than scholars thus far have acknowledged. Women interviewed by gardai in

the course of infanticide investigations demonstrated a degree of sexual knowledge, agency, and

experience that is entirely at odds with the chaste, demure, innocent Irish woman portrayed in

moralist and prescriptive literature and, occasionally, in feminist scholarship.22 It would be

foolhardy, based on the small sample analyzed here, to generalize about sexuality in mid

twentieth century Ireland, but it is not unreasonable to raise questions about the accuracy of

prevailing assumptions about extramarital sex and female sexuality in mid-twentieth-century

Ireland. Molly Hayes’s testimony echoed that of many women accused of infanticide for whom sex

was a normal feature of romantic attachments and unwed pregnancy an unfortunate, but not

necessarily disastrous or unexpected, side effect. Hayes was convicted in August 1947 of

manslaughter in the death of her newborn infant. In statements to gardai she admitted that she

had “connection," on several occasions, with two different men; at the time of her arrest she was

unsure which of those men had fathered the child.23 Prior to these relationships Hayes kept

company for two years with another man, with whom she also had a sexual relationship 24 It

would not be far-fetched, given Hayes's sexual history and the lack of effective contraceptive

22Of the 196 women accused of killing or concealing the birth of their infants 18 acknowledged that they had numerous sexual partners and 19 had other illegitimate children or admitted to committing infanticide on more than one occasion. It is possible that these figures are lower than the actual number of women who had other children or more than one sexual partner.

23Central Criminal Court, File 1D 29 1.

24ibid.

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methods at the time, to wonder if Hayes had been pregnant more than once. She likely realized

that her sexual activity could lead to pregnancy, and her crime could be interpreted as an

extension of her sexuality - a way to engage in a sexual relationships without the inevitable

related burden of motherhood.

Hayes's relationships, while numerous, also were long-term. But some of the

women accused of infanticide would have been regarded as “promiscuous" by contemporary

standards, engaging in many short-term relationships before becoming pregnant and committing

infanticide. Elizabeth Davis was 18 years old when she was charged in March 1946 with the

murder of her child. In her deposition Davis stated that she often attended dances and permitted

men to escort her home. She engaged in sexual relations with several of those men, most of

whom she did not know: “I never knew the names of the men who used to accompany me home

from those dances, and none of them ever told me their names. During the times I was

accompanied from those dances three or four different men had connections with me on two or

three different occasions each, and I would say as far as I can remember that my periods stopped

some time in July 1945."25 Davis appears not to have been concerned either with preserving her

reputation or with becoming pregnant, two of the strongest motivations for remaining celibate. The

behavior of women like Davis prompted enormous concern among Catholic prelates about the

dangers of “foreign" cultural influences: she attended dance halls regularly and engaged in sexual

activity as part of that routine. Davis's case was the exception rather than the rule in terms of the

links between sexual immorality and dance halls, however she and women like her represented

the church’s worst fears regarding the moral and sexual behavior of young unmarried women.26

Because many of the dance halls were unlicensed and therefore unregulated, church and state

25Central Criminal Court, File 1D 29 11.

26ln fact only 4 of the women accused of infanticide suggested that the sexual liaisons that led to their pregnancy occurred as part of an evening out at a dance hall.

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officials were hard-pressed to control the inter-mingling, in unchaperoned environments, of

working-class women and men, particularly where the availability of alcohol lowered inhibitions

and clouded judgments. Davis would have been described as “giddy" by contemporaries, and as

in Hayes's case, it is difficult to equate her actions with the fear, shame, and desperation that

motivated some women to commit infanticide.

Hayes's and Davis’s sexual histories challenge the traditional assumptions about

unmarried women’s celibacy, and portrayals of and unmarried mothers as the unfortunate or

unlucky victims of a “fall” or lapse in morality. This is not to suggest that all women, even a

majority, were as sexually experienced as Hayes and Davis, but the records of infanticide trials

suggest that women did not always avoid opportunities for sexual experimentation, nor were they

always shy and embarrassed about discussing sexual matters with gardai and court officials.

References in the Irish Folklore Commission archives to folk contraceptive and abortion methods,

assessed in light of strenuous efforts on the part of the state to prevent books on family planning

and English newspapers containing advertisements for contraceptives from falling into the hands

of working-class women and men, suggest that women actively sought out methods to prevent or

abort unwanted pregnancies.27 Admittedly those methods were untrustworthy, but the fact that

women used them indicates a desire to control their fertility. Some women may have turned to

these folk methods hoping to avoid pregnancy while fulfilling their husbands sexual demands;

however, there is no reason to assume that only married women wishing to avoid another

pregnancy were the only women who sought folk contraceptive methods.28 This last possibility is

27All of the best-selling family planning guides appeared on the Register of Banned Books from the late 1930s to the 1960s, as were newspapers that consistently carried “lewd" advertisements for contraceptive devices. See Register of Banned Books (Dublin: Government Stationery Office, 1930-1960).

28Michael Solomons, former obstetrician with the Rotunda Hospital, recalled that as a young trainee doctor he and a colleague delivered a child with a Guinness bottle-cap lodged in its forehead, a misguided effort on the part of the mother to prevent conception. See Michael Solomons, Pro-Life? The Irish Question (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1992), 6.

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bolstered by the surprisingly numerous instances in which women arrested on a single count of

infanticide subsequently were found to have committed the crime more than once as part of either

a long-term union or numerous short-term relationships.29

Maggie Shea was charged in June 1953 with murdering her newborn infant after

telling a public health nurse that she had borne and murdered many children over the years.

When they dug up the floor of Shea's home gardai uncovered the bones of several children,

although the precise number that Shea killed over the years was never determined. Shea was

married during the entire time that the murders were committed; while her husband worked in

England she carried on a long-standing affair with Peter Connor, the father of all the murdered

children. After her arrest Shea was taken to the Carlow Mental Hospital for evaluation, and

although the doctor concluded that she was mentally unbalanced he believed the veracity of her

statements about the children:

She told me she had killed six or seven of her babies, that she wasn’t sure of the number. She didn’t say when she had killed them, that is she did not give the dates, but she said she had killed them shortly after their birth. She said she wanted to inform the Guards, so that she might be punished for what she had done. I believed that it was not a delusion, that what she was saying was true.30

The fact that Shea became pregnant on almost a yearly basis and systematically murdered the

resulting children suggests the possibility that her extra-marital affair, and the death of her

children, were not moral issues for her. Infanticide perhaps became a means through which Shea

carried on a sexual relationship outside of marriage while avoiding the burden of motherhood.

Shea was married, sexually active outside of marriage, and unwilling to accept the reproductive

ramifications of her sexual activity. While Shea’s case was extreme relative to other infanticide

29Thirty-five of the women tried in the Central Criminal Court of murder, manslaughter, infanticide, or concealment of birth admitted to having several sexual partners and/or more than one illegitimate child prior to the pregnancy that led to infanticide that led to their arrest.

30Central Criminal Court, File V15 14 47.

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cases, there are examples of other young women, married and unmarried, who sought similar

means of exercising some control over their sexuality and fertility, and who did not accept as

inevitable the maternal responsibilities that resulted from their sexual liaisons.

Maire Wogan was convicted in 1933 of concealment of birth after her newborn

infant was discovered wrapped in a blanket in her bedroom. Wogan insisted that she had not

murdered the child, although she admitted wrapping it in a blanket while it was alive, knowing and

intending that it would die. When asked who the father was she replied: “The same fellow as

before, Martin Tighe it is three times - he is the father of my third baby and the third time I have

been arrested.”31 There was a certain matter-of-factness in Wogan’s attitude: her previous arrest

record indicates that she knew what she was doing, and the possibility of legal action and even

imprisonment apparently served as no deterrent to extra-marital sexual activity or infanticide. It is

not clear whether Wogan was convicted in relation to the earlier infant deaths although it seems

likely that she either was acquitted or given a light sentence, perhaps sending the inadvertent

message that the courts tolerated such crimes.32 Wogan's history of infanticide underscores both

the leniency typically extended to female defendants, and the limits of judicial tolerance. The judge

sentenced Wogan to prison although she was convicted on the lesser concealment of birth

charge, and in all likelihood he was influenced to some extent by her previous record.33

31Central Criminal Court, File 1D 33 64.

32Wogan was not convicted of these earlier crimes in the Central Criminal Court. She may have been accused but released without charge, or she hay have been tried in a district or circuit court. Without knowing when the earlier crimes were committed it would be difficult to trace circuit court records or newspaper accounts, and impossible to trace the crimes if she was tried in the district court.

33Of the 66 defendants convicted in the Central Criminal Court of concealment of birth, 15 (including Wogan) were given prison sentences. Of that 15, 3 defendants were men, 6 were not the mothers of the dead infants, and 2 were married.

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While “promiscuous” women, and women who committed infanticide on more

than one occasion, violated society’s most fundamental tenets of appropriate maternal, moral, and

sexual behavior, courts did not always use a woman’s previous sexual history as an excuse for

excessive harshness. Both Hayes and Davis pleaded guilty, to manslaughter and concealment of

birth respectively, and sentenced to confinement in magdalen asylums, typical sentences for

women convicted on a first offence and for whom “moral rehabilitation” was still possible. Maggie

Shea pleaded guilty to infanticide and was sentenced to three years' penal servitude, a harsh

sentence relative to other women, but mild considering that she admitted to killing seven children.

Had Shea been convicted prior to the 1949 infanticide act likely she would have been convicted of

murder and sentenced to death, commuted to life in prison. The fact that courts were willing to

take a more lenient view of women committing infanticide essentially meant that women who used

infanticide as a regular form of “birth control” were treated no more harshly than those who

resorted to it out of fear, shame, or desperation. In other words, in spite of official efforts to

regulate female sexual and reproductive activities, and to limit them to church-sanctified marriage,

some women used infanticide as an effective means of circumventing church and state control

and determining for themselves how their sexual and reproductive lives would be conducted, and

law and prevailing judicial practice essentially allowed them to do so.

The cases discussed thus far illustrate the broad range of circumstances that

compelled women to kill their illegitimate children. While courts sought to distinguish between

moral failings and crimira! behavior, women themselves were guided less by moral or ethical

questions, concerns about sin and forgiveness, fears of heaven and hell, or even the possibility of

legal action or imprisonment, than by the ordinary forces that punctuated their existence: abject

poverty, the rejection of lovers, fear of what family and friends might think, and their own sexual

desires and ambivalence about their maternity. Whatever the motivation behind a woman’s

decision to commit infanticide, all women had in common the fact that in engaging in extra-marital

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sex and committing infanticide, they had to weigh their own values, morals, attitudes and

expectations, against the financial and social hardships they would face if they kept their

illegitimate children, and the legal penalties for killing them. It is clear that regardless of their

particular circumstances all women faced a difficult choice, and in many cases may have felt that

they had no choice at all in a society that left them with limited access to effective contraceptive

methods and few alternatives in dealing with unwanted pregnancies.

Family and Community Responses to Infanticide

In some cases infanticide and illegitimacy reflected as much on families and

communities as on female defendants, and the testimonies of witnesses and co-conspirators—

family members, partners, and friends- demonstrate the subtle and overt ways that families and

communities guided the decisions women made in coping with their pregnancies, as well as the

stake that families and communities had in determining the fate of illegitimate children. While

some women committed infanticide because they were convinced that family and friends would

reject them, others hoped that killing their babies would spare their families disgrace and shame.

How families responded to unwanted pregnancy and infanticide was rooted not only in law or the

moral demands of their faith, but in “what the neighbors would think.” Some family members

conspired in the crime, believing it less unpalatable than having other family members or

neighbors discover the pregnancy of an unwed daughter. Others claimed ignorance of the

pregnancy and infanticide, and sacrificed their daughters to the mercy of the courts and the

magdalen asylum regime in order to preserve their own standing in the community. Some of the

most revealing testimonies are those that suggest that family members, and mothers in particular,

not only knew of their daughters’ pregnancies but also were present at the birth and assisted in

ending the child’s life or concealing its birth. The involvement of family members in individual

cases of infanticide offers insight into the role families and communities played in defining and

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regulating the moral and sexual behavior of its members. It also reveals the values, beliefs, and

priorities that determined who would be drawn in and forgiven and who would be ostracized and

punished, and the lengths to which family members would go to protect either their own or their

daughter’s status and reputation in the community.

The reaction of Teresa McCormack’s father to her suspected pregnancy was an

extreme but not necessarily unusual example of the way that fathers responded to their unmarried

daughters’ pregnancies, and perhaps accounts for McCormack’s sense of desperation.

McCormack testified under oath that two months before she was due to give birth her father

demanded to know if the rumors he had been hearing— that McCormack was expecting a child—

were true. McCormack denied at that time that she was pregnant, and her father threatened to cut

her throat if the rumors proved to be true.34 After she gave birth McCormack tied twine around the

infant’s neck to stop it crying, and when asked why she killed the child she said: “I was afraid of

[my mother] and father, because if my mother knew it she would tell my father.”35 McCormack’s

mother also suspected McCormack’s pregnancy, although she seems to have been more fearful

of her husband’s reaction than she was angry with or ashamed of her daughter. During the trial

the judge castigated Mr. McCormack’s behavior as “unchristian” and suggested that while he

understood the shame and anger that parents naturally felt when their daughters disappointed

them, nonetheless as parents they had a responsibility to support their children unconditionally.36

In this case, the judge’s expectations of parental support and mutual responsibility clashed with

the priorities that framed family and community relationships and informed responses to unwed

pregnancy, illegitimacy, and infanticide. Mr. McCormack's status in the community outweighed his

34Central Criminal Court, File 1D 44 47.

35ibid.

26Offaly Independent, 23 June 1934, 7.

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parental obligations or his affection for his daughter, and no one in the family or community seems

to have been surprised by his reaction.

Teresa McCormack’s mother suspected that McCormack was pregnant but took

no active role in concealing the child’s birth and death. Other mothers of unmarried mothers-to-be

were not so reticent in conspiring to kill or conceal the birth of illegitimate children, particularly

when their reputation in the community was at stake. Rose McLoughlin’s daughter Carmel gave

birth in the Coombe Hospital; within 24 hours of Carmel’s release from hospital the child was

dead.37 This in itself was not unusual; what was unusual was that while Mrs. McLoughlin was

complicit in the death and concealment of the child, she also implicated other family members to

hide her own guilt. Initially she told gardai that Carmel had boarded the child out with her aunt

Ellen Browne. McLoughlin finally admitted that the child was dead, claiming that it was overlain

during the night, and that she had disposed of the child’s body in the River Barrow “...to hide any

disgrace from my daughter and myself."38 Medical evidence indicated that the child had been

stabbed several times and strangled with a handkerchief wrapped tightly around its neck,

representing an unusual degree of violence. Rose McLoughlin was more concerned with the

“disgrace" that would befall her family should Carmel’s pregnancy become known, than with the

theological or moral implications of the willful and violent murder of a newborn infant. Both

McLoughlins were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to penal servitude. These sentences

are particularly harsh, and one can only speculate as to why the judge imposed them. The

McLoughlins lied about what happened to the child and then involved innocent family members in

their scheme, suggesting that they were trying to hide something and were, at least in part,

motivated by malicious intent. Worse still, they perpetrated violence against the child, further

37Central Criminal Court, File 1D 60 61.

38ibid.

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distinguishing their behavior from the actions of “typical” infanticide defendants. It is interesting

that, in spite of lack of evidence as to who actually killed the infant. Rose McLoughlin was given a

longer prison sentence than Carmel, further underscoring the leniency with which courts typically

treated the mothers of dead infants in comparison with other defendants, even when there was a

hint of criminality in their actions.

The participation of family members in the death of newborn infants illustrate the

complexity of family relationships in the sometimes oppressive and stultifying atmosphere of

small-town Ireland, and the ways that individuals and families negotiated the often conflicting

demands of family love and loyalty, status and reputation, morality and immorality, and basic

human compassion and decency. Ellen Ross argues, in Love and Toil, that financial pressures

sometimes took precedence over parental love and nurture, and the reaction of some parents to

their daughters' pregnancy and infanticide reveals the other external forces that shaped parent-

child relationships.39 The home was not always a “haven” against the pressures of the outside

world but, indeed, the place where the pressures of the outside world were played out in most

intimate and minute form. In some cases these pressures caused tensions between parents with

high hopes and expectations for their children, and children whose behavior was embarrassing

and disappointing. But there were cases, like that of Elizabeth and Cathleen Kelly, where parents

rose above the disapproval of neighbors and friends and supported their daughters through the

most trying of ordeals. Elizabeth Kelly was charged, along with her daughter Cathleen, with the

murder of Cathleen’s illegitimate child. Cathleen Kelly already had two illegitimate children whom

her parents helped to support, and she had informed her parents about the third pregnancy.

Cathleen Kelly falsely accused her mother of killing the child, and initially her mother was charged

with murder. Still Kelly’ parents stood behind their daughter “My daughter Cathleen is there

39Ross, Love and Toil, 9.

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present and she knows I was not present when the child was bom. I did what I could when I

returned. She knows the child was dead when I came in. God forgive her for drawing that on me.

That is all have to say. I would be very sorry to have a hand in any of her children if she had

twenty-five of them."40 While it is clear that in some cases parents responded to unwed

pregnancy and infanticide based on their own concerns and priorities rather than their children’s

well-being, the Kelly case illustrates the bonds of support, loyalty, and affection that sustained

families in hard times. The Kelly family were atypical, at least in the context of infanticide cases,

both in their vocal and vehement defense of their daughter, and in their willingness to place their

daughter’s well-being above the possible censure and disapproval of family, friends, and

community.

The most typical scenario involving family members was that of mother and

daughter conspiring to conceal a pregnancy from fathers and neighbors, or sisters endeavoring to

hide pregnancies from parents. In very rare cases fathers also conspired in the death or

concealment of the birth of their daughters’ newborn infants. The trial of Delores Mitchell and her

father John thus is unusual and noteworthy. Delores bore an illegitimate child in 1935, apparently

the third illegitimate child she had borne 41 Gardai confronted the Mitchells about the rumors

rampant in the town that Delores Mitchell recently had given birth again; initially Joseph Mitchell

denied it: “Don’t you know I reported the last child she had but there is nothing like that in it at all

now."42 While Joseph Mitchell denied knowing anything about the birth of the baby, Delores

Mitchell claimed that her father had helped her to conceal it: “I baptized the child when I found it

40Central Criminal Court, File 1C 94 57.

41 Delores Mitchell acknowledged to gardai that she had given birth to two children previously, and Joseph Mitchell’s statement implied that at least one of the children had died at or shortly after birth.

42Central Criminal Court, File 1D 56 23.

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was alive and I left it there then till morning and I liked to see it nicely dressed but was unable to

do it. and I rolled it in a little sack and took it out to the garden. I told my father not to handle it rude

and to leave it down easily for fear there would be too much weight over it, so that I could pray

when I would see it."43 Joseph Mitchell was convicted of concealment of birth, and Delores

Mitchell’s allegation notwithstanding, it seems that Mitchell's conviction was based solely on the

fact that he was aware of the birth of the child but did not report it. What is interesting about the

case is the matter-of-fact way that Joseph Mitchell discussed his daughter’s previous

pregnancies. It is not clear what happened to Delores Mitchell's earlier children, but Joseph

Mitchell appears not to have been overly concerned either with Delores's pregnancy, or with what

the neighbors thought about it. There may have been a certain pragmatism in Joseph Mitchell’s

attitude: his wife was dead, and Delores Mitchell looked after the other children and the family

home. Turning Delores Mitchell out would have deprived the Mitchells of vital domestic and farm

labor. It also is possible, although highly speculative, that Delores Mitchell's pregnancies were the

result of incest. Joseph Mitchell was aware of all of the pregnancies and, in at least one case, was

involved in concealing the birth of a child, if not in the child’s death. The Mitchells lived in a rural

community, Delores apparently on her own with her father and brother; there was no mention of a

lover or partner, and Joseph Mitchell’s matter-of-fact acceptance of his daughter's pregnancies,

and the death of the subsequent infants, was unusual and extraordinary.44

43Central Criminal Court, File 1D 56 23.

^Incest was implied in three of the infanticide cases heard before the central criminal court although in none of these cases did the court entertain the defendant’s claim that she had been the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of her father. In one case, heard before the Dublin Circuit Court, Margaret Gibney was convicted of concealment of birth and sentenced to two years in a magdalen asylum. At the same sitting of the Circuit Court her father was convicted of incest and sentenced to five years in prison. See Central Criminal Court, Trial Record Book, 1D 11 99. Four other men were convicted of incest in the Dublin Circuit Court in the years 1930-1940, and they too were given sentences of 5 years penal servitude.

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Family responses to infanticide reflected a complex evaluation of practical and

moral considerations. Most families reacted to the pregnancy of a daughter or sibling first and

foremost based on a consideration of its affect on their standing in the community and their

economic or material well-being. Some family members actively participated in the death or

concealment of the child, placing the risk of being caught lower on their scale of priorities than

bringing an illegitimate child into the family. But there also are rare glimpses into family

relationships that were based on genuine affection and mutual responsibility that withstood the

external pressures of social censure or disapproval. As with most other aspects of social history,

the intimate interactions between families and communities, the values and attitudes that tied

them together as well as the disappointments and dashed hopes that could tear them apart, thus

far have received little attention from Irish historians. The records of infanticide cases offer one

window into these relationships and interactions, facilitating a greater understanding of family and

community life in mid-twentieth-century Ireland.

Religion and Class in Infanticide Cases

The vast majority of women accused of infanticide were Catholic, which is not

surprising in a country where roughly 95 percent of the population professed Catholicism.45

Although their actions violated central strictures of their faith system, Catholic women accused of

infanticide did not necessarily reject their faith and, indeed, often drew on it for guidance, comfort,

and forgiveness. Many women's testimonies reveal that they attended church and the sacraments

45ln some cases the religion of the defendant was obvious in their statements or those witnesses. When the religious persuasion was not explicitly stated the most obvious way of discerning the religion of the accused was in her sentence, as magdalen asylums did not accept non-Catholic defendants. In some cases, particularly where the defendant was Protestant, religious persuasion was noted in the Central Criminal Court’s Trial Record Books.

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regularly, in some cases confessed their “sins" to the parish priest, and made genuine, if clumsy,

efforts to ensure that their dead infants would not spend an eternity in limbo.46 The words and

experiences of women who appear in infanticide records illustrate the ways that ordinary women

and men integrated Catholicism into their daily lives, but also suggest that their understanding of

Catholicism was a more complex affair than simply going to church on Sunday, saying the rosary,

and abiding by the priest’s commands. If ordinary women and men had clearly defined notions of

sin, they also seem to have been confident of forgiveness; sex outside of marriage, the desperate

or deliberate murder of newborn infants, may have been “wrong" according to Catholic teaching,

but for the women and men involved it could be reconciled with their own understanding of sin,

contrition, and forgiveness. Mairead Malloy’s poignant efforts on behalf of her newborn child

reflected the strange and complex interplay of faith and pragmatism, sin and forgiveness: “I

baptized the baby in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost before I put it in

a bucket of water. I said the Apostles Creed and then threw Holy W ater on it."47 Malloy killed her

baby but, in her eyes, she also “saved it," perhaps even believed that her child was better off. And,

in all likelihood, these small rituals brought solace during what must have been traumatic and

painful ordeals.

While some women believed that their individual efforts were sufficient to ensure

their infants’ eternal fate— that they did not need a priest to intervene between themselves and

God— others were not so confident of their salvation and saw the priest as a source, perhaps of

comfort, but more importantly of absolution and forgiveness. Maire Wogan confessed her crime to

her parish priest, which led ultimately to a full confession to gardai48 W hat is particularly striking

46These measures included giving the child a “lay" or private baptism, saying prayers over the body of the infant, or burying the infant in consecrated ground.

47Central Criminal Court, File 1D 11 95.

48Central Criminal Court, File 1D 33 64.

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about Wogan's confession is that she had killed two children previously, apparently without a

guilty conscience. Had she not confessed to the priest in the third instance she might have got

away all three crimes. The fact that she sought the priest suggests that her guilty conscience

caught up with her, and perhaps that she believed only the direct intercession of the priest could

put her right with God again. Like Wogan, Marie McHale made a confession to her parish priest,

after which she also confessed to the gardai.49 McHale admitted giving birth to a child on the

beach, claiming that as the child was being bom she pulled it and flung it into the sea.50 Medical

evidence contradicted McHale’s account of the birth and death of her baby but, in her eyes,

confession to the parish priest meant forgiveness, even if her confession was tainted with lies or

half-truths. For both Wogan and McHale it was not only the strength of their faith that mattered,

but also the appearance of piety that they projected in the community, and in the courts. Although

the evidence provided in infanticide records is not sufficient to explore the issue to a significant

degree, the behavior of McHale, Wogan, and other women accused of infanticide raises

compelling questions about religious practices and beliefs in twentieth-century Ireland, and the

links between outward shows of piety and a genuine belief in Catholicism as both a faith system

and a way of life. There was evidence of a deep and abiding faith among Irish women and men,

even among those who repeatedly and willfully violated church teaching. But one wonders

whether this appearance of piety reflected firmly held beliefs and deep convictions, or whether

some segments of the population embraced Catholicism superficially as a matter of convenience

in a society that expected no less than full acceptance of and adherence to Catholic principles.

Only rarely did non-Catholic women appear in infanticide cases, so it is

impossible to draw conclusions about how religious persuasion might have influenced women's

49Central Criminal Court, File 1D 11 94.

50ibid.

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actions or the responses of families and communities, or their own perceptions of their behavior in

relation to unwed pregnancy. What is striking, however, is the role played by the local Protestant

clergyman in the two cases involving Protestant defendants. The nature of this involvement raises

the possibility that there were differences in how the churches as institutions, and individual

clergymen of the two faiths, perceived their responsibility to vulnerable members of the community

including unmarried mothers, illegitimate children, and women accused of infanticide. Fiona

Bolger gave birth in 1948 to an illegitimate child who was taken into care by her pastor, Reverend

Giff, and sent to the Protestant Children’s Fold Home. Bolger subsequently married the father of

the child, prompting Giff to return the child to her in August 1949. Bolger pleaded with Reverend

Giff to keep the child but he refused based on his firm conviction that the best and most

appropriate place for the child was with her natural parents.51 Giff reported the child's return to the

local gardai. perhaps indicating a fear that Bright would harm the child. Gardai visited the Bolger

home regularly to check on the child and on one such visit discovered the child dead of starvation

and neglect.

Reverend Giff returned the child to Bolger following her marriage because,

according to law and Protestant theology, marriage legitimized the child so that it could be raised

“...in all respects as a legitimate child, and so save her from the stigma of illegitimacy."52 This

belief was common to Protestant and Catholic teaching but it was more theoretical than real in

the Catholic context. In Catholic thinking a child born outside of wedlock was inherently tainted

and flawed, and even the marriage of its parents could not erase the stain of its moral weakness.

Catholic social observers believed that the best place for illegitimate children was a religious

51Central Criminal Court, 1D 22 96.

52Central Criminal Court, 1D 22 96 See also Legitimacy Act, 1931 (Act 13 of 1931). Republic of Ireland, Irish Statute Book: Acts of the Oireachtas 192201997 (Oxfordshire, UK: Jutastat UK, 1999), CD-Rom.

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institution that would provide proper moral guidance to help the child to overcome, to the extent

possible, the social and moral disadvantages inherent in illegitimacy. Bolger's case alone is not a

firm enough foundation upon which to base comparisons between Catholic and Protestant

attitudes toward and treatment of unmanned motherhood and illegitimacy. But it does suggest

possibilities for further scholarship, particularly in the ways that the two communities in Ireland

conceived of motherhood and morality, and of sin and forgiveness, loyalty and mutual

responsibility.

Official discourses assumed that the “typical" infanticide defendant was a poor

woman, and the judicial treatment of infanticide sometimes represented a clash between middle-

class values and notions of respectability, and the priorities and realities that guided decision

making among ordinary women and men. Only rarely did middle-class women appear before the

courts on infanticide charges, and the judicial handling of these cases elucidate the class

assumptions that underscored official and popular treatments of infanticide. Ethel Allen was an

atypical infanticide defendant because she was a Protestant whose family was affluent and highly

respected in the community. The lengths to which Allen's parents went to protect Allen, and their

efforts in court to prove their respectability, illustrate the stake that middle-class families had in

dealing privately and discretely with unwanted pregnancies. Allen was charged in 1937 with the

murder of her newborn infant. In their testimony Allen’s parents, neighbors, and friends insisted

that she was “not right in the head” and unable to care for herself, and thus not responsible for her

actions. According to her stepmother, Victoria Allen, Edith: “... was very excited in the yard when

we met her. W e had to force her into the house. I don't think she was accountable for what she

was doing. She is not normal."53 The prison medical officer, who examined Allen prior to trial,

testified as to her mental state: “She apparently understands the seriousness of the charge

against her, but it does not seem to worry her. I doubt if she would be able to instruct Counsel for

53Central Criminal Court, File 1D 60 58.

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her defense. Although I cannot find any delusions or hallucinations present, I don’t think she is

mentally stable. She is not, in my opinion, certifiable as Lunatic, but she is mentally defective."54

Allen was convicted of concealment of birth and sentenced to two years'

confinement in the Bethany Home, a Protestant equivalent of the magdalen asylum. With the

support of family, friends, and their local rector, the Allen family actively lobbied for her release.

While these efforts acknowledged Ethel Allen’s crime, they also insisted on the Allens’

respectability and status in the community, implicitly pressing the point that a “respectable"

middle-class woman like Ethel Allen could only commit a crime like infanticide if she was mentally

unbalanced. A letter from the local rector reinforced this view:

They live about two miles from the town of Ballyshannon in a considerable farm containing about 92 acres statute, which I understand pays a rent to the land commission. Both the father of the girl, William Allen and is wife Mrs. Victoria Allen are respectable parishioners and their home is a fit one not only for Ethel Allen but for any person to live in. They have a large two storied house, and are very correct in all their dealings. They have three children, all young, but the present marriage and they treated Ethel Allen well, the same as their own children. Edith has always been mentally defective, and though she went to school regularly for a good many years could never learn anything, and is almost quite unable to read or write.55

The Allens' respectability was reaffirmed in a letter from a family friend: “The house is kept in

good order and most respectable and William Allen and his wife I am informed and believe are

anxious to have her home, and they would take care of her properly and look after her well.”56 It

is not clear if the Allens knew that Ethel was pregnant and about to give birth, but their efforts to

exonerate her imply that, had they known, they would have ensured that the matter was handled

privately.

^ ib id .

55Central Criminal Court, File 1D 60 58.

56ibid.

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While it would be unwise to generalize based on Ethel Allen's case, it is safe to

suggest that middle-class women did experience unexpected and unwanted pregnancies,

although their families and communities had a greater stake in dealing discretely with such

matters than did their working-class counterparts. The majority of unmarried middle-class

pregnancies went unnoticed, at least by lawmakers, judges, and juries, projecting the false

impression that immorality and illicit sexual activity occurred only in working-class relationships,

and thus that immorality was a distinctly working-class problem. That falsehood is compounded by

the fact that official conventions of morality and sexuality specifically targeted the sexual and

reproductive activities of the working class, and working class women especially. Infanticide was

seen as a distinctively working-class crime not only because lawmakers and judges assumed that

poverty and desperation were primary motivating factors, but also because working-class women

and men were thought to be inherently morally weaker than their better-off counterparts, and thus

more susceptible to the temptations of illicit sex and the “easy" solution of infanticide to hide their

immorality.

Conclusion

Women committed infanticide for a variety of reasons that reflected their tenuous

financial position and their marginalized social status. Some women were motivated by

desperation, poverty, fear of family and community reactions, and extreme isolation. Kate

O'Shea's lament that “no one wanted me when I had the baby" could have been the lament of any

number of defendants who were rejected by family, lovers, and employers, or who feared that they

would be if their pregnancies became public knowledge. The personal narratives of infanticide

also highlight the constraints married women faced when their husbands failed them, or when

their marriages were troubled and they sought solace and companionship elsewhere. But

evidence also offers a brief glimpse at the bonds of affection, loyalty, and mutual responsibility, as

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well as the pragmatism, survival instinct, or sheer lust, that kept couples together. While the

records of infanticide are not a sufficient basis from which to draw inferences about the nature of

romantic and sexual relationships between women and men, they do offer some tantalizing

insights that present possibilities for future scholarship. Women and men engaged in a variety of

emotional, companionate, and sexual relationships that did not always fall into the two-parent,

nuclear family or unmarried celibacy paradigms, and these intimate family and sexual

relationships thus far have been entirely ignored by social and feminist historians.

Fear and desperation may have been significant factors in man cases, but for

some women infanticide also was a logical means of balancing their ambivalence about

motherhood with sexual temptation and desire. Religious moralist discourse extolling the virtues

of celibacy for unmarried mothers, and fertility and a natural “maternal instinct” for married

women, had little resonance in the lives of ordinary women for whom sex may have been

customary in their relationships with men, and for whom children represented a drain on financial

resources or simply an impediment to their way of life. It is clear from these accounts of infanticide

that not all women wanted to be celibate, nor did they want to be mothers. The evidence

presented in infanticide cases begs a re-evaluation of constructions of sexuality, maternity, and

family life that were disseminated through moralist literature and have been accepted uncritically

by feminist and social historians. Such a re-evaluation would facilitate a greater understanding of

the interplay of official values and assumptions and popular realities, priorities, and beliefs, in

shaping ordinary women’s and men's perceptions and experiences of Catholicism, morality, and

sexuality.

Family responses to infanticide reflected a complex evaluation of practical and

moral considerations in which affection between parent and child did not always play a central

role Most families responded to the pregnancy of a daughter or sibling first and foremost based

on a consideration of how it would affect their standing in the community. Some family members

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actively participated in the death or concealment of the child, placing the risk of being caught

lower in their scale of priorities than bringing an illegitimate child into the family. But there also are

insights into family relationships that were based on genuine affection and mutual responsibility

that withstood the external pressures of social censure or disapproval, or even legal action. As

with most other aspects of social history, the intimate interactions between families and

communities, the values and attitudes that tied them together as well as the disappointments and

dashed hopes that could tear them apart, thus far have been neglected by Irish historians. The

records of infanticide cases offer one window into these relationships and interactions, facilitating

a greater understanding of the intricate ways that intimate family relationships shaped and were

shaped by community values and priorities.

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SOCIAL OUTCASTS II: ILLEGITIMATE AND

NEGLECTED CHILDREN

Introduction

The institutionalization of unmarried mothers was both a manifestation of the

intolerance of “difference" in mid-twentieth-century Irish society and a reflection of the state’s

general policy relating to needy, vulnerable, and problematic populations. The institutional regime

claimed to protect women from their own weaknesses and human frailties, but more importantly it

protected “respectable" society from the taint of immorality attached to unmarried mothers and

their children, and it protected the image of piety and purity that represented Ireland at home and

abroad. While the magdalen asylum facilitated the breaking of a woman from her past sins, it also

effected her separation from family, community, and the child whom she was not permitted to rear

even if she had had the financial resources with which to do so. Illegitimate and vulnerable

children also endured an institutional regime that stripped them of their individual and family

identities and emphasized the fact that they were “unwanted", not necessarily by their mothers but

certainly by a society unwilling to accept the financial burden of their maintenance and fearful of

their potential for juvenile delinquency and anti-social behavior.

This chapter argues, drawing on official discussions and policy and the first-hand

experiences of former institutional inmates, that the Catholic doctrine of the sanctity of human,

and especially child, life, and the value that early nationalist lawmakers placed on child life, bore

no resemblance to the way church and state dealt with illegitimate, problematic, and vulnerable

children in the twentieth century. Lawmakers and the hierarchy did not always regard children as

future citizens to be valued and molded, but often as dangerous and burdensome populations to

161

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be confined, regulated, and controlled. The state, with the assistance and cooperation of the

church, adopted the institutionalization of unwanted, vulnerable children as the most effective and

inexpensive means of controlling the deviance of allegedly bad parents and tempering the

inherent immoral and delinquent tendencies of poor and illegitimate children. District court

justices, social workers, and public assistance authorities sanctioned the removal of legitimate

and illegitimate children from their homes, and the state spent hundreds of thousands of pounds

annually to maintain them in institutions, in many cases solely on the grounds of abject poverty.

The relative ease with which church and state severed the bonds between parent and child

contrasts sharply with the state’s emphasis on the family as the most fundamental unit of society

“...possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law,"

and with the parental and family rights enshrined in the 1937 constitution.1 Historians and social

observers have taken for granted that the sanctity of the family, Catholic morality, and frugal

simplicity formed the cornerstones of the independent state’s social policy and thus have scarcely

questioned the methods utilized in the mid-twentieth century, not only to cope with perceived

family breakdown but, indeed, to make family life conform to a narrowly defined “norm”. The

treatment of needy and vulnerable children shatters the myth of family defined in constitutional law

and reveals the extent to which notions of family life were contrived to suit specific political, moral,

and economic agendas. The state reserved the right, in “exceptional cases", to strip parents of the

custody of their children, and admittedly some parents were neglectful and abusive. In reality,

however, the state terminated custody rights in far more than “exceptional" cases, often only

because of poverty, further undermining the insistence on the part of church and state that the

family was the most important, respected, and protected unit in twentieth-century Irish society.

1 Bunreacht na h&reann (Constitution of Ireland), Article 41 (Dublin: Government Stationery Office, 1995).

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This chapter also considers how and why church and state brought so many

children into state care and custody with so little resistance from parents or other concerned

parties. The process of committing children to institutions or placing them for adoption involved

interactions between and among religious authorities, civil servants, social workers associated

with groups such as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) and

the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society (CPRS), district court officials, and individuals,

families, and communities. These interactions reveal an imbalance in power relations, particularly

between poor parents and social workers who evaluated their fitness as parents according to

middle-class conventions of appropriate behavior. But they also suggest that for some parents the

committal or adoption of a child was a relief, especially in families plagued by endemic poverty, for

whom one more mouth to feed could spell the difference between survival and utter destitution.

The majority of children committed to industrial schools were brought before the court by

inspectors for the NSPCC, either in response to a complaint from priests, gardai, or neighbors, or

in the course of inspectors' regular visits to poor areas. District court justices rarely denied a

request for committal, and rarely did parents insist that the state give them the assistance that

would permit them to exercise their constitutional right to maintain custody of their children. In

many cases the NSPCC inspector alone seems to have decided parental fitness and determined

which children would be allowed to remain at home and which would be sent to industrial schools.

NSPCC inspectors held poor parents to middle-class standards of child-care, cleanliness, and

hygiene, with no appreciation of the circumstances in which most poor women and men lived that

made the ideal virtually impossible to achieve.

The treatment of illegitimate, vulnerable, and poor children in the mid-twentieth

century, like popular experiences of and responses to infanticide, reveals a complex interplay of

national or “universal” definitions of childhood and family life, local conceptualizations of

sociability, respectability, and inclusion, and the realities of daily life for poor families. While the

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industrial school system provided for both Catholic and Protestant children, by the 1920s, when

responsibility for the system shifted from British prison authorities to the Irish Department of

Education, the last Protestant school had already closed.2 District court justices had the authority

to send Protestant children to a handful of orphanages, but most of these institutions were

ineligible for the capitation grants available to officially recognized schools. Only a tiny fraction of

the thousands of children sent to industrial schools in the mid-twentieth century were Protestant.

While this is due in part to population trends, it may also indicate the different ways that Protestant

and Catholic communities conceived of loyalty and mutual responsibility, particularly in caring for

needy and vulnerable individuals and groups. Most of the children confined to industrial schools

ended up there after neighbors, friends, or parish priests complained to gardai or the local branch

of the NSPCC that they were neglected or abused by their parents.3 In many cases, although it is

impossible to know how many, neighbors complained not because the children were being

abused or neglected but because they objected to the parents’ lifestyle or simply to the standards

of hygiene and cleanliness maintained in the home.4 The fact that courts rarely dealt with

Protestant children may suggest that Protestant communities supported their neediest members

2Commission of Inquiry into the Reformatory and Industrial School System, 1934- 36 (Dublin: Government Stationery Office, 1936), 8. The last Protestant industrial school closed in 1917.

3According to NSPCC annual reports, only a fraction of cases came to the attention of the NSPCC through their own investigations. The majority of complaints came from “interested” third parties, including neighbors, schoolteachers, parish priests, and the gardai. See Annual Reports of the Dublin Branch (Dublin: NSPCC, 1930-60).

4Of the 7 former inmates who participated in the first episode of RTE’s States of Fear series, 4 were sent to industrial schools, along with their brothers and sisters, because neighbors complained to the NSPCC after the parents separated, or when their widowed mother began dating another man. Two of the former inmates were sent to industrial schools after getting into trouble with the police, and only one was sent because she was illegitimate and her mother could not support her. States of Fear, written and produced by Mary Raftery, Radio Telefis Eireann, RTE Dublin. NSPCC case files also support this conclusion but they cannot be cited in detail here.

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through difficult patches rather than seeking the intervention of local authorities.5 It is also

possible that these communities defined fit and unfit parenting in ways that differed from their

Catholic counterparts, and that in their eyes poverty alone was not sufficient grounds to sever the

ties between parent and child.

The Democratic Programme of the First DAil, which could be read as a “blueprint"

for the independent Irish state’s social agenda, acknowledged the concept of public responsibility

for the care and well-being of all children, not only as the human resources upon which the future

social, political, and economic viability of the state rested, but as valued members, in their own

right, of post-independence Irish society.6 At the same time, the Democratic Programme’s

statement about the value of children also could be read as a justification for the state’s unofficial

policy of institutionalizing children in its insistence that the state’s most fundamental responsibility

was the feeding, clothing, sheltering, and educating of future citizens: “It shall be the first duty of

the Government of the Republic to make provision for the physical, mental, and spiritual well

being of the children to secure that no child shall suffer hunger or cold from lack of food, clothing,

or shelter, but that all shall be provided with the means and facilities requisite for their education

and training as citizens of a Free and Gaelic Ireland.”7 The care and protection of vulnerable or

problem children in the mid-twentieth century underscores the politicization of conceptualizations

of vulnerability and deviance in the service of post-independence political, social, and moral

agendas that had little regard for the needs, interests, or well-being of children as individuals.

Margaret Humphreys and Gillian Wagner examine the practice, from the 1870s to the 1950s, of

5Of the over 2,700 children committed to industrial schools by district courts in Galway and Dublin in the period 1930-1940, none were Protestant. See Galway District Court, Justice's Minute Books, 1930-1940; Dublin Children's Court, Justice Minute Books, 1930-1940.

6Deiil Eireann, Minutes of Proceedings of the First Parliament of the Republic of Ireland 1919-1921 (Dublin: Government Stationery Office, 1921).

7Dciil Eireann, Proceedings of the First Parliament, 23.

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sending “unwanted” children from orphanages and industrial schools in England to institutions and

families in the farthest reaches of the empire, both as a means of disposing of the “problem” at

home and perpetuating a white, English population throughout the empire.8 Orphaned and

abandoned children who came into state care became pawns in England's late nineteenth and

early twentieth-century empire building strategies. Similarly, the institutionalization of Irish children

served as a counterweight to the “paganism" and “liberalism” allegedly inherent in English colonial

rule, and protected innocent Irish children from the “evil" clutches of Protestant proselytizers. The

removal of children from their families and homes also helped to protect the veneer of

“respectability”, piety, and morality that distinguished the native government’s rule from that of the

former Protestant colonizer. The ends may have differed, but the politicization of definitions and

policies relating to childhood in Ireland mirrored those elsewhere in Europe in spite of early

nationalist leaders’ insistence on the importance and value of children in the life of the new

republic.

While the independent Irish state inherited the institutional framework for dealing

with illegitimate and poor children— namely the workhouse and industrial school— from British rule,

the form the system took in Ireland was unique in that the state contributed capitation grants in

respect of each child, but religious orders operated the schools with almost complete autonomy.

What is more, the legal system for committing children to industrial schools was sufficiently vague

that any “concerned party", such as an NSPCC inspector or social worker, could bring a child into

court and request a committal order. In almost all cases district court justices obliged, with little

investigation into family circumstances and background, thus confining children until they reached

their sixteenth birthday. According to the 1925-27 Department of Education report, more children

were confined to industrial schools in Ireland than in England and Wales combined, an

8See Margaret Humphreys, Empty Cradles (London: Corgi, 1997) and Gillian Wagner, Children of the Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992).

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extraordinary statistic given the enormous differences in population size.9 The same report

acknowledged that English poor law institutions housed more children than similar Irish

institutions, not unsurprising given prevailing demographic trends in each country. But this

difference may also suggest that divergent philosophies underpinned the treatment of needy

children: poor law institutions were, in theory, voluntary and temporary stop-gaps for families

experiencing poverty, unemployment, or illness. On the other hand, confinement to industrial

schools represented a permanent, often irrevocable separation of parent and child. Statistical

evidence shows that, into the 1950s, roughly one in ten children who left industrial schools

annually returned to their parents’ custody, while the remainder went directly into employment

secured for them by the school’s resident manager, or into other extern institutions such as

maadalen asylums, county homes, or institutions for “mental defectives".10

Caring for Illegitimate and Vulnerable Children Within the State

In spite of the value that members of the first DSil theoretically invested in

children, as individuals and as members of independent Irish society, social policy in the mid-

twentieth century actually took little account of children and was particularly ill-equipped to deal

with illegitimate children or children whose parents local authorities, neighbors, and parish priests

deemed unfit. Ireland was unusual in that the notion of the “welfare state”, and the concept of

state responsibility for society’s neediest members, were still very much in their infancy even as

they flourished elsewhere in post-World W ar II Europe. Although some of the British initiatives of

the early twentieth century were integrated into the post-independence political and legislative

frameworks, only in the mid-1950s did Irish lawmakers begin to institute a system of social welfare

9Department of Education, Annual Report 1925-27 (Dublin: Government Stationery Office, 1927), 91.

10Department of Education, Annual Reports (Dublin: Government Stationery Office, 1927-1961).

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not based on contributory schemes or institutional relief, and even here children fared badly. No

specific provisions entitled poor parents to assistance through temporary periods of

unemployment, illness, or poverty. The 1939 Public Assistance Act gave local authorities the

option of providing relief through home assistance or institutionalization, but the local authorities

could, and often did, reject apparently legitimate requests for assistance based on a host of

criteria that were not clearly elaborated.11 Committal to industrial schools or other state-funded

institutions was the preferred method of providing for illegitimate or neglected children.12

Many illegitimate children began their institutional lives at birth, in mother and

baby homes overseen by religious orders, or county homes that were part of the state’s network

of poor relief institutions, also under the direct administration of religious orders.13 Most of the

mother and baby homes required unmarried mothers to remain in the homes with their children

for two years unless they could afford to pay a fee in return for which the sisters in charge

arranged an adoption, planned to keep the children themselves, or made private adoption or

fostering arrangements. After two years women left these institutions and their children were

adopted, boarded out, or sent to industrial schools. Most mother and baby homes operated

11This conclusion is supported by NSPCC case files which cannot be cited in detail here.

12Children were confined to industrial schools in one of three ways: committal by a district court; committal by the local authority responsible for its maintenance (in these cases children would first have to come under the custody of the local authorities, which occurred either when a parent voluntarily gave her/his child into their custody, or when the local authorities assumed custody because of some real or perceived shortcoming on the part of parents); or voluntary committal by parents. In the first two cases central government funds and local authority rates maintained the children, and in the third case parents themselves paid regular maintenance charges. Court committals represented the overwhelming majority of cases, with voluntary or local authority committals accounting for, at most, a few hundred children annually.

13ln 1929 there were 756 women who gave birth in county homes and 214 in auxiliary institutions maintained by local authorities. In 1939, the figures were 841 and 315 respectively. It is impossible to know how many more women gave birth in private hospitals and nursing homes, mother and baby homes that were not maintained by the local authorities, or in magdalen asylums. See Department of Local Government and Public Health Reports (Dublin: Government Stationery Office, 1929, 1939).

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privately, outside of any system of state regulation and control, although several of these,

including the Sacred Heart Homes in Counties Cork and Westmeath, qualified under the 1939

Public Assistance Act as extern institutions and thus received capitation grants for the women and

children in their care. Local Authorities in Dublin and Galway also maintained auxiliary homes

specifically for unmarried mothers and their children. These institutions were funded entirely out of

local rates although administered by religious orders, and subject to inspection, under the

Children Acts of 1908 and 1934, by inspectors appointed by the Department of Local Government

and Public Health (renamed the Department of Health in 1945). While inspectors regularly

commented on the fact that children were retained in county and mother and baby homes for far

too long, and encouraged local authorities to step up their efforts to secure suitable foster homes

for children in state care, the conditions of overcrowding, and the tendency to maintain children in

these homes until they were old enough to be sent to industrial schools, prevailed. This trend was

due both to the reluctance on the part of local authorities to expend energy securing good foster

homes when institutionalization provided such an easy and painless alternative, and to a

resistance on the part of religious orders to a boarding-out system that diverted precious financial

resources from institutions to foster homes.

Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of the care of children in mid-twentieth-

century Ireland was that, in any given year, 8,000 to 10,000 children resided in industrial schools,

certified schools, extern institutions, and private (although predominantly religious-run)

orphanages, all of them technically under the oversight of the Departments of Education and

Health.14 Another 1,500 - 2,000 children were boarded out, for a total of 9,500-12,000 children in

care annually. While it is impossible to compare Ireland’s rate of institutionalization with figures

elsewhere in Europe, it does seem that rates of Irish confinement were exceedingly high,

14Figures are based on statistical information published in annual reports of the Departments of Health and Education.

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underscoring both the preference for institutionalization on the part of religious orders and local

authorities, and the ease with which local authorities and district courts stripped allegedly unfit

parents of the custody of their children. While illegitimacy and poverty unquestionably were factors

in the committal of children to industrial schools, the question remains as to why church and state

officials preferred to remove children— illegitimate or otherwise— from the care of their parents

rather than providing assistance to keep families together. The answer lies in part in the fact that,

when the Irish Free State came into existence a vast and extensive religiously-run system existed

to provide for “problem" children, and it was convenient and cost-effective from all perspectives

that the system continue. It could only survive, however, if it retained a guaranteed number of

children at public expense. Taking children away from unmarried mothers and other allegedly unfit

parents thus served financial, social, and political ends: it provided a steady infusion of cash into

the church's mammoth network of convents, agencies, and institutions; it relieved society of its

most potentially troublesome elements; and it relieved the state of responsibility for developing a

secular, state-run system that was cost-effective but that also served the needs of vulnerable

children and their parents.

Although on the surface Department of Health officials expressed a preference

for boarding children out rather than sending them to industrial schools it is clear from

communications between the Department’s inspector of children, Alice Lister, and the local

authorities that the local authorities often ignored the Department’s recommendations and

resisted calls to step up efforts to secure foster families for illegitimate, orphaned, and poor

children. This seeming friction reveals conflicting agendas and philosophies between and among

the Department of Health, who oversaw the system, local authorities who funded it, and the

religious orders who ran the institutions. The inspectors of boarded-out children, employed by the

Department of Health, were most concerned with the best interests of children in state care, and

annual reports as well as reports on individual children often were painstaking in their detail of the

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circumstances in which boarded-out children lived and in their calls for greater oversight and

inspection of foster homes. Alice Litster, the Department of Health inspector who authored most

of the Department’s reports from the 1930s to the 1950s, repeatedly expressed the view that a

foster home was the best place for a child whose own mother or parents were unable to care for

her/him, and that institutionalization should be utilized only as a last resort. Litster often criticized

local authorities’ meager efforts to foster children who would benefit from a stable family

environment:

Children are still being maintained in institutions who might profitably be dealt with otherwise. Although county councils are represented in court cases of proposals to commit children to industrial schools in practice, except in the case of Dublin...applications for the committal of children to industrial schools are not opposed. It appears to be an extremely casual manner of treating the question of the disposal of a child's whole life, that a county council should not make an effort to discover in what manner the child’s best interests will best be secured, whether by committal to an institution, by boarding-out if the child can be dealt with under the boarding out system, or if the family of which the child is a unit cannot be kept together by means of home assistance.15

Miss Litster’s reports regularly expressed frustration that her recommendations regarding the

inspection system or individual children went unheeded. For example, Litster occasionally

recommended the removal of a child from a foster home for a host of reasons from ill treatment to

the advanced age of the foster parents, only to discover during subsequent inspections that local

authorities had taken no action to protect the child in question.16 Litster was not afraid to criticize

the local authorities responsible for boarded-out children. However, while her tenure as a

Department of Health inspector spanned more than twenty years, and she carried an enormous

burden in terms of the number of children for whom she was responsible, it is not at all clear that

her criticisms of the boarding-out system, or of the extent to which local authorities lived up to their

15Report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health, 1935-36 (Dublin: Government Stationery Office, 1936), 390.

16See abstracts of Miss Litster’s reports in Department of Local Government and Public Health Reports (Dublin: Government Stationery Office, 1922-1946).

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responsibility for the children in their care, had any discernible impact on the overall operation of

the system, or on the philosophies that underpinned it.

Local authorities were concerned primarily with the cost of caring for children and

did acknowledge that boarding-out was the least expensive alternative, but they also faced

considerable pressure from religious orders to maintain children in institutions and only rarely did

they attempt to buck that pressure. There is ample evidence in Department of Health files to

indicate that religious orders insisted that institutions were preferable to boarding out, and that

they resisted local authority efforts to remove children from their institutions. Two specific

examples provide insight into the sometimes tense relations between local authorities and

religious orders. The first case involved a young boy who had been removed from an unsuitable

foster home and placed, temporarily, in St. Joseph’s Industrial School, Tralee, County Kerry.

While the inspector of boarded-out children ordered that the child be removed from the school as

soon as a suitable foster home became available, the resident manager of the school pressed the

local authorities to leave the child, based on “...my knowledge of boarded-out children (of whom

not a few have been sent here from conditions similar to those under which [the child] was living) I

am convinced they receive a much better training and education in Industrial Schools than they

can possibly obtain in the average country home which receives them.”17 The second case also

involved the removal of children from St. Joseph’s; in this instance, the resident manager of the

school protested the planned boarding out of 3 young boys. He went so far as to arrive

unannounced at Department of Health offices in Dublin to present his case directly to the Minister

for Health. The resident manager’s apparent objection stemmed both from his assumption that

the children were better off in an industrial school than in a foster home, and in light of the “...care

that has been given them and the [reorganization] of the school that took place to facilitate them -

1 departm ent of Health, File A8/290 vol. 2.

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they were so young. I am appalled at the arbitrary manner in which exchanges were made and the

removals effected."18 The fate of these boys is not apparent, but the files relating to the

controversy surrounding their removal from St. Joseph’s contain no orders for the transfer of the

boys from St. Joseph's to a foster home, so it is likely that they remained in the institution until the

age of 16.

The resistance on the part of religious orders to board out children can be traced

to their conviction, explicitly stated by the resident manager of St. Joseph's and reinforced in

letters that passed regularly between other resident managers and the Department of Health, that

the industrial school was a more suitable environment for a “certain class of children” than the

“average country home”. Implicit in this conviction was the view that members of male and female

religious orders were more suitable substitute parents than actual parents or foster parents,

particularly in the moral training of children whose moral fiber was weakened by their inferior

family background. But the real root of this resistance was an economic reality: religious orders

needed to keep their schools full, and state capitation grants flowing, to ensure a steady source of

income for the industrial schools; the cost of running an industrial school remained essentially

static whatever the number of children maintained. The request for certification under the 1939

Public Assistance Act, made by the resident manager of St. Dominick’s School, Waterford, was

typical in its concern for financial matters; “The position is this - we have a splendidly appointed

Industrial school here, which has been modernized recently at very great expense. Our numbers

are gone down very much and there seems to be no prospect of getting children committed by the

court. We only got two new pupils since last January, and twenty-two girls left school, their period

of detention having expired."19 Although money, rather than the best interests of the children in

^Department of Health, File A30/119.

^Department of Health, File A122/61.

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their care, seems to have underpinned religious orders’ ambivalence toward the boarding out of

children, the rather lackadaisical attitude of most local authorities suggests that, when it came to

illegitimate and vulnerable children, they trod the path of least resistance. It was easier to bow to

the pressure of religious orders than to buck the tide and formulate a consistent and coherent

policy on caring for children for whom the only alternative to their own or a foster home was

institutionalization.

The extent to which the Catholic hierarchy operated virtually autonomously in the

operation of the industrial school system is reflected in the inspectional regime that prevailed

there, as opposed to the scrutiny that foster-parents often encountered. Admittedly, the system of

inspecting boarded-out children had its short-comings, and the inspector often complained that

inspections did not occur frequently enough and that the inspecting officers' recommendations

often were ignored. But when inspectors did visit boarded out children they examined the home

and the child, and it was not unusual for them also to inquire about the children's general health,

clothing, and sleeping arrangements, and to speak privately with the children. On the other hand,

inspections of industrial schools and their inmates appears to have occurred infrequently, and with

a general lack of enthusiasm on the part of the inspecting officers. Inspectors reports' were most

general in nature and said little about the physical and emotional condition of children beyond

vague assertions that they “appeared well cared."20 Indeed, even Miss Litster, whose reports on

boarded out children were thorough and indicated a significant degree of concern for the

children’s welfare, was vague and circumspect in her reports on schools that applied for

certification under the 1939 Public Assistance Act. The Department of Health approved virtually all

applications for certification, which comprised little more than a letter from a resident manager

requesting certification, which received a formulaic reply similar to that issued to St. Joseph's in

Dundalk:

20Department of Education, Files 27829, 28740.

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The above industrial school is situated in the town of Dundalk. It is certified for 80 children between the ages of 2 and 16; the accommodation limit is 100, and at present there are 76 children in residence. The dormitories are bright and airy and not overcrowded. There is an infirmary with 8 beds and one of the Sisters is a qualified nurse. The children are taught the standard national school subjects until they are 14, after which they are trained in household management. They would get posts as domestic servants, and the Sisters keep in touch with them as much as possible. The school appears to be suitable for the reception of children from the Public Assistance authorities, provided that the accommodation limit of 100 is not exceeded.21

Perhaps it is not surprising, given the sheer number of schools and children involved, that an

application for certification as an institution suitable for the reception of needy children received

such cursory consideration, particularly if it was already a certified industrial school. At the same

time, there appears to have been reluctance on the part of local authorities and Departments of

Health and Education staff to interfere to a significant degree in the running of industrial schools.

While children occasionally were removed from foster parents who were found to be neglectful or

abusive, there is little documented evidence that children were removed from industrial schools

for similar reasons, although first-hand accounts of former inmates, and sealed Department of

Education files, suggest that neglect and abuse were wide-spread, likely more wide-spread than in

foster homes.22

The experiences of illegitimate and vulnerable children are among the most

difficult to uncover, not only because of the shame, disgrace, and thus secrecy that attached to

illegitimacy, but also because many of the agencies and institutions that catered for these

21 Department of Health, File A122/1.

22Following the airing of States of Fear the producers of that program gained access to sealed Department of Education files detailing complaints made by individuals about the treatment of children in state and institutional care. Suffer the Little Children, the book that resulted from the television documentary, documented one extreme and unusual case in which a local county councilor became involved in the case of a boy who suffered extreme physical and sexual abuse while confined to Artane Industrial School, resulting in his official release by the Department of Education. However, although tens of thousands of children lived in industrial schools in the middle decades of the twentieth century this is the only documented case of release for reasons of mis-treatment, neglect, or abuse. See Mary Raftery and Eoin O'Sullivan, Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools (Dublin: New Island Books, 1999), 210-217.

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populations guard their records with great care, particularly as information has emerged in recent

years detailing the alleged physical and sexual abuse endured by children in state care. One of

the most readily accessible sources of insight into the plight of children who were institutionalized

or sent to America is through their own narrative accounts, and through the television

documentaries highlighting the conditions under which inmates of some religious run institutions

lived. Although these accounts are subjective, and thus must be used with care, nonetheless

there is a remarkable degree of consistency in the portrait that emerges of institutional life in mid-

twentieth-century Ireland. The picture painted by the narratives of former inmates is reinforced by

a recent documentary, States of Fear, that combined personal narratives of institutional life with

scholarly commentary based on extensive research in the Department of Education’s industrial

school files.23 Eoin O'Sullivan, a Trinity College researcher, gained access to Department of

Education files as the foundation of a doctoral dissertation. Shortly after the series of

documentaries aired the Department of Education withdrew access to the files to facilitate

government research into the matter. While both the documentary and book were guided by an

explicitly anti-Church agenda that resulted in the authors' making serious but unsubstantiated

allegations, these authors are the only researchers who have examined Department of Education

files relating to industrial schools, and for that reason their work is important.

In the days and weeks following the first episode of States of Fear, ordinary Irish

people reacted to the documentary's allegations with a mix of outrage, compassion, and disbelief.

Those who hail the disintegration of the Catholic Church’s power and influence point to the

allegations of severe physical and sexual abuse as “proof that the church exploited its influence

and position of power at the expense of the most innocent and defenseless of people, children

with no voice and no parents to protect them. At the other end of the spectrum, staunch Catholics

23 States of Fear

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insist that the Departments of Education and Health were entirely at fault because they forced the

church to maintain thousands of “unwanted" children on shoestring budgets with no training and

minimal oversight. The media-driven debate has deteriorated into a “church-versus-state" polemic

in which the real issues are clouded if not lost altogether. Admittedly, evidence suggests that

individual industrial schools “lobbied" to have children sent to them in an effort to keep capitation

grants flowing, and local authorities bowed to pressure to maintain children in institutions rather

than foster families. But many of the children committed by the courts to industrial schools first

came to official notice because someone in the local community— neighbor, parish priest, or

teacher- complained to gardai or the local branch of the NSPCC about alleged parental neglect

or abuse, or because parents themselves approached the NSPCC for advice about having their

children committed to industrial schools. The state's reluctance to take responsibility for

illegitimate and needy children was mirrored by a similar reluctance within families and

communities to accept “deviance" in their midst, or fully to embrace the principles of compassion,

loyalty, and mutual responsibility that defined the Catholic-Christian faith. The industrial school

system flourished not only because it suited the political, economic, and social agendas of church

and state, but also because ordinary women and men supported it to relieve themselves of

responsibility for caring for vulnerable, burdensome, or deviant individuals, and to protect their

status and reputation in the community.

Exporting the “Problem": American Adoption of Irish Children

For the majority of illegitimate Irish children, adoption by an American family

under American adoption laws provided the only alternative to institutional life or an insecure

informal adoption or fostering arrangement in Ireland. The legality of sending Irish children out of

the state for adoption under foreign laws was scarcely questioned by those involved in the

process; government officials were concerned only that the children in question were sent to

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“good" Catholic homes. Indeed, the hierarchy and civil servants were so concerned with the

Catholic question that they refused to allow children to be removed to Northern Ireland or England

for adoption lest they fall into the hands of Protestant families or proselytizers.24 On the surface,

those involved in the unofficial adoption scheme expressed reservations about the wisdom of

sending children out of the state for adoption. In fact, it was an ideal solution for most of the

parties concerned. For religious orders, who ran the mother and baby homes from which the

majority of children were adopted, it solved an accommodation problem that occasionally reached

crisis proportions when babies were born or admitted faster than they could be boarded out or

sent to industrial schools. Sending children to America also relieved local authorities of the

financial burden of maintaining them in industrial schools, extern institutions, or foster homes. The

only player who did not win, in the official sense, was the Department of Foreign Affairs, which,

because of its role in issuing passports to facilitate the removal of children, faced accusations that

it encouraged and indeed fostered emigration at a time when the Irish population was in a steady

decline due to low birth and high emigration rates. But as long as the Catholic hierarchy

sanctioned the scheme the Department of Foreign Affairs facilitated it. However, it was not the

DFA but the hierarchy, and in particular John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin from 1940-

1972, who determined the conditions under which passports would be issued.

It is not possible to ascertain, from Department of Foreign Affairs or Dublin

Diocesan Archives adoption policy files, the number of children sent to America under the informal

adoption scheme.25 The Department of Foreign Affairs began keeping statistics on passports

24See Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/164.

25According to Mike Milotte, a total of 2,103 children were sent overseas throughout the duration of the overseas adoption process. See Mike Milotte, Banished Babies. The Secret History of Ireland’s Baby Export Business. (Dublin: New Island Books, 1997), 201. These statistics exclude children sent overseas prior to 1951. It also does not include the children whose adoptive parents took them out of the country without securing an Irish passport for them, or who were registered, illegally, as the biological children of the adoptive parents. Milotte culled

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issued to children to travel to America for the purpose of adoption only in 1950; from the beginning

of 1950 through October 1952 the DFA issued 330 such passports.26 Anecdotal evidence

suggests that children were exported to America beginning as early as the mid-1940s, with one

agency alone, St. Patrick’s Guild, Dublin, arranging 61 American adoptions between 1948 and

1950.27 Official statistics are not an accurate indication either of the time frame in which the

adoptions occurred, or the numerical extent of the practice. Department of Foreign Affairs files

reveal that some American couples brought Irish children home without a passport under the

United States Displaced Persons Act, 1948.28 Other couples, mostly US servicemen stationed in

England, simply registered the births of illegitimate Irish children as their own biological children.29

Given the apparent ease with which some couples secured and removed children without

passports, or registered illegitimate Irish children as their own biological children, likely the

practice was more widespread than public and church officials knew or wished to admit.

It is easy to understand why religious institutions seized on overseas adoptions as

a viable solution to what they saw as an overwhelming problem. Letters from religious institutions

to Archbishop McQuaid documented the dilemma from their perspective: “Girls are flocking here

daily, some of them in great distress, and the best I can do for them is to hold out hope that they

these figures from various DFA files which he does not cite, so it is impossible to confirm the accuracy of these figures.

26Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/164.

27Dublin Diocesan Archives, American Adoption Policy Files 1950-52.

28Under this act, visas could be issued to European orphans who were entering the country for the purpose of legal adoption. Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/96/I.

29ln 1955 it came to the attention of the Department of Foreign Affairs that at least 8 children were illegally registered as the biological children of American servicemen stationed in England. All of the adopted children were bom in the same nursing home, and it seems that the mid-wife who ran the home arranged the adoptions and facilitated the illegal practice. Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/96/545.

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might be relieved in December or the New Year. Many of them will become disheartened, no

doubt, and who can be sure that the children will be safe."30 There is little doubt that Catholic

agencies received more requests for assistance than their human or financial resources could

grant; however, the problem was more complex than this sister’s lament might convey. Many

women did turn to religious orders in desperation, often after being rejected by their families or

released from employment when their pregnancies were discovered, but it seems that many more

gave birth in county homes, mother and baby homes, or magdalen asylums, and then were

coerced into giving up their children. In still other cases children were sent to America without their

mothers’ knowledge or consent.31 Although religious authorities paid lip service to the idea that

mother and child should be kept together whenever possible, religious orders operated on the

assumption that unmarried mothers, because of their status as “fallen women”, were not suitable

guardians or moral guides for their own children. They justified overseas adoptions with the

argument that it was virtually impossible to convince Irish Catholic families to adopt children whom

no one wanted. This claim is somewhat dubious in light of the fact that inspectors’ reports on

boarded out children consistently referred to foster families who wished to adopt the children

entrusted to their care.32 Additionally, in the first year of legal adoption in Ireland the adoption

board received 2,500 requests for adoption orders, and thereafter received at least twice as many

applications as could be processed in a year.33

30Dublin Diocesan Archives, American Adoption Policy Files 1950-52.

31 Milotte, Banished Babies, 136-152; Witness: Sex in a Cold Climate, produced by Steven Humphries, Channel 4 UK (Testimony Films).

32See, for example. Department of Health, File A124/12.

23 Report of An Bord Uchtala (Adoption Board): (Dublin: Government Stationery Office, 1953).

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In spite of the legal and ethical dilemmas posed by the overseas adoption policy,

healthy children were sent out of the state in their hundreds from the 1940s into the 1960s.

American couples were able to acquire illegitimate Irish children almost for the asking, earning

Ireland a reputation, particularly among American servicemen stationed in England, as a “happy

hunting ground."34 In some cases American couples called on institutions to inquire about their

chances of adopting children; other hopeful adoptive parents wrote to convents or adoption

societies such as the St. Patrick’s Guild specifying the kind of child they wanted.35 In virtually all

cases the institution's administrators provided children to American adopters with a minimum of

fuss. These transactions often occurred through the mail, the adopted child was accompanied to

America by a paid attendant, and no one in a position of responsibility ever met the adopting

family and the adoptive parents did not meet the child until she/he actually arrived in their home.

Adoption societies were so eager to secure adoptive families for the children in their charge that,

at least until 1950, they required very little information about an adopting couple’s background,

home life, or financial position. All they required was an affidavit from a prospective adopting

couple undertaking to raise the adopted child as a Catholic, although ironically the couple did not

have to prove that they were practicing Catholics. These overseas adoptions carried on, in virtual

silence and secrecy, from the mid-1940s until the early 1950s, when two high-profile incidents

shattered church and state’s complacency in the matter. These incidents marked a turning point in

Ireland’s adoption policy: the first set of circumstances obliged Archbishop McQuaid to shut down

overseas adoptions temporarily until guidelines could be put into place, while the second forced

the government’s hand in introducing adoption legislation.

^Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/96/I.

35Although adoption was not legalized until 1952, charitable agencies such as St. Patrick’s Guild and the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society arranged fostering arrangements and informal adoptions and thus they referred to themselves as adoption societies.

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In March 1950 the New York Times published a photograph of six children

departing from Shannon Airport for adoption by American couples. The photo was accompanied

by a story about the children’s origins and backgrounds and details of their adoption by American

families.36 This press attention, coming on the heels of earlier news accounts of wealthy

American businessmen flying to Ireland specifically to adopt Irish babies, prompted Archbishop

McQuaid to call for a suspension of overseas adoptions until his staff could fully examine and

regulate the process.37 He also instructed his leading advisor, Cecil Barrett, to initiate a ban on

publicity at Shannon Airport.38 At the same time Department of Health officials, who heretofore

had played only a minor role in the overseas adoption process, raised alarming questions about

the “...character, suitability and religion" of potential adopters who were able to remove children

from the state without undergoing a vetting or screening process, and seemingly without following

U.S. immigration laws. Yet, it was not these practices in themselves, but the press that the

adoptions attracted, that caused concern and embarrassment among church and government

officials. It is a testament to McQuaid’s influence that the publicity black-out remained virtually

unchallenged, at least within the Irish media, for almost two years.

The second incident, which forced the government into action on the adoption

issue, involved the Hollywood film star Jane Russell, who travelled to Ireland in late 1951 with the

intention of adopting a child:

I hoped I would be able to find a boy in Europe, but it seems to be impossible...the British law will not allow me to take a child from England. In Italy I could not get a child because I am under 40; and, anyway, there were difficulties because Italy is a Catholic country and I am a Protestant. Now I have been advised to try Ireland; but I am worried in case the same difficulties would arise there. My husband is Irish, and he would very much like to adopt an

26New York Times, 18 March 1950, 11.

37Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/164.

38Dublin Diocesan Archives, American Adoption Policy Files 1950-52.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 183 Irish baby. If it is possible, I would like to fly to Dublin this week to pick out a child and make all the arrangements for bringing him to America.39

A member of the Church of Ireland Moral Welfare Organisation advised Russell that she would be

unable to adopt a child from a Protestant institution without the requisite home studies and

background investigations, so Russell set her sights on a young Irish boy who resided with his

parents in England. The chain of events that led Russell from Ireland to England is sketchy at

best, but somehow Russell convinced an Irish couple, the Kavanaghs, to allow her to adopt their

son Tommy, and within hours the Irish legation in London issued a passport in Tommy

Kavanagh’s name. The British press gave considerable coverage to the incident, which in turn

fueled a flurry of reports in other European newspapers about Ireland's adoption process.40 The

Department of Foreign Affairs responded with the following memo, issued to all Irish legations and

consulates abroad:

As from the receipt of this minute, we would be glad if you would refer to the Department any application for a passport made to you by or on behalf of a person of either sex under the age of 18 years...You may have noticed in the Irish papers of the beginning of last week a reference to a case in which the Embassy at London granted a passport to an infant, on the application by the father, and that the child was subsequently brought to the United States by an American film actress. The whole business received a great amount of undesirable publicity in the Press (particularly the English Sunday papers of the 11th inst.) and the reason for this instruction is that we wish to ensure that an Irish passport will not again be issued in such circumstances 41

Although Russell's adoption of Tommy Kavanagh violated both British law and Irish regulations, it

was the ridicule to which Ireland was subjected in the foreign press, and not the violations of law

or concern for Tommy Kavanagh's welfare, that precipitated official action on the issue.42

29lrish Times, 30 October 1951, 5.

40DFA Adoption Policy Files contain clippings of articles that appeared in England, Australia and Germany.

41 Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/96/I.

42Even though Russell stated publicly that she and her husband were not happy with Tommy Kavanagh and considered returning him, none of the extensive correspondence that passed between various government departments expressed concern for his welfare, nor was there any question of prosecuting the Kavanaghs or Russell for violations of British adoption law,

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When Archbishop McQuaid undertook to regulate the overseas adoption scheme

religion was the defining issue, as it was in the 1952 adoption bill. The bill revolved around the

protection of the faith of Irish children adopted at home and abroad, but even prior to 1952 civil

servants worked assiduously to carry out Archbishop McQuaid’s requirements to the letter,

denying passports when there was any question about a couple’s standing within the Catholic

Church. Given that the overwhelming majority of the Irish population was Catholic it is likely that a

corresponding majority of children involved in overseas adoptions also were Catholic. The

question of Protestant children and overseas adoptions is scarcely raised at all in Department of

Foreign Affairs files. DFA staff certainly did not work as closely with Protestant as with Catholic

agencies, nor did they take great pains to ensure that Protestant leaders approved of prevailing

adoption policy. It could be that Protestant children were placed in informal adoptions within the

state, although this is not an adequate explanation for their absence in official discussions. The

official emphasis on Catholicism as the determining factor in overseas adoption was, in part, a

function of demographics, but it also reflected the power of the Catholic Church, and of

Archbishop McQuaid in particular, in shaping adoption policy, and the policy relating to unmarried

mothers and illegitimate children generally. But, as was the case of children sent to industrial

schools, it also may reflect differing conceptualizations of mutual aid and responsibility. Protestant

agencies and organizations seem to have received little funding from state resources and in all

likelihood dealt with issues of poverty and vulnerability within their own communities, and in ways

that conformed to their own moral and Christian sensibilities.

McQuaid’s regulations required a number of documents from prospective

adopters, including: a sworn affidavit proving their religious faith and undertaking to raise and

educate adopted children as Catholics; a recommendation from the Director of Catholic Charities

which expressly forbid the removal of children from the country for the purposes of adoption, even if the children were not British nationals.

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of the diocese in the U.S. in which prospective adopting couples resided; a statement as to

income and financial circumstances; and “...medical certificates for both adopters, stating ages,

and that they are not deliberately shirking natural parenthood.”43 Couples were also required to

undergo a home study conducted by Catholic Charities, an American Catholic organisation with

branches throughout the country. However, a leading official of Catholic Charities admitted to DFA

officials in 1955 not only that many of the home studies relied more on the word of the prospective

adopters themselves, and references from family and friends, than on the assessment of qualified

social workers, but also that “...the Catholic Charities Organisation was not in fact equipped at all

its Branches to deal satisfactorily with adoptions.”44 In other words, while the home study

theoretically was one of the centerpieces of Archbishop McQuaid’s rules, in fact it did little to

ensure that adopting couples were suitable in every way to adopt an Irish children, and religious

guarantees remained the sole factor upon which decisions were made regarding the issue of

passports.

The state's reluctance to play an active role in the regulation of overseas

adoptions persisted following the implementation of McQuaid’s regulations. The DFA issued a

standard response to all requests for information on overseas adoption: “This department has no

function in connection with the adoption, outside the State, of Irish children beyond the issue of a

Passport to enable the child to travel."45 The government’s reluctance stemmed in part from a

desire not to infringe on the church’s authority in matters of faith and morals, as revealed in this

exchange between the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of Justice, in which

Justice declined to facilitate a background check on a potential adoptive family on the grounds

43Dublin Diocesan Archives, American Archives Adoption Policy Files 1950-52.

44Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/96/I.

45Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/164.

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that the church hierarchy might object: “A more substantial ground of refusal was, however, that

we might lay ourselves open to accusation from high places that we were facilitating the adoption

of a child by a person not of the religion in which the child was being reared or not of the religion

of one or other of the parents. Very delicate questions might arise and it was felt that Departments

of State should keep clear.”46 The policies set forth by Archbishop McQuaid, and strenuously

upheld by relevant government departments, highlight the extent to which the Catholic hierarchy,

and especially Archbishop McQuaid, manipulated various state departments and agencies in

determining the fate of illegitimate and vulnerable children. Some Irish children were placed with

American families that, on paper, appeared to be “good Catholics," but were found wanting in

other ways. Meanwhile, others remained in institutions because potential adopting parents who

would have been suitable could not meet Archbishop McQuaid’s religious tests.47

The state’s reticence also can be traced to a concern that they not appear to be

facilitating adoption at the same time that low birth and high emigration rates threatened Ireland’s

demographic stability. One DFA official rejected a plan to involve Irish consulates abroad in vetting

potential adoptive couples because such a move “...might place the Minister, and indeed the

whole Government, in the embarrassing position of appearing to actively encourage the export of

Irish children abroad.”48 DFA officials were well aware that the government had, in the late 1940s,

convened a Committee on Emigration and Other Population Problems to examine Ireland's

population crisis and recommend solutions. The DFA would have been placed in an awkward

46Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/96/II.

47There are references throughout DFA files to the fact that Catholic agencies in America revealed the unsuitability of some homes, although there is no information as to why the homes were unsuitable. No one in the DFA appears to have taken the initiative to find out what the problems were, how many children were involved, or how those children fared after they were adopted by the “unsuitable" families.

48Department of Foreign Affairs. Adoption Policy Files, File 345/96/I.

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position if their activities in the area of adoption had come to light at such a critical time,

particularly as the percentage of the population in the 0-14 years age group fell consistently from

1901, and levelled off only in 1951.49 The Commission acknowledged the worth of child life, not in

the Christian/Catholic sense but in the contribution children made to the perpetuation of the

nation:

The intrinsic value of human life in itself and the supreme worth and potentialities of the individual human person present us with the first objective of our population policy: to see that our country, considering its resources, has as many people as can live in conditions worthy of human beings. In any country there is obviously a limit to the number of people who could be supported at a reasonable standard of living, but we consider that such a limit is very far from being reached in this country.50

The Commission touched briefly on the links between emigration and unmarried motherhood,

although they suggested that the problem stemmed not from sending illegitimate children out of

the state, but from unmarried mothers emigrating to “hide their shame":

For us, as a Population Commission, the significance of the problem of illegitimacy rests primarily on the loss by emigration of many unmarried mothers who find it preferable for one reason or another, to emigrate rather than to face all the circumstances of an illegitimate pregnancy and confinement in this country. We are aware that there are other important aspects of the problem. Our investigations have done no more than touch the fringe of a matter, the significance of which is perhaps more social than demographic, and we suggest that the question of the welfare and care of unmarried mothers and their children should be fully examined with a view to finding out, among other things, how the present position could be improved, so that the problem relating to illegitimacy in the Twenty-Six Counties might be dealt with fully in our own country, instead of partly in Great Britain as at present. Such improvement might have the effect of retaining at home many young women who, under present conditions, leave Ireland and never return.51

Even as the Commission established to examine Ireland’s population problems advocated

extending state services to enable unmarried mothers and their children to remain in the state the

49Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems, Reports 1948- 1954 (Dublin: Government Stationery Office, 1954), 17.

50Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems, Reports, 179.

51 Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems, Reports, 102.

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church, with the full cooperation of government agencies, perpetuated the crisis by secretly

sending healthy children abroad.

Archbishop McQuaid’s regulations assured that, on paper anyway, American

couples who removed children from the state for adoption were practicing Catholics. However,

nothing in the regulations provided for the supervision of these children until such time as they

were formally adopted under American law. DFA officials argued that because the Catholic

hierarchy oversaw the system at home, they also should ensure the child’s well-being on the other

side of the Atlantic, as evidenced by this response by a DFA official to a query from the Chicago

consulate relating to the rejection by a Chicago court of an American couple’s petition to adopt an

Irish child: “...the onus of ensuring the welfare of the child with its adoptive parents rests upon the

child's parent or parents or upon the agency (usually a convent) in Ireland arranging for the

adoption.”52 Meanwhile the hierarchy left the follow-up to Catholic organizations in America such

as Catholic Charities, the same agency that admitted in 1955 that its ability to conduct home

studies or follow-up investigations was severely hampered by financial and human resource

constraints. What this essentially meant was that those children whose adoptions were rejected

by American courts were placed in legal and political limbo: the Irish government refused to

accept responsibility for them, and the American government had no obligation to care for them.

While there is evidence to suggest that some adoptions were in fact blocked in American courts,

there is no indication in church or government records as to what happened to those children.53

Although such children were Irish citizens entitled to the same rights and protections as other

citizens, they were allowed to be removed from the country under extraordinary circumstances,

and once removed they effectively lost their Irish citizenship, and thus the protection of the state,

in fact if not in law.

52Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/164.

53Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/96/II.

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While it would be easy to fault agencies and individuals of church and state for

the callousness with which illegitimate children were treated, one could argue that official attitudes

reflected a more general social intolerance of illegitimate children and their mothers. The majority

of illegitimate children were institutionalized, or sent overseas for adoption, precisely because their

mothers could not or would not keep them, and because their families and communities refused

to acknowledge or accept them. There was an absence of public opinion in Ireland surrounding

the care and protection of children that made it easy for the church and state to conspire in

sending children overseas in virtual secrecy, or to commit them in such vast numbers to industrial

schools. This secrecy and silence are in part an indication of the success of Archbishop

McQuaid’s press blackout, but it also epitomizes the prevailing attitude toward children, and

particularly illegitimate and neglected children. It would seem that no one cared enough about the

plight of illegitimate children to question what went on behind the walls of industrial schools and

orphanages, to object to the practice of sending children overseas, or to demand that the state

accept responsibility for providing for children at home in ways that served children’s best interests

rather than those of the state or the church hierarchy.

The ways that illegitimate children were treated by the agencies of church and

state raises questions about how notions of citizenship and identity were defined and deployed in

the mid-twentieth-century. Archbishop McQuaid’s regulations, and the process of vetting potential

adopting couples, illustrate the primary concern with ensuring that the children who left the state

for adoption overseas would retain their Catholic identity even as they were denied their Irish and

family identities. Historians and other social observers commonly assume that Catholicism and

“Irishness” were and are virtually synonymous. Yet the practices of institutionalization and

overseas adoption reveal a far more complex understanding, among state and government

officials, about what it meant to be Irish, and who would be entitled to the rights, benefits, and

protections of citizenship. In part, this was determined by conformity to the church’s demands in

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the ways of sexual morality. But the fact that so many legitimate children were taken away from

allegedly unfit parents suggests that it also had to do with image as much as reality— with

preserving the veneer of morality and respectability in spite of the fact that thousands of Irish

people, children especially, lived in such abject poverty that they could not hope to achieve the

ideal. One must also consider the concepts of respectability that were formulated and monitored

in the local community. Church and state may have devised and overseen the industrial school

and overseas adoption systems, but the systems were fueled by ordinary women and men who

were intolerant of deviance within their midst and refused to support their most vulnerable

members.

Church. State, and Adoption Legislation

By lawmakers’ own admission, Ireland lagged woefully behind western

counterparts when they introduced adoption legislation in 1952.54 And yet, when lawmakers

finally did act on the issue they did so not because they acknowledged the utility of legislation, but

because they were, literally, shamed into it by foreign press coverage of Ireland's heretofore

informal and unregulated adoption practice. Not only did the Jane Russell incident prompt a flurry

of negative attention in the foreign media, it also raised a host of questions in the Ddil, where

individual TDs demanded an accounting from government ministers on the practice and extent of

overseas adoption.55 Once the “secret" was out public opinion began to coalesce around the

issue, leaving lawmakers with no choice but to act.

Given the general lack of concern on the part of both church and state for the fate

of illegitimate children adopted overseas, perhaps it is not surprising that there was no sense of

urgency to initiate legislation that would legalize adoption at home and regulate the overseas

Debates, vol. 132 (11 June 1952), 1119.

55Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/96/I.

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process. Government officials argued that until the Jane Russell incident put the issue on the

national agenda, adoption legislation was unnecessary because there was no public demand, and

no apparent need, for it:

No pressing need for legislation on this subject has been felt in Ireland until relatively recently. In recent years there has been demand for enactment of legislation enabling the adoption of children. This has arisen, partly as a result of the activities of certain aliens who wish to adopt Irish children and held out the inducement of large sums of money to induce Irish parents to allow their children to be taken out of the country. To deal with this situation the government have recently decided to introduce a Bill to legalise adoption in the case of illegitimate and orphan children.56

But lawmakers conceded in the Dail that by the time they convened to discuss adoption

legislation, many county councils and trade unions had been agitating for adoption legislation for a

number of years.57 The Legal Adoption Society of Ireland, founded in 1948, also lobbied for

legislation that would legalize adoption in Ireland.58

In private, government officials admitted the real reason that adoption legislation

was not forthcoming: an unwillingness to enact legislation that might infringe on the church’s

authority. In an address to the King's Inn Law Students’ Debating Society, Attorney General C.F.

Casey articulated the dilemma from the government’s perspective:

The subject...had received much publicity in recent years and efforts had been made to prevail upon the Government to introduce legislation dealing with it, and severe criticism on this has been leveled against the Government for its failure to introduce a Bill. I would ask those who are concerned on this topic to be patient and to avoid emotion...This country is a predominantly Catholic country. That does not mean that Parliament should penalise any other creed, but it does mean this, that Parliament cannot surely be asked to introduce legislation contrary to the teaching of that great Church.59

56Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/96/I.

57D&I Debates, vol. 132 (11 June 1952), col. 1103.

58W.A. Newman, “Legal Adoption," The Bell, vol. 16. no. 4 (January 1951): 62.

59Catholic Standard, 16 February 1951, 1.

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In the eyes of government ministers and civil servants it clearly was more important to maintain

the balance of power between church and state than it was to fulfill their responsibility to protect

and care for vulnerable children.

Members of the hierarchy, although confronted daily with first-hand evidence of

the need for legislation that would allow Irish couples to adopt children, staunchly refused to lobby

for adoption legislation even as they acknowledged that adoption was not contrary to Catholic

teaching. Archbishop McQuaid’s ambivalence stemmed from his concern that adoption legislation

would transfer control and regulation from the church to a state body, and his fear that religion

would no longer be the primary indicator of a couple's suitability as adopters. Church and state

officials also worried about what they perceived as an unknown factor - whether Irish couples

would adopt illegitimate children if legislation safeguarded their rights as adoptive parents.

Illegitimate children were marginalized and stigmatized to such an extent in both social policy and

church teaching that lawmakers’ fears about Irish couples’ unwillingness to adopt illegitimate

children were understandable. And, given that children in institutions were cast out by their own

flesh and blood families, these concerns perhaps were justified. At the same time, reports of

boarded-out children reveal an eagerness among foster families to adopt the children entrusted to

their care, indicating that couples anxious for children would quite willingly adopt even illegitimate

children whose own families did not want them or could not care for them.

What placed adoption legislation high on the political agenda in late 1951 and

1952, then, was not a newfound sense of responsibility on the part of church and state officials for

the well-being of illegitimate children, but rather a series of highly critical and embarrassing

reports in the foreign press on Ireland's overseas adoption practices, brought to light by the Jane

Russell adoption scandal. While Archbishop McQuaid ordered a blackout on publicity within the

Irish press that proved to be extraordinarily effective, not even McQuaid could control how

Ireland’s adoption policies played in the foreign press. The most damning and worrying article

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appeared in 1951 in the German 8 UhrBlatt newspaper, in response to English press coverage of

the Russell case. The article struck a nerve with both church hierarchy and government agencies

because it raised the specter of a black market baby ring in which “unwanted” Irish children were

being sold to the highest American bidder, the irony being that while Irish church and state officials

were willing to do almost anything to rid Ireland of the moral and financial burden of caring for

illegitimate children, American couples were willing to pay dearly for the privilege of adopting

healthy white Irish children.

According to a DFA translation of the 8 Uhr Blatt article, an Irish welfare worker in

England accused the Irish government of turning a blind eye to the export and sale of Irish

children: “‘Our country has today become a sort of hunting ground for foreign millionaires who

believe they can acquire children to suit their whims just in the same way as they would get

valuable pedigree animals. In the last few months more than one hundred children have left

Ireland, without any official organisation being in a position to make any enquiries as to their future

habitat.'"60 Department of Foreign Affairs officials were hard pressed to refute the article's

allegations; Irish legation staff in Bonn wanted to demand a retraction from 8 Uhr Blatt editors but

DFA staff advised against such a move: “I have to say it is our considered opinion that no such

action should be taken - more especially so since, with the exception of the figures given, the

article is largely not incorrect."61 It is indicative of the ambiguous legal and ethical position in

which overseas adoptions placed the government, as well as illegitimate children, that

government officials were unable to defend themselves against 8 UhrBlatt's allegations.

Negative press coverage compelled the government to take action on the issue of

adoption yet, true to form, government officials waited for the church to take the lead. The first

^Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/164.

61 Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/164.

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reference in official sources to government ministers actively discussing an adoption bill appeared

in Department of Foreign Affairs files in May, 1952. Yet earlier that year, in January 1952, the

Episcopal Committee established by the church hierarchy issued a statement that laid out the

church's position and teaching, which later served as a guideline for lawmakers.62 The church

acknowledged the state's right to provide for children, and in particular to ensure that “unwanted"

children were given a good home, but the Catholic issue still dominated.63 Even as Miss Litster

and other social workers argued that adoption legislation would serve the best interests of

vulnerable children and merely regularize relationships already in existence, albeit without the

protection of law, the state deferred to the church rather than the “experts" in formulating adoption

policy.

The Catholic Church dominated what little public discussion occurred around the

adoption issue. One of the few “liberal" views, which appeared in The Bell in 1951, highlighted the

hypocrisy of official attitudes toward illegitimate children: “...we must face that this State behaves

barbarously by the illegitimate child. It pays no heed to the truly Christian slogan that ‘there is no

such thing as an illegitimate child: there are only illegitimate parents...”64 The limited mainstream

commentary, such as The Bell article and a handful of Irish Times articles and editorials, argued

that the best interests of the child, rather than political expediency, should guide lawmakers in

their legislative efforts. The author of The Bell article also pointed out that moving children from

institutions into loving adoptive homes would benefit the state by easing the financial burden on

public funds, and by increasing the likelihood that adopted children would grow up to be

62The Episcopal Committee, convened by Archbishop McQuaid in late 1951, included members of the hierarchy, including Cecil Barrett, who were considered “experts" in the fields of adoption and child care. The Committee formulated the hierarchy's official response to adoption legislation.

63Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/164.

^Newman, “Legal Adoption,” 62.

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productive and upstanding citizens rather than juvenile delinquents.65 This view of the merits of

adoption was not widely shared, and seems to have had little influence on official deliberations.

The strongest voice in the adoption discussion came from the Catholic press, and

particularly the Catholic Standard. The Standard, adopting the Catholic “party line", insisted that

adoption legislation must be anchored by strict measures protecting the religious faith of Catholic

children: “The safeguarding of the Catholic religion of children is, needless to say, a vital

consideration for the ecclesiastical authorities. Consequently, they can only sanction adoption

legislation in which adequate provisos are made to prevent any undue interference with the

religion of the children or with the rights of the family and of the Church.”66 The fear that adoption

would become a “cloak for proselytism" informed Catholic adoption discourse, which portrayed

Protestant and non-Catholic social service agencies as “predators" who lurked around every

corner waiting to steal innocent Catholic babies from the arms not only of their desperate mothers,

but also of their Catholic faith and birthright. The following appeal for subscriptions to the Catholic

Protection and Rescue Society typified Catholic anti-proselytizing rhetoric: “‘Slavery has been

abolished...but proselytism continues to persist. It is a disgrace to all Christian sects, and reduces

Christianity to the level of the lowest commercial firm. It is at the best a mere vulgar traffic in

souls."67 Given the church’s near-hysterical obsession with the alleged dangers of proselytizing, it

is not surprising that religious leaders refused to countenance legislation that might transfer

oversight of the process from the hierarchy to a secular body that might not defend or protect the

religious faith of adopted children. The church’s insistence on the strict Catholic upbringing of

65ln addition to The Bell article, the Irish Times carried the occasional article detailing the activities of the Legal Adoption Society, and the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland Journal also published a series of papers on the efficacy of adoption.

66Trie Standard, 14 October 1949, 5.

67Trie Standard, 7 February 1931, 3.

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children sent to America for adoption was interpreted as “safeguarding their birthright," while

Protestant agencies who extended assistance to unmarried mothers and their children were

“vulgar traffickers]."

While popular discussions of adoption were controlled in large part by the

Catholic Church, official debates also were heavily infused with Catholic rhetoric. Those

government officials, including many TDS and the Attorney General, Mr. Casey, who regarded

themselves as good Catholics, refused to consider legislation that might place a “single soul" at

risk: “The Catholic Church has never taught that those outside its communion cannot be saved,

but it does teach that those in the Church who have reached the use of reason must remain in it

for salvation and that membership of the Church is the best means of saving one's soul. Bearing

these matters in mind, how can a Catholic logically demand or permit any legislation which would

endanger the soul of a single child?”68 In the eyes of the church, and thus of government officials,

it was better that a child live in a less than ideal environment in its earthly life than to be adopted

by a family that might jeopardize its eternal life. The fact that lawmakers were willing to defer to

the Archbishop on such matters, and to place religious duty above their own civic responsibility to

ensure the physical and material well-being of one group of Irish citizens, adds credence to the

view, held among critics in the 1950s, that Ireland was a confessional state with Archbishop

McQuaid the equivalent of an “ecclesiastical Taoiseach."69

A comparison of the debates on adoption legislation in the British parliament in

1925-26, and the Irish D£il in 1952, illustrates the vastly different ways that the two governments

conceived of the state’s obligation to children, as well as the principles and assumptions that

68 The Standard, 16 February 1951, 1.

69John Charles McQuaid: What the Papers Say, presented by John Bowman, Radio Telefis Eireann, RTE 1 Dublin. The term Taoiseach applies to the head of the Irish Government, equivalent to the British prime minister or the American president.

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underscored their social welfare policies and philosophies. The primary distinctions centered on

the state’s responsibility for children who lacked the protection and care of “naturar or “normar

families, how far the state could and should go in protecting the rights of the natural mother, and

the role of religion in assessing the fitness of prospective adopters. British MPs also highlighted

the benefits that would accrue to the state as a result of legalized adoption:

I feel - and I believe my views are shared very largely by all Members of the House - that the English character has been built up on home life. God knows, some of the homes are not worthy of the name; but nevertheless, there is a spirit even in the meanest tenement that has developed the British character, which as made the British nation what it is. I find, too, that institution life tends very largely to a return to institution life, either in the form of prison, workhouse, or homes of that description. It saps the independence of character. It tends to make men, at any rate, with less moral fibre than we associate with the average Britisher. To a person who has been brought up in an institution - even a good institution - prison has not the same horror that it has to the average man or woman, and we complete the vicious circle very often, as magistrates well know, with people who have been brought up to appreciate institution life. Therefore, I welcome the Bill, because I think it will assist us to enable orphan children to be brought back into the normal life of the nation, and to become normal citizens.70

Although the “liberar press, and especially The Bell, hinted at the financial and other benefits that

would derive from adopting children rather than institutionalizing them, no government or church

official used this as a justification for passing adoption legislation.

English lawmakers held steadfastly to the view that the best interests of the child

should underpin adoption policy. Virtually all MPs who spoke in support of the adoption bill insisted

that an adoptive family was a far better environment in which to raise a needy and vulnerable child

than even the best institution, and they acknowledged that wealth and religion alone did not

determine a family’s ability to love and care for an adopted child. Linder English law, a couple

wishing to adopt a child had to file a petition with the courts for an adoption order, and then submit

to a thorough home and background study. Only people resident in England and Wales were

eligible to adopt, and only children who were similarly resident could be adopted. As MP Galbraith

pointed out, the state retained responsibility for adopted children's well-being even after the court

70Hansard House of Commons Debates, 26 February 1926: 940-941.

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issued an adoption order allowing people to remove children from the state would also remove

said children from the protection and jurisdiction of the English court system.71 In a further effort

to protect children from unsuitable foster parents, the law authorized courts to issue interim

adoption orders for a two year period of supervision and assessment.

Although English legislation endeavored to safeguard the vulnerable child's

physical and emotional health, lawmakers also acknowledged the hardships and pressures faced

by biological mothers who gave their children up. The law prohibited the making of an adoption

order without the mother’s consent, and it required magistrates to be fully “...satisfied that the

parties understand the nature and effect of the proposed transaction and are acting of their own

free will," in other words that women giving children up for adoption were not pressured into doing

so, and understood the irrevocable termination of parental rights that legal adoption

represented.72 British legislation implicitly recognized that, just as some women might in

desperation seek unsuitable alternatives for dealing with an unwanted child, so too many women

faced enormous pressure to give up their children for adoption, either by religious institutions who

thought they knew what was best, or by desperate couples willing to pay hefty fees for the

privilege of adopting a healthy white child. The question of maternal rights, as well as the best

interests of the child, were consistently ignored in the Irish debates.

The most conspicuous distinction between the British and Irish debates was the

role of religion in matching children with adoptive families. This is in part due to the different

religious persuasions that underpinned each society, but English legislation implied that religious

tests were not the most important criteria for determining the suitability of adoptive parents:

71 Hansard House of Commons Debates, 18 June 1926: 2661.

72Child Adoption Committee First Report, British Parliamentary Papers vol. 9 (13 March 1925): 6.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 199 In these matters we have, first of all, to consider the welfare of the infants. I am not for a moment suggesting that the question of religious belief is not a most important thing, but it is not the only thing, and if we put in the Clause words which make it peremptory that the only person who can adopt a child must be of the same religious faith we may be doing something which in certain cases may be against the interests of the child. Of course, due regard will always be paid to this matter, but I ask the House to leave it to the discretion of the tribunal which will have all the facts before it, and which will see that full consideration is given to the paramount welfare of the infant.73

The child-centered nature of the English debates contrasts sharply with the obsessive concern

among Irish lawmakers with questions of religion, faith, and morals, at the expense of the rights

and interests of children and their biological parents.

The issues that preoccupied Irish lawmakers illustrate the extent to which they

were invested in a particular concept of family life as the foundation of Irish social life and stability.

This is not to suggest that English lawmakers discounted the importance of the family, or that

vulnerable English children necessarily fared better than their Irish counterparts, but rather that

the English conceptualization was broad enough to include adoptive families consisting of two

parents and adoptive and biological children, and also families comprised of unmarried women or

men and adopted children. Although Irish lawmakers were willing to solve the problem of

illegitimacy by establishing “non-traditionaP families, neither lawmakers nor church officials

anticipated displacing the traditional, nuclear family as the foundation of Irish social life and in fact

were adamant that adoption legislation not “...substitute an artificial for a natural family," nor did

Archbishop McQuaid and his contemporaries believe that married couples who were artificially

preventing pregnancy (in other words using contraception) should be eligible to adopt children.74

The language of the church’s episcopal statement regarding the place of the family in Irish society

was inserted virtually verbatim into Minister for Justice Boland’s opening statement on the

introduction of the bill:

73Hansard House of Commons Debates, 18 June 1926: 2664.

74Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 354/164.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 200 The Constitution recognises the family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law. The purpose of this Bill is not to allow the relationship of adoption to be substituted for the family, but to enable children who do not belong to a family, to secure through adoption the benefits of the family.75

Because officials were concerned that adoption not supplant or alter “appropriate" or acceptable

models of family organization, unmarried people were prohibited from adopting except where an

unmarried woman petitioned to adopt a child who was related to her by blood.

The adoption of legitimate children also was problematic in the context of the

government's conceptualization of “normal” or appropriate family composition, as Minister Boland

illustrated:

I am advised...that there is a danger that the Bill would be held to be unconstitutional if it provided for the adoption of legitimate children whose parents are alive. The Constitution declares the rights and duties of parents towards their children to be inalienable, and any provision for the permanent transfer of those rights and duties, even with the consent of the parents, might be unconstitutional. The main need for adoption arises in connection with orphans and illegitimate children.76

Even under the informal, pre-1952 adoptions, DFA officials were quite willing to issue passports to

allow illegitimate children to travel overseas for adoption, so long as church officials approved, but

consistently refused passports to legitimate children, even orphaned children. Their reluctance to

allow legitimate children to leave the state for the purpose of adoption was linked to their

understanding of parental and family rights enshrined in the 1937 constitution, as outlined in a

1954 internal DFA memo:

In my view it would not be proper for us to issue such a Passport [to a legitimate child of parents still living] notwithstanding that on the face of it the child’s material interests might well be best served by facilitating her adoption. It is relevant to remark in this connection that our own adoption law does not envisage the adoption of legitimate children under any circumstances. This no doubt is based on the principle of the State maintaining so far as is in its power the unity of the family, which is enshrined in the Constitution...In the light of the above my view is that...having regard to the terms of Articles 41 and 42 of the Constitution, it would not be open to the parents of this child to execute a valid surrender of the child to a

75D6il Debates, vol. 132 (11 June 1952), 1107.

76ibid, 1106.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 201 third party, and that consequently the Department could not consider the issue of a Passport in a case such as this.77

Yet not all members of the government agreed with this interpretation of the constitution, and the

debate underscores the marginalization of unmarried mothers in constitutional as well as legal

terms:

...the Constitution insists upon the natural and imprescriptible rights of the family and refers throughout to the parents, that is to say, both to the mother and the father. It is clear therefore that the Constitution so far from imposing a restriction on the family, recognises that it is entirely free to carry out its own moral obligations which are anterior to positive law. For this reason, if a parent wishes to allow his child to be adopted in America, there is nothing in the Constitution to prohibit it.78

The disagreement evident in these conflicting interpretations was one of form more than

substance. There was no question that “legitimate" parents possessed fundamental, ‘inalienable’

rights. What was at issue was how best to protect those rights; the question at the center of the

debate was whether the state had the right to override the decision to give their legitimate children

up for adoption. And yet, the fact that illegitimate children were sent out of the state with a

minimum of fuss, sometimes without the consent of their mothers, and that thousands of

legitimate children were confined to industrial schools, suggests that the constitution would be

used to protect the rights only of those who conformed to the state’s expectations of appropriate

sexual, parental, and family behavior. The adoption legislation represented an implicit

acknowledgment that those who fell outside the pale were not entitled to full participation, as

citizens, in the life of the state, or to full constitutional rights and protections as parents.

Although the adoption bill, on the surface, was motivated in part by the dangers

posed to illegitimate children by unregulated overseas adoptions, the legal adoption bill did not

77Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/96/II.

78Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/96/II. As it happened the child in question was born in Northern Ireland and thus not an Irish citizen under existing citizenship laws. The state therefore had no right to issue a passport for the child to travel outside of the country for adoption, even with the parents' consent to the removal.

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stop the outward flow of infants and, in fact, the safeguards established to protect infants adopted

within Ireland, and in particular oversight of the process by an adoption board, did not apply to

overseas adoptions. The debate on this aspect of the bill is revealing and indicative of the

fundamental lack of concern on the part of church and state for the fate of illegitimate children,

even as some TDs continued to argue that the bill would prevent children from being sent to

America for adoption:

W e could see these children being taken out, being placed in an aeroplane and going right across to the United States of America to be adopted by parents of whom we had no knowledge except the amount of money they might have for that purpose. There were no precautions in regard to that adoption and nothing could be done about it. The children could be adopted, flown across the Atlantic to America and kept there where they would be under no control of our Minister or of our courts. Under this Bill, they will be under the control of the Minister and of the board set up under this Bill when it becomes an Act, and under the control of this House, if needs be. Deputy Rooney: Does the Deputy mean that the practice will be stopped? Deputy Cowan: Yes, the Bill prohibits it. Deputy Boland: It makes it illegal. Deputy Lynch: It proposes imprisonment if it is contravened.79

The adoption bill did not halt the exodus of children or enact measures to protect the civil and

legal rights of children who were removed from the state, and it certainly did not provide for the

imprisonment of people who removed children from the state for the purpose of adoption. The

only change in overseas adoption practice was the introduction of a minimum age for removing a

child from the state, and this measure was aimed not at protecting the child but at preventing

proselytism, as it was based on the assumption that desperate mothers would willingly hand

newborn infants over to any individual or organization, including Protestant ones, that offered

assistance, with no regard for the spiritual or moral well-being of their innocent infants. Imposing

an age restriction theoretically reduced the element of desperation that the Catholic hierarchy

assumed fueled the proselytizing “menace”, and ensured that children sent out of the state for

adoption would not lose their Catholic birthright.

79 D6il Debates, vol. 132 (11 June 1952), 1125.

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Not only did overseas adoptions not cease, but DFA officials acknowledged that

there was no legal basis for them to deny passports for children to travel abroad, so long as the

children and adopting parents met Archbishop McQuaid's 1950 regulations:

...I think it essential that I should make it clear that we could see nothing in Section 39 to justify us using the passport machinery to exercise an administrative restraint on the travel abroad, for adoption or other purposes, of children in the exempted categories outlined in subsections (2) and (3) of that Section. Quite the contrary. In fact, we must, it seems to us, regard Section 39 of this bill, even at the present, as a precise statement of Government policy in the matter of what categories of children are to be permitted to go abroad or be restrained from so doing and we must be guided by that in the issue of passports. This being so we have, for instance, decided against the issue of future passports to illegitimate children under one year to travel abroad for adoption purposes. Similarly, we must interpret the Government policy reflected in sub-sections (2) and (3) of Section 39 as specifically inhibiting us from exercising an administrative restraint on the travel abroad of the exempted categories of children whose right so to travel the two sub-sections in question so clearly preserve.80

Even as DFA officials insisted that they could not impose limits on granting passports to children

to be adopted overseas, they continued to insist that they were opposed in principle to such

adoptions: “...while refusing to give encouragement in a positive way, we did not mean to suggest

that you should refuse passports where a child's guardians want to send him out of the country

and there is no legal impediment to that."81 DFA officials were in a difficult position: on the one

hand, they had no choice but to adhere to both the adoption bill and constitutional law when

determining whether to issue passports; on the other hand, precisely because their role was to

issue the required travel documents, they were open to the charge that they were facilitating

emigration . This dilemma plagued DFA from the time overseas adoptions began in the 1940s,

and the adoption bill did nothing to resolve this dilemma.

80Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/164.

81 Department of Foreign Affairs, Adoption Policy Files, File 345/164.

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Conclusion

Like unmarried mothers, illegitimate children, and the children of poor and

allegedly unfit parents, faced an uncertain future in a society that focused on institutionalization as

the preferred method of dealing with dependence and deviance. In spite of official declarations of

support for the “imprescriptible" rights of parents and families, and early lawmakers' articulation of

the value of children to the future of the Irish state and race, family life was interfered with to a

significant degree in the post-independence period, especially among poor or “illegitimate”

families who threatened the national vision of frugal simplicity and piety that served as the

cornerstone of the independent Irish state. Definitions of childhood, as well as the actual treatment

of illegitimate, vulnerable, or potentially deviant children, were politicized in the mid-twentieth

century in the pursuit of the post-independence state’s political and religious agendas.

Recent revelations relating to the treatment of children who were removed from

their families by the state and placed in industrial schools, coupled with the practice in the 1940s,

1950s and early 1960s of allowing illegitimate children to be removed from the state for the

purposes of adoption, suggest that lawmakers and the Catholic hierarchy were more concerned,

at least into the 1960s, with the preservation of Ireland’s self-image and reputation abroad, and

with the preservation of the faith of illegitimate children, than with the needs of children who, for a

variety of reasons, could not be cared for in their own homes or by their own parents. But, as the

procedures for committing children to industrial schools suggests, it was not only church and

state, but local communities, who saw industrial schools as the most appropriate method to deal

with “problem" children. Many of the children who were committed to industrial schools at the

behest of the NSPCC first came to official notice through the intervention, often anonymously, of

neighbors, teachers, and parish priests accusing biological parents of neglect or abuse. Many

more children were committed because their parents— unmarried mothers and desperately poor

or dysfunctional families— simply could not cope and requested that they be sent to industrial

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schools. In spite of the Catholic insistence on the sanctity of child life, articulated most frequently

in official discussions of infanticide and abortion, it seems clear that the safety, physical and

emotional health, and material well-being of poor and illegitimate children was disregarded in

favor of the official certainty that the children’s souls would be preserved for the after-life.

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THE CHANGING FACE OF CATHOLIC IRELAND: ABORTION,

ANN LOVETT, AND THE KERRY BABIES CONTROVERSY

Introduction

The very existence of unmarried mothers and illegitimate children, and the

seeming prevalence of infanticide as a means of disposing of unwanted children, suggests a

popular challenge on the part of some individuals, perhaps at an unconscious level, of the

Catholic Church’s moral authority in twentieth-century Ireland. At the official level, one can see

occasional resistance to the church’s interference in affairs of state, evident most clearly in the

controversy over the mother and child scheme in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Even people

who regarded themselves as “good Catholics" and on the surface fulfilled their obligations to the

faith engaged in behaviors that the clergy consistently condemned as abhorrent to Catholic-

Christian sensibilities. The liberalism that spread through the Western world in the 1960s and

1970s, to which Ireland was not immune, did not entirely erode the church's hold over the voice of

authority in matters of sexual morality.1 But a series of events in 1983 and 1984 shattered the

complacency of a society that had rarely questioned its moral underpinnings or the church’s

exclusive right to define moral and immoral, acceptable and unacceptable behavior. These events

also revealed the tension that had been building since the 1960s between the idea of a “native"

1The liberalism that began to emerge in Ireland in the early 1960s can be traced to a growing interaction between Ireland and the rest of the Western world, brought about by economic policies that encouraged expansion and foreign investment rather than the traditional policy of isolationism and protectionism, coupled with the growth of the television industry. RTE, Ireland’s national television station, began broadcasting on New Year’s Eve 1961. Households on the northern and eastern coasts could also pick up transmissions from England. For a valuable study of Ireland in the 1960s see Fergal Tobin, The Best of Decades: Ireland in the 1960s (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1996). 206

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Irish Catholic identity and political, social, and economic integration into and interaction with the

broader world. The advent of television, greater ease of travel between Ireland and Europe, and

an increased importation of “foreign” films, books, newspapers, and cinemas, essentially rendered

the church powerless to control the ideas, images, and values to which the Irish Catholic faithful

were exposed and how this exposure shaped their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. This chapter

examines the events of the early 1980s to argue that in spite of Ireland’s growing interaction with

the outside world beginning in the 1960s. and of the influence in Ireland of Western liberalism, the

events of the early 1980s, and in particular the links between the growth of the popular media and

the substantial public commentary, represented the transition from the conservative “dark” days to

the liberalism that now characterizes Irish society.

In September 1983 Irish people went to the polls and voted in favor of a

referendum embedding a ban on abortion within the Irish Constitution. While the success of the

referendum may not be surprising in a country where the Catholic Church was still recognized as

the arbiter of moral standards and values, the referendum passed by a smaller majority than its

supporters had anticipated, and less than fifty percent of the electorate turned out to vote.2 Prior

to the emergence of the anti-abortion movement there were no proposals or demands to change

Irish abortion law; rather, a small group of conservative politicians and Catholic leaders feared that

Irish law eventually would be superseded by European law and abortion legislation thus would be

imposed on Ireland from without. They insisted that a constitutional amendment was the only way

to preserve Ireland’s distinctive moral foundation in the midst of a secularizing trend within Irish

society and a growing exposure to “foreign" cultural, political, and moral influences resulting from

Ireland’s entry in 1973 into the European Economic Community (now the European Union or

2Fora discussion of the abortion referendum see Michael Solomons, Pro-Life? Ireland’s Question (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1992); Ailbhe Smyth, ed.. The Abortion Papers Ireland (Dublin: Attic Press, 1992); and Tom Hesketh, The Second Partitioning of Ireland? The Abortion Referendum of 1983 (Dublin: Brandsma Books, 1990).

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EU).3 Some of those who opposed the referendum might have regarded abortion as immoral but

nonetheless they viewed the pro-life stance articulated by anti-abortion activists as hypocritical

and untenable given the refusal of both church and state to recognize unmarried mothers and

their children as deserving of the respect, dignity, and material benefits extended to married

mothers, or to hold men equally responsible, morally and financially, for children born outside of

marriage. There also was a fundamental tension between the surface disdain for abortion, on the

one hand, and the fact that thousands of Irish women annually availed of legal abortion services in

Britain, a trend to which the Irish government essentially turned a blind eye.4

The referendum debate epitomized the tensions that existed in Irish society

between the traditional conservatism of the first half of the twentieth century and the supposed

“liberalism” that accompanied Ireland’s entry into the EU. Although Ireland had been exposed,

prior to the 1960s, to feminism, “foreign” ideas, and cultural influences that challenged traditional

assumptions about women’s appropriate social roles, by the 1960s the growth of the mass media

and Ireland’s increasing interaction with Europe and the United States meant that church and

state could not prevent the influx of these ideas or the way Irish people responded to them.5 At

3Solomons, Pro-Life?

4Joumalist Anthony Clare has argued that given the divisiveness of the abortion question encouraging women to travel to England made more sense socially and politically than tackling the abortion issue again: “...the existence of Britain less than 100 miles away, coupled with constitutional rights to information and travel, meets the needs of the great majority of those who wish to have abortions while avoiding the appalling and bitter divisiveness which would follow the introduction of even limited abortion in Ireland." Sunday Independent, 23 November 1997, 4.

5There were isolated challenges to the church's authority in the 1940s and 1950s, in addition to those of the 1960s and 1970s. Sean O’Faolain and Peadar O ’Donnell founded The Bell in 1940 to provide a “liberal" voice of opposition to those policies that seemed to conform too closely to church teaching, including the Censorship of Publications Act. In the late 1940s Dr. Noel Browne, then Minister for Health, introduced a mother and child health scheme that was vehemently opposed by the Catholic hierarchy. Browne refused to back down in the face of enormous ecclesiastical and political pressure but ultimately was forced to resign his post. In 1973 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Mary McGee, who argued, on the basis of marital privacy, that the 1935 ban on the importation and sale of contraceptives was unconstitutional. The McGee victory was a tacit recognition of a married couple's right to decide for themselves whether and how to limit family size, and to have access to contraceptive methods. For a legal analysis of the

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the same time, lawmakers began to bow to the pressure of the feminist movement and enact

legislation that sought to remedy gender imbalances in marital relationships, employment, social

welfare benefits, and responsibility for illegitimate children.6 The abortion referendum movement

represented both a retreat into conservatism and a backlash against the feminism evident in

some of the legislative initiatives of the 1970s.7 On the eve of the abortion referendum Irish

women's existence increasingly extended beyond the “traditionar arenas of home and church, but

they continued to be defined, politically and socially, in maternal terms that reflected adherence to

Catholic moral principles and the “sanctity of the family” enshrined in the 1937 constitution. The

language of the amendment was ambiguous in its protection of women's rights, appeared to value

the potential life of the fetus more highly than the actual life of the mother, and suggested that

referendum supporters still viewed married motherhood as a woman’s most fundamental and

legitimate social function.8

Magee case see Magee v. The Attorney General and the Revenue Commission, Irish Law Times, vol. 109 (1975), 29-53.

6 Little has been written about the Irish feminist movement of the 1970s, and while it seems clear that organizations such as Cherish and the Irish Women's Liberation Movement pressured the government for benefits for lone parents and equality for women workers and equal rights and responsibilities within the family, it also is likely that the Irish government responded to pressure from the EU in enacting legislation that could be defined as feminist.

7ln 1973 the governmentally established Commission on the Status of Women reported its findings, recommending government action to institute equality in job opportunities and pay, and maternity leave, leading later that year to the abolishment of the ban on married women in the civil service. Later in the 1970s some of these recommendations were translated into law: Anti-discrimination in Pay Act, 1974 (Act 14 of 1974), Family Home Protection Act, 1976 (Act 27 of 1976), and Family Law (Maintenance of Spouses and Children) Act, 1976 (Act 11 of 1876). Republic of Ireland, Irish Statute Book: Acts of the Oireachtas 1922-1997 (Oxfordshire, UK: Jutastat UK, 1999), CD-Rom. Unrelated to the Commission on the Status of Women, lone parents allowances were introduced in 1973 (children’s allowances had been available to married parents since 1944). The Employment Equality Agency was established in 1978 to ensure equality of opportunity and pay for women.

8Article 40.3.3, enacted in September 1983, reads “The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right." Bunreacht na nBireann (Dublin: Government Stationery Office, 1995).

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In spite of the apparent liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s, Ireland remained a

“Catholic country”: the overwhelming majority of Irish people subscribed to the Catholic faith and

regarded themselves as practicing Catholics.9 Most people also continued to accept the principle

of Catholic moral authority even if women and men increasingly began to exercise an individual

conscience where their own sexual and reproductive activities were concerned.10 Two events in

1984, the death of Ann Lovett and the “Kerry babies" scandal, brought firmly into focus the

schisms between the “traditional" and “modem” Irelands. Their occurrence within months of each

other, and on the heels of the 1983 abortion referendum, represented a pivotal moment in the

transition from the Catholic conservatism that endured into the 1980s to the liberal impulses that

began to stir in 1960s and 1970s. The death of Ann Lovett and the Kerry babies affair facilitated a

public airing through the media of these tensions and conflicts: between the image of Catholic

Ireland that prevailed at the national level, and the realities of moral and sexual behaviors and

attitudes at the local level; between those segments of Irish society who embraced the changes of

the 1960s and 1970s, and those who found them frightening and threatening; between blind faith

and individual conscience; and between the right and responsibility of the community to regulate

the behavior of its members, and the individual’s right to privacy.

9Michael Fogarty, Irish Values and Attitudes. The Insh Report of the European Value Systems Study (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1984). According to this report, in the early 1980s over 95 percent of the Irish population practiced the Catholic faith. Of that 95 percent, 86 percent attended church weekly or more often, while less than 5 percent attended church yearly or never.

10The Magee case, the controversial “condom trains", and the proliferation, albeit underground, of family planning clinics, suggests that couples increasingly sought access to contraceptives either to limit fertility within marriage or to exercise greater freedom over sexual activities outside of marriage. In 1971 a loose association of women known as the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement traveled regularly to Belfast by train to purchase condoms and import them to the Republic; on their return to Dublin the police refused to arrest them even though they were in violation of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1935. The “condom trains” as the journeys became known, effectively pointed out the hypocrisy and inefficiency of laws banning the importation of contraceptives.

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In January 1984 Ann Lovett, a 15-year-old convent schoolgirl, gave birth

outdoors, in a grotto dedicated to the Virgin Mary, in Granard, County Longford. According to post

mortem reports Lovett’s baby was still-born, having died of asphyxia in the process of childbirth.

Lovett later died of exposure and hemorrhage after spending over four hours lying on the cold,

damp ground, unprotected from the wind and driving rain. Lovett’s death shocked and saddened

people in her community and throughout the country. Those close to her claimed ignorance of her

pregnancy and insisted that every aid would have been extended had they but known. An inquest

revealed that many people did, in fact, know that Lovett was pregnant but believed it to be none of

their business. Rumors circulated through the town that Lovett’s pregnancy was the result of

sexual abuse, although these rumors have never been confirmed.11 Lovett’s pregnancy and death

confronted small-town Irish society with a host of issues that were not new in the 1980s: sexual

abuse, teenage sexuality, and unwed motherhood. What was new was the very public way that

the community was forced, by one young girl’s personal and painful dilemma, to wrestle with how

it defined right and wrong, inclusion and exclusion, punished transgressions from the norm, and

negotiated the limits of a community's responsibility for its most vulnerable members.

Two and a half months later, in April 1984, the stabbed and badly beaten body of

a baby boy was found washed up on a beach in Cahirciveen, County Kerry. The grisly discovery

sparked a county-wide investigation that reverberated throughout the nation. The “Kerry babies”

case, as it became known, captured the Irish imagination the way few events in recent years had,

inspiring a film, several books, and countless pages of newspaper commentary.12 Joanne Hayes,

11 Emily O ’Reilly, the journalist who first reported on Ann Lovett’s death, interviewed several people in Granard in the weeks after Lovett’s death and heard these rumors from many sources. She also interviewed Lovett’s alleged boyfriend, who admitted that he could have been the father of Lovett’s child. Emily O'Reilly, Political Editor, Sunday Tribune, interview by author, telephone interview, 12 December 1997.

12The term “Kerry babies" refers to two babies found within 50 miles and one week of each other: the baby washed up on the beach in Cahirciveen, and Joanne Hayes’ baby, discovered on her farm in Abbeydorney, County Kerry.)

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the woman at the center of the garda investigation, became a feminist symbol of what happens

when a woman transgresses the codes of moral and maternal behavior established by the Roman

Catholic Church and the Irish state. Hayes, an unmarried woman, became pregnant by a married

man. She gave birth at home to what she claimed was a still-born child. Although forensic

evidence confirmed that Hayes was not the mother of the baby discovered at Cahirciveen, nor

was there evidence that she had murdered her own baby, nonetheless she was vilified by a

government tribunal as a woman of loose morals and as a baby killer. In spite of the fact that her

behavior violated even “liberal" notions of sexual morality, Hayes was supported by her family and

community in a way that Lovett was not, and this was in part a function of her family’s standing

and reputation in the town.

The Ann Lovett and Kerry babies episodes were noteworthy because they

created a space, for the first time in Irish history, for a wide-scale discussion of the issues that

increasingly divided Irish society into “conservative" and “liberal" camps, and the growth of the

popular press and media facilitated and fueled the discussion. Through the media the finger of

blame was pointed at the people of Granard, and people in Kerry and around the country

expressed their outrage at the abuse of power and invasion of privacy perpetrated by the Kerry

babies tribunal. The public reaction to Lovett’s death was sensitive, self-conscious, and inward-

looking. People in Granard and around the country were forced to consider the extent to which

Lovett’s plight resulted from her marginalization both by prevailing attitudes toward sexual morality

and unmarried motherhood, and local conceptualizations of respectability and community

responsibility. On the other hand, the women and men who protested Joanne Hayes’ treatment at

the hands of the government tribunal did not necessarily condone Hayes’ behavior, but they

objected to the notion that the government had the right to dictate codes of private morality and to

hold up to public scrutiny those who strayed from the norm.

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Death in the Grotto

Ann Lovett’s lonely death in a secluded grotto shattered the peace of the quiet

town of Granard. Initial media reports suggested that Lovett successfully concealed her

pregnancy from parents, friends, and teachers. The mother superior at the local convent school

denied suggestions that school officials knew of Lovett’s pregnancy and confronted her parents

about it.13 Indeed, Lovett apparently managed to hide her pregnancy from her family doctor,

whom she visited on two occasions just two months before she died, when she was six months

pregnant.14 Newspaper accounts portrayed Lovett as a well-known and well-liked, if somewhat

troubled, girl. Both local newspapers pointed to the large turnout at her funeral, “...the largest ever

seen in [thej area..." as evidence of her popularity and of the town’s deep regret over her death.15

Lovett may have been popular with the local girls but the townspeople regarded

her family with suspicion and animosity, not only because the Lovetts had moved to Granard from

County Cavan just three years before Lovett’s death and thus were “outsiders", but also because

Lovett's parents did not conform to the community’s standards of respectability. Townspeople

reported that they rarely saw Lovett’s mother Patricia, and they encountered her father Diarmuid

only when he went to the pool hall to bring Ann home.16 Lovett’s father was unemployed, allegedly

alcoholic, and rumors circulated about his behavior towards his wife and children.17 Although the

reluctance of neighbors to interfere in Lovett’s circumstances could be interpreted as a respect for

the family’s privacy, it is more likely, in a small and close-knit community like Granard, that

13/risri Independent, 6 February 1984, 1-2.

'i4lrish Independent, 17 February 1984, 7.

15Longford News, 10 February 1984, 7.

16Sunday Tribune, 12 February 1984, 4.

17Emily O’Reilly interview.

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townspeople simply did not want to become involved or take responsibility for getting Lovett the

help she needed. The traditional bonds of community responsibility were easily loosened in

Lovett’s case because of her family’s reputation and their status as outsiders..

On the day she died Ann Lovett was, according to her parents, in her usual ‘good

form.’’18 She left home with her schoolbag but never arrived at school, and it is likely that she

never planned to attend school that day. Neighbors saw her walking around the town until

approximately 12:30 p.m., when she visited her friend Mary Maguire. Although Maguire knew that

Lovett was pregnant, and had heard her complain on the previous day of stomach pains, she

insisted she had no idea that Lovett was about to give birth: “If I knew what was to happen on

Tuesday [the day she died] there’s no way Ann would be dead today."19 It is not clear where

Lovett went after leaving Maguire’s house, but medical evidence indicated that she had probably

given birth several hours before three young boys returning from school discovered her, semi

conscious, in the grotto.

If Lovett’s life in a small County Longford town was unremarkable, her death was

not; repercussions of the fact and manner of her death were felt around the country. Initially

neither of the local weekly papers reported Lovett’s death or printed an obituary. On 5 February

1984, almost a week after the fact, a page one article in the national Sunday Tribune newspaper

detailed the circumstances of Lovett’s death.20 The following Monday, 6 February, other national

newspapers began covering the story and journalists descended on Granard, much to the dismay

18Irish Independent, 22 February 1984, 1.

19Longford Leader, 10 February 1984, 1.

20An anonymous caller to the Sunday Tribune newsdesk alleged that a girl had died in childbirth in a small midlands town. Tribune reporters confirmed the story with gardai in Granard. These reporters heatedly debated the wisdom of revealing Lovett’s identity in their coverage; some felt that Lovett’s age, and the circumstances of her death, warranted confidentiality; others argued that naming her publicly would enable people to identify more strongly with her. Letters to Ann, radio documentary, RTE, 16 June 1998.

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of local residents. Finally, on 11 February, both local newspapers reported Lovett's death, clearly

responding to the perceived “bias" and “insensitivity" of the national media. Popular and official

responses to Lovett’s death were swift and furious. As letters from around the country poured into

local and national newspapers, Nuala Fennell, Minister for Women’s Affairs, called Lovett's death

a “national tragedy” and demanded a full inquiry “regardless of whose sensibilities are hurt.”21 The

people of Granard were more reticent in their response. They might have sympathized with Lovett

and her family, but they criticized media efforts to exploit her death and resisted what they

perceived to be outside intrusions into private matters family and community. Granard’s parish

priest chided the media for its extensive and often indelicate coverage: “What happened should

have been left to the town to look after in its own way. My firm belief is that what happened should

not have been covered by RTE or the newspapers - it should have been kept parochial, local.”22

Townspeople did not want Lovett or their community to become platforms on a feminist political

agenda or scapegoats in the aftermath of the abortion referendum.23

Local hostility to national media coverage was not merely an emotional over

reaction to the “morbid" public interest in a tragic yet private matter, but reflected a complex

struggle between local culture and values and national perceptions of “small town” Ireland. The

most immediate source of antagonism was the fact that Lovett’s death was reported at all. Local

newspaper editors likely would have continued to ignore it had they not been forced by the

national media to give the local, or “real”, version of events. Yet, only the local newspapers’

headlines, which positioned the community as the innocent victim of national slander,

21 Irish Independent, 6 February 1984, 1.

z2lrish Independent, 13 February 1984, 1.

23This view was expressed by people interviewed by reporters in Granard in the days after Lovett’s death: “The media in Dublin are trying to exact revenge for the defeat of the anti-amendment lobby. They are saying, ‘Look you’ve won the amendment but this is the way your priest leaders are treating the unmarried mothers.’” Longford News, 10 February 1984, 1.

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distinguished local from national coverage. Local papers carried such headlines as: “Ann Lovett’s

Decision”, “Granard People Reject Slur," “National media wallow in Granard disaster,” while

national newspaper accounts led with: “Girl, 15, dies after giving birth in field”, “In the valley of

squinting windows", “A teen-age pregnancy could not have gone unnoticed", “For country women

there is no other refuge”. One wonders, then, to what extent Granard’s response to the media

onslaught was one of shame, embarrassment, and collective guilt: the national press pointed the

finger of blame at the people of Granard who, by their silence, allowed Lovett to give birth

outdoors, on a cold, damp January day, frightened and alone. Journalists who interviewed friends

of the Lovett family discovered that some people knew of Lovett’s pregnancy and even may have

questioned her about it. Two men whose daughters were friendly with Lovett suspected that she

was pregnant and had heard rumors to that effect for months before she died. A local shopkeeper

alleged that the nuns at Lovett’s school knew of her pregnancy and approached the family about

it, although the mother superior refuted this allegation.24 Media reports implied that, rather than

gossiping privately about Lovett’s plight, “the community" should have taken responsibility for

confronting Lovett's parents and getting her the help she needed. Media coverage also illustrated

the hypocrisy inherent in the local response to Lovett’s pregnancy: townspeople might have

suspected that she was being abused, but they also pointed out that she was seen leaving her

boyfriend’s home at “unsociable” hours.25

The fact that the local newspapers covered the story far more extensively, and for

a longer period, than the national press, suggests that it was not the media coverage itself but

rather the national media’s characterization of Granard and their responsibility for Lovett’s death,

that offended townspeople. Granard was depicted as a “depressed little country town,"

24Sunday Tribune, 12 February 1984, 4.

25ibid.

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reminiscent of Brinsley McNamara's Valley of the Squinting Windows, where people gossiped

privately about Ann Lovett’s pregnancy and turbulent home life but did little to assist her.26 The

local press accused the national media, as well as government ministers like Nuala Fennell, of

passing judgment on the town and its people without understanding the situation: “All Irish and

some British newspapers...gave extensive coverage to the tragedy with the clear implication in

some cases that in some way the people and town of Granard had something to be ashamed of.

However, when more investigating was carried out by reputable reporters it became clear that the

background to the case explained a lot of what happened."27 Yet the “reputable reporters" of the

local press were no better able than their national colleagues to explain the circumstances

surrounding Lovett’s pregnancy and death, or to dispel the impression that the local community

must share some of the responsibility for what happened to Ann Lovett.

The people of Granard may have regarded national media coverage as an

indictment of their failure to help Lovett when she so obviously was unable to help herself;

however, it was not Granard itself, but what Granard represented, that underscored the intense

media scrutiny. Lovett’s death could have happened in any town in Ireland where some people

valued the image of Catholic piety more highly than the Christian principles of compassion and

tolerance, and where narrow and conservative attitudes toward morality and sexuality continued to

underpin responses to unmarried motherhood. The local press inadvertently reinforced this

impression in their attempts to defend themselves:

Every week in every county in Ireland babies are born to young girls out of wedlock. Some are left on doorsteps, some are born in the arm of voluntary organisations, many more are aborted in backstreet clinics in England. In all these cases there is no publicity, no media

26Although the phrase “Valley of the Squinting Windows" was used widely in media coverage, townspeople reserved their hostility for Nuala Fennell, who was the first to use this term and uttered it repeatedly in print and broadcast media. Brinsley McNamara, The Valley of the Squinting Windows (Dublin: Maunsel, 1918).

27Longford Leader, 10 February 1984, 1.

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Perhaps that was what was so shocking about Lovett’s death - the acknowledgment that it could

have happened anywhere in Ireland where community standards of acceptable and unacceptable,

moral and immoral, determined whether one would be included, aided, and forgiven or

marginalized, excluded, and cast aside.

Despite local protests that people in Granard were compassionate Christians,

and their rejection of any responsibility for Lovett’s death, some people in the community shared

the national media’s criticism of Granard’s “Valley of the Squinting Windows" mentality. The

author of one letter to the local newspaper rejected the claim that Lovett would have been helped

had people only known about her predicament:

What has happened to the charity and goodwill of the people who live in this supposedly Christian community of ours? These are the questions people should ask themselves when a young pregnant girl of 15 can deliver her child by her own hands and die as a result while the rest of the people sit idly by and converse in meaningless gossip...I must firmly direct my feelings towards certain members of the community in Granard who cannot deny the fact that they knew about this unfortunate girl’s predicament and yet they would not even offer the smallest help which I am quite sure would have been gratefully received.29

A classmate of Lovett's at the Convent of Mercy school offered the simplest, yet the most

poignant and scathing, indictment of her community: “O my God what have we done...We killed

our friend and now she's gone...It’s only now we have deep regret...She needed help which she

did not get...No one on his own is to be blamed...It’s all in Granard should be ashamed...When

she died everyone did cry and moan...When she needed help she was alone."30 The last lines of

this poem reinforce the contradiction presented by the fact that, while the entire community turned

out for her funeral, Lovett gave birth and died alone, in wretched and primitive circumstances.

28ibid.

29Longford News, 10 February 1984, 8.

30ibid.

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Lovett did not get the help she needed, and some members of the local community believed that

there was individual and collective guilt to be shared.

The reaction of some of Ann Lovett’s neighbors to her death, as articulated in the

pages of the local press, sheds some light on why Lovett chose to keep her pregnancy a secret.

Certainly the extent to which unmarried motherhood was still stigmatized and censured was

evident in some of the local reaction to her death. In a page one commentary the editor of the

Longford Leader asked: “Who is to say Ann Lovett did not die happy? Who is to say she that she

and her son are not in Heaven? Who is to say she has not fulfilled her role in life as her God had

decreed?"31 The view that perhaps Lovett was better off dead was articulated more explicitly in

two letters to the Longford News. One reader wrote: “She [Lovett] asked Our Lady for help and

Our Lady took her and her baby home. Had She let her live, she would have endured terrible

suffering."32 Another reader wondered: “If the girl had been successful in giving birth, if she had

survived: if the boy had survived, what life would she have in Granard? The rumour-mongers

would play hell, worse than the greatest gutter-snipe journalist."33 The notion that a 15-year-old

girl would be better off dead than bearing a child out of wedlock perhaps seems extraordinary in

the “civilized" Western world, yet it reflects an enduring investment in rigid codes of Catholicism

and morality as the foundation of status and acceptance, especially in small, rural communities. It

also reveals the hypocrisy inherent in the concepts of morality perpetuated by church and state

which insisted on adherence to the “letter of the law” regarding sexual behavior while leaving little

room for a broader spirit of Christianity that encompassed compassion and tolerance.

31Longford Leader, 10 February 1984, 1.

32 Longford News, 17 February 1984, 4.

33 Longford News, 10 February 1984, 16.

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In addition to extensive media coverage Lovett’s death elicited an outpouring of

emotion in the form of song and poetry that expressed the sadness many Irish people felt over a

15-year-old school girl dying because of the shame, fear, and hypocrisy associated with

unmarried motherhood. Christy Moore and Sinead O’Connor’s “Middle of the Island” poignantly

articulates the popular reaction to Lovett’s death: “It was a sad slow stupid death for them both.

Everybody knew, nobody said. A week ago last Tuesday. At a grotto. In a field. In the middle of

the isiand."34 The stupidity of Lovett’s death stemmed from the fact that “everybody knew” and

“nobody said"; many people either knew or suspected that Lovett was pregnant but took no action

to assist her. Granard, the “middle of the island,” represents the hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness,

and blind adherence to Catholic moral codes that presumably pervaded in small town Ireland, and

that underscored popular and official attitudes toward questions of morality and sexuality and

toward those who violated prevailing norms.

Paula Meehan’s poem “The Statue of the Virgin of Granard Speaks" is a

powerful, feminist response to Lovett’s death.35 Meehan alludes to the image of the Virgin Mary,

long held up by the Catholic Church as the feminine ideal from which women derived influence

and status in Irish society. Lovett went to the Virgin Mary, perhaps seeking comfort, and the Virgin

was powerless to help her: “I did not move. I didn’t lift a finger to help her, I didn't intercede with

heaven, nor whisper the charmed word in God’s ear." While Meehan’s poem reflects the grief that

women especially felt about what happened to Lovett, it implies that the elevated position

accorded to women based on the Marian ideal was little more than a patriarchal myth. What

happened to Lovett could have happened to any Irish woman in a social climate that limited

^Christy Moore and Sinead O’Connor, “Middle of the Island," on Christy Moore's Voyage, WEA Records, Ltd., 1989.

35Paula Meehan, “The Statue of the Virgin of Granard Speaks," in The Man who Was Marked by lV/bter(Loughcrew, Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 1991), 40-42.

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access to contraception and insisted on the sanctity of the life of the unborn child at the same time

that it stigmatized unmarried motherhood, to the extent that some people believed Lovett was

better off dead than bearing a child outside of marriage. There is evident in Meehan’s poem an

undercurrent of anger that the definitions of morality prevalent in contemporary Ireland

condemned girls like Ann Lovett while it excused those who showed such indifference to her

plight: “On a night like this I remember the child who came with fifteen summers to her name, and

she lay down alone at my feet without midwife or doctor or friend to hold her hand and she pushed

her secret out into the night, far from the town tucked up in little scandals, bargains struck, words

broken, prayers, promises...”36

Although Lovett’s death generated extensive media and popular attention and

struck an emotional chord throughout the country, the issues it raised nonetheless were extremely

sensitive. Unlike the Kerry babies case, which raised these issues in a way that allowed Irish

people to project their anger onto institutions of church and state, Lovett’s death forced people in

Granard and throughout the country to consider their individual and collective role in perpetuating

the attitudes that might have contributed to it. Did the townspeople fail to show compassion to

Lovett, and if so why? Was Lovett undeserving of compassion because she and her family did not

conform to the community’s standards of decency, or because she violated moral or sexual

norms? Were the conditions under which Lovett gave birth and died any more or less moral than

the fact that her pregnancy was “illegitimate?” Did she deserve to die for her “sin?” Given the

speed with which media attention abated, and the fact that it produced no significant changes in

either attitude or policy, it seems likely that Irish society was not yet prepared to confront these

troubling issues head on. Events that unfolded three months later, in the Kerry babies case,

proved to be a far more effective platform from which not only feminists but society at large could

36Meehan, “The Statue of the Virgin of Granard Speaks," 42.

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demand a re-evaluation of the values, assumptions, and mentalities that seemed to trap Ireland in

the “dark ages” as far as matters of sexuality, morality, and reproductive rights were concerned.

The “Kerry Babies" Scandal

Ann Lovett’s death was still a recent memory when, on 14 April 1984, the body of

a newborn child washed ashore on a remote beach in Cahirciveen, County Kerry. The discovery

prompted a wide-scale garda investigation that eventually centered on Joanne Hayes, an

unmarried mother from the small village of Abbeydorney, outside of Tralee, County Kerry. When

the Cahirciveen baby was found gardai searched the county for a woman who was known to have

been pregnant and no longer was, sometimes traveling door to door demanding that new mothers

produce their infants as proof that they had not “done away" with them. Through a series of

telephone calls to local hospitals investigators increasingly concentrated on Hayes as a possible

suspect. Hayes was pregnant in April of 1984, the result of an affair with Jeremiah Locke, a

married man. The unhappy coincidence of Hayes being admitted to hospital after giving birth at

home on the same day that the Cahirciveen baby washed ashore fueled suspicion that Hayes was

the mother of that baby. According to her doctor Hayes arrived at the hospital on the night of 14

April complaining of severe bleeding. A scan of her uterus revealed that it had been emptied

recently - in other words that she had given birth within 48 hours previously.37 Based on this and

37lt is not clear why Joanne Hayes’ doctor revealed details about her condition to the gardai, given the existence of fairly strict practices regarding patient confidentiality. When he was interviewed at the tribunal the doctor indicated that he worried about violating the patient- doctor relationship, but it is likely that gardai pressured him into providing the information they wanted. When gardai approached the doctor, they suggested that they had all the information they required regarding Joanne Hayes condition and simply needed “confirmation" from him; the doctor perhaps believed that Hayes had willingly provided that information and given her consent for the doctor to confirm those details. The Kerryman (Tralee edition), 18 January 1985, 9; Barry O’Halloran. Lost Innocence: The Inside Story of the Kerry Babies Mystery (Dublin: Raytown Press, 1985), 81-83.

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other evidence gardai believed the case against Hayes to be solid and irrefutable, and they

detained Hayes and members of her family for questioning.38

Gardai confronted the Hayes family with the death of the Cahirciveen baby on 1

May 1984. Several detectives called to the Hayes farm in Abbeydorney, while others approached

Joanne Hayes and Jeremiah Locke at the Tralee sports center where both worked. They “invited”

Hayes’ mother and siblings to the Tralee garda station to be interviewed regarding Hayes’

pregnancy. When gardai approached Joanne Hayes at the sports center she assumed that her

own baby had been found on the family farm, where she maintained she concealed it after giving

birth on the night of 12/13 April. The rest of the family, although claiming ignorance of the birth of

the baby, also assumed that gardai wished to discuss Hayes’ pregnancy. They were stunned

when gardai accused them of murdering the baby discovered at Cahirciveen, about which they

had read in the local Kerryman newspaper but which they did not connect with Joanne Hayes.

Initially Hayes denied that she had been pregnant. However, when she realized

she was being questioned about the Cahirciveen baby she claimed to have miscarried in early

April 1984. Gardai, convinced that Hayes was lying, applied considerable pressure to elicit a

confession that she had given birth, in a field adjacent to the family farm, to a full-term or near-

term baby. Although Hayes drew a map pinpointing the location of her baby’s body, gardai

searched the field several times but failed to uncover the baby. A government tribunal established

in January 1985 would suggest that gardai failed to find Hayes’ baby because they “...regarded

the search as a formality that had to be carried out because Joanne Hayes was saying that her

3877je Kerryman (Tralee Edition), 15 February 1984, 1. This article, entitled “How the Gardai began the baby investigation," outlines of the steps taken by gardai as they investigated the death of the baby discovered at Cahirciveen. While this outline is interesting for the light it sheds on the assumptions and biases that informed the investigation, it also explains how gardai finally focused on Joanne Hayes, and the lengths they went to make Hayes’ circumstances “fit” the crime at hand. The Kerryman article is virtually the only insight into the garda investigation into the death of the Cahirciveen baby, as garda reports, interviews with witnesses, and other materials relating to the investigation are not open to public scrutiny.

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baby was hidden on the lands, but that the realities were that everybody ‘knew1 that her baby was

down in Cahirciveen and therefore not on the lands.”39 Hayes finally crumbled under garda

pressure and confessed to the murder of the Cahirciveen baby; shortly afterward members of

Hayes’ family confessed to helping dispose of the body. Even after a government tribunal

convened to investigate the matter, it is not clear why members of the Hayes family confessed to

complicity in the death of the Cahirciveen baby. The Hayes family displayed an extraordinary

degree of solidarity in the face of garda pressure; while they did not condone Joanne Hayes’

sexual indiscretions, neither did they relish the intrusion of outsiders, and particularly of gardai,

into their private, family matters.

Hayes' sister eventually reported finding Hayes' baby precisely where she said it

would be. Still gardai refused to drop charges against Hayes and her family, underscoring their

investment in Joanne Hayes as their primary, indeed only, suspect. Gardai alleged that Hayes

gave birth to twins: the first, born in a field, died of natural causes and Hayes left it in the field; the

second twin was born in Hayes’ bedroom, was beaten and stabbed by Hayes as her siblings

watched, and thrown off a cliff at Slea Head, approximately fifty miles from the Hayes farm. The

twins theory was based less on physical and forensic evidence than on the testimony of the Hayes

family themselves, in which they admitted to murdering Joanne Hayes’ baby and throwing it into

the waters of Dingle Bay. Gardai refused to acknowledge that these confessions were made

under duress and in relation to the Cahirciveen baby, which was ultimately discounted as Joanne

Hayes’ baby, and thus were entirely false at worst, and seriously flawed at best. Garda

investigators, keen to secure a conviction, made no effort to explain how or why Hayes gave birth

to one child in the field and the second child in her bedroom. They were reluctant to admit that

Hayes might not be the mother of the Cahirciveen baby as this would reveal the extent to which

39Report of the Tribunal of Inquiry into The Kerry Babies Case (Dublin: Government Stationery Office, 1985), 124.

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the case had been mishandled from the start, and would force them to reopen the investigation,

on a trail now grown cold, into the murder of the Cahirciveen baby. Hayes was immediately

suspect, as an unmarried mother and adulterer, and even if she did not murder the Cahirciveen

baby she was no “innocent;" she could be sacrificed in the name of law, order, and morality.

The case against Hayes was further compromised when tests revealed that the

blood type of the Cahirciveen baby did not match that of Hayes, her lover, or her daughter. Gardai

persisted in the twins theory, suggesting that Hayes could have given birth to both babies through

the rare process of super-fecundation, whereby a woman is impregnated by two different men

within a 48-hour period. This theory carried little weight in medical and legal circles and, in

September 1984, with no evidence to link Hayes to the Cahirciveen baby, the public prosecutor

ordered that all charges against Hayes and her family be dropped. In October 1984 the charges

were officially stricken from the records in Tralee Courthouse, and no new charges were

introduced in relation to the birth and death of Hayes' baby. It is not clear whether the search for

the mother of the Cahirciveen baby continued, but no one has yet been made accountable in that

case.40

The day after the charges were dropped the Hayes family lodged complaints

against gardai involved in the investigation. Joanne Hayes claimed that gardai slapped and

threatened her and coerced her into making a false confession in the murder of the Cahirciveen

baby. Hayes’ siblings alleged that gardai used harassment and physical intimidation to elicit

confessions. When asked why they did not make complaints sooner the family claimed that they

informed their solicitor, Patrick Mann, of the threats and intimidation on 5 May 1984, and Mann

40ln November 1999 the Irish Independent newspaper, perhaps marking the fifteenth anniversary of the opening of the Kerry babies tribunal, revisited the case in a two-part series. Gardai never found the mother of the Cahirciveen baby, and at least one senior garda investigator insists that Joanne Hayes was the mother of both babies, and he has recently called for the investigation to be re-opened. See Sunday Independent, 21 November 1999, 1L, 6L; Sunday Independent, 28 November 1999, 3, 6L.

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advised them to reserve the allegations for their defense should the case go to trial. If media

accounts are any indication, allegations of garda misconduct were becoming increasingly

common in the mid-1980s; in the two and a half years preceding Joanne Hayes' arrest, the Kerry

garda division was the subject of four inquiries investigating misconduct.41 An internal garda

inquiry was established to investigate the Hayes family claims, but both sides refused to

cooperate, leading to calls for an independent inquiry and, ultimately, the establishment of a

government tribunal. It seems extraordinary that the Hayes family would pursue their claims once

the charges against them had been dropped, particularly as their allegations of garda misconduct

would have been almost impossible to prove. Whatever their personal suspicions about Joanne

Hayes' guilt or innocence, they believed they had been mistreated, and their unity as a family and

their standing in the community empowered them to speak out against what they saw as an abuse

of power on the part of the state. Given the public way that their good name had been slandered

locally by their arrest, the charges lodged against gardai could be interpreted as a demand for

public vindication.

As was true when Ann Lovett died, the media played a leading role in articulating

the diversity of responses to the Kerry babies affair. Aside from coverage in the Kerryman

newspaper, initial media attention was scant from the discovery of two dead babies in April until

the charges were dropped in October. But as the internal garda inquiry unraveled, it became clear

that the case was far from routine, and it began to take on a significance that no one could have

foreseen in April 1984. The coverage of the tribunal in the national and local broadcast and print

media enabled people all over Ireland not only to keep abreast of the latest developments, but

also to participate in a national critique of the contemporary Irish society that claimed to embrace

“pro-life” principles even as it allowed newborn babies to die, and single women to give birth

41 The Kerryman, 19 October 1984, 1.

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frightened, alone, and stigmatized. The public outcry also reflected a shift in attitudes in favor of

individual morality and privacy, and a rejection of the right, long reserved by church and state, to

interfere in the private moral and sexual behaviors of Irish women and men.

The Tribunal opened on 7 January 1985 amidst tremendous anticipation and

speculation. Early press coverage described in detail Joanne Hayes' hair, clothes and demeanor,

all of which the public enthusiastically consumed. The highlight of the first day’s proceedings was:

“...the naming for the first time in public of Joanne Hayes’ lover and father of her daughter

Yvonne, and the claim on the basis of forensic evidence that he could not have been the father of

the Cahirciveen baby."42 Joanne Hayes took the stand on 17 January, in an atmosphere that

resembled opening night at the theater, with “...flowers, telegrams of congratulation and luck, a

packed house and a queue hopeful for returns.”43 However, the tribunal would present, in frank

and sometimes graphic detail, subjects that respectable Irish Catholics found difficult to discuss

privately, much less publicly. Although technically neither the gardai nor the Hayes family were on

trial, state solicitors clearly had an interest in presenting gardai in the most favorable light possible

while discrediting the Hayes family. Normal standards of restraint and decency did not apply in

their efforts to clear gardai of any wrongdoing. State solicitors cross-examined Hayes in minute

detail about her private life, including her sexual history, menstrual cycles, and contraceptive

use.44 People who traveled to Tralee to support Joanne Hayes told journalists that they were

shocked and outraged at the private matters that Hayes was compelled to discuss so publicly.

While some observers faulted the media, the majority were angry that issues that seemed to be

marginal to the tribunal’s mission were foregrounded while the real issue, garda misconduct, was

42/risri Press, 9 January 1985,1.

43Irish Times, 17 January 1985, 2.

44Trie Kerryman (Tralee edition), 18 January 1985, 12-14.

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virtually ignored.45 Disquiet over the tone and nature of the questioning was also articulated by

government officials; Mr. Michael Keating, TD, suggested: “It had never been intended that such

personal and medical evidence, every sad and minute detail, should be dragged out of people.

That should never have been part of the tribunal.”46 The Dail Committee on Women’s Rights

characterized the questioning of Joanne Hayes as “...insensitive...very, very

frightening...harrowing and quite horrific...and shameful.”47 At the same time, the committee was

reluctant to interfere in the judicial process and took no action beyond registering their disapproval

with the Minister of Justice.

An Irish Times editorial astutely pinpointed the source of the public unease over

tribunal proceedings: “The Kerry babies inquiry is disturbing...Much of what is emerging confronts

a society which has long been too comfortable and secure in its supposed virtues and values.

There is a natural urge to turn away from it.”48 The “urge to turn away” stemmed from the fact that

coverage of the Kerry babies affair forced people to consider their own hypocrisies and self-

righteousness, and not only the abuse of official power that the tribunal came to represent. The

tribunal was extraordinary because it facilitated, perhaps for the first time in Irish history, a

sustained public discussion of the “virtues and values” that underscored perceptions of

appropriate and inappropriate, moral and immoral behavior, and legitimate and illegitimate forms

of maternity and family life. Widespread public reaction to the Kerry babies case posed a

fundamental challenge to the idea that women like Hayes should be subject to public scrutiny and

to social and legal penalties when they consciously chose to define moral and maternal behavior

in their own terms.

45lrish Press, 16 January 1985, 5.

46Irish Times, 23 January 1985, 1.

47Irish Press, 23 January 1985, 1.

48lrish Times, 17 January 1985, 11.

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As the questioning of Joanne Hayes intensified and focused increasingly on her

private life people from all segments of Irish society began to vocalize their objections. Neighbors

from Abbeydomey traveled to Tralee and stood outside the courthouse bearing placards

proclaiming their support for Hayes and her family. Women’s groups from all over the country also

demonstrated in front of the courthouse, reflecting their sympathy, as women, with Joanne Hayes

and their contempt for the tribunal that condemned “immorality" among women but ignored the

transgressions of men: those, like Jeremiah Locke, whose own sexual indiscretions were partly

responsible for the whole affair, and those who sanctioned the “inquisition" of Joanne Hayes.49

Strangers sent flowers and mass cards, illustrating the wide-scale popular rejection of the

tribunal’s intrusion into Hayes' private life.50 Undoubtedly some people believed that Hayes “got

what she deserved" for giving birth out of wedlock and carrying on an affair with a married man.

For the most part, however, the fact that Hayes had an affair with a married man and bore two

illegitimate children was irrelevant in the face of what many people regarded as a gross abuse of

power on the part of the state.

From the outset Hayes was an unlikely heroine. By her own account she was no

feminist, nor did she regard the tribunal as a feminist issue. Family and friends condemned her

actions (even if they also vehemently condemned the tribunal’s treatment of her), and Hayes

accepted their censure. She also accepted full responsibility for the affair with Jeremiah Locke

and expressed remorse that the tribunal implicated and embarrassed him. Even before the

tribunal opened Hayes’ credibility was suspect, as forensic evidence indicated that her account of

the birth and death of her own baby was at least partly untrue. But the fact that Hayes was an

untrustworthy heroine did little to diminish popular support for her; when she was attacked by the

4977?e Kerryman (Kerry North edition), 1 February 1985, 10.

50lrish Times, 17 January 1985, 9.

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tribunal her neighbors stood solidly behind her, and this was due in part to the fact that Hayes and

her family were respected members of the community. Hayes took great pains, in her own

published account of the case, to portray herself and her family as devout Catholics who attended

church and the sacraments regularly, and who regarded their Catholicism as central to their

existence.51 She apparently saw no contradiction between her regular attendance at mass and

the sacraments on the one hand, and her engagement in an affair with a married man that

resulted in two illegitimate children and one miscarriage on the other. She considered herself a

“good Catholic," and was similarly regarded by the community. Hayes and her family were

“insiders” in the community in ways that Lovett was not: they had lived in Abbeydorney for

generations, owned considerable land, and participated in local politics and sport. They had a

claim to the community’s support even if they did not adhere to prescribed norms.

While Hayes received enormous support from Abbeydorney, people from around

the country also identified with her, suggesting that the issues raised by the tribunal resonated far

beyond County Kerry. Scores of people, many of them devout Catholics, backed Hayes even as

the tribunal vilified her. Nell McCafferty, one of Ireland's most outspoken feminist journalists,

observed the tribunal’s proceedings and provided a running commentary in the Irish press:

The people of the 95 per cent catholic country said a lot. Joanne Hayes received more than five hundred letters, cards and notes which invoked, on her behalf, the intercession of a loving compassionate God who was clearly and with certainty seen to be quite a cut above the human metronomes who clocked up her imperfections. Irish catholics, wanting genuinely to be good, struggling desperately under a yoke of bewildering rules and regulations, wrote to Joanne Hayes that no man should be allowed to sit in judgment on the human sexual condition. Their letters were a perfect cacophony of misery, anger and solidarity, and subjection to a God who alone could cope with what went on down here. The catholics who wrote trusted God, not the priests or the doctors or the lawyers. As if to make their point more forcefully one hundred and forty-two of the people who wrote to her enclosed mass cards, indicating that human judgment had been bypassed in favour of a direct line to God. Joanne Hayes’ public suffering evoked memories of private ordeals and tribulations, striking chords in a population that had never been able to fully subscribe to the official sanctioned norm. The letters showed that during her days on the stand people were

51 Joanne Hayes, My Story (Dingle, Co. Kerry: Brandon Books, 1985), 22-29.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 231 literally sitting by their radios and televisions, confessing with her, hoping it would never happen to them, grieving that such personal matters should ever see the light of excruciating day.52

Ordinary women and men used the language and iconography of their faith to express their

solidarity with Hayes and their rejection of her treatment at the hands of the tribunal’s “moral

police," reflecting the social and spiritual turmoil that characterized Irish society in the early 1980s.

While the overwhelming majority of Irish people continued to subscribe to the Catholic faith, their

response to Hayes' public humiliation suggests that the harsh, stifling, intrusive, and unforgiving

brand of Catholicism that prevailed in the mid-twentieth century, and that underscored the

tribunal’s denunciation of Hayes, hindered the development of the liberal tendencies that began to

emerge in the 1970s. Building on the McGee case of 1973, people were beginning to insist on an

individual’s right to privacy even when that individual’s behavior contravened Catholic teachings

on sexual morality. There also was inherent in the public response to the tribunal a fundamental

tension between obedience and individual conscience. Hayes was “punished” by the tribunal for

her flagrant disobedience of accepted moral codes, in other words for exercising an individual

conscience in her practice of the faith. In backing her and denouncing the tribunal’s tactics, Hayes’

supporters implicitly rejected the notion that the practice of Catholicism and individual conscience

were incompatible, or that they were incapable of deciding for themselves what constituted

appropriate or acceptable behavior.

The tribunal also became a rallying point for feminists, even if Hayes did not

regard it as a feminist issue.53 Nell McCafferty gave voice to the feminist outrage over the

tribunal’s proceedings, in an editorial “Womanhood goes on trial in Tralee”:

52Nell McCafferty. A Woman to Blame. The Kerry Babies Case (Dublin: Attic Press, 1985), 117.

53 Although women and men protested outside the courthouse, women’s groups from around the country organized buses to take their members to Tralee to stand outside the courthouse in solidarity with Joanne Hayes. Four weeks into the Tribunal Judge Kevin Lynch condemned the pickets outside the courthouse although he distinguished the “dignified and silent” protest organized by the people of Abbeydorney from the “raucous and ill-mannered" picket

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This inquiry is supposed to be about the events in Tralee Garda Station, but so far, due to the nature of the questions asked, it is about mattresses and the men in Joanne Hayes' life, and her private behavior with them. However salacious and sleazy the tone struck by certain words, phrases, questions and answers uttered in the courtroom, it would be wrong to assume that this is just another sensational case for the public appetite... A lot of women are trying to reassure themselves in Kerry. There is a sense among them of womanhood itself being on trial here, and the traumatic echoes of the amendment debate in the recurring phrases of the legal and medical practitioners about sex and wombs and babies done to death.54

Irish women identified with Hayes because they realized that widely held attitudes toward

motherhood, sexuality, and reproduction shaped the experiences of all women, not only those

who transgressed society’s codes. The apparent advances of the 1970s- legal recognition of the

principle of equality in the family and the workplace, the right to privacy in marriage, and the

introduction of lone parents' allowances— paled with the recognition that church and state leaders

continued to insist on narrow definitions of female sexuality and maternity. Married women may

have won the right, through the McGee case, to use contraceptives to limit their fertility, but the

abortion referendum and the public humiliation of Joanne Hayes suggested that unmarried

women were still subject to official control of their sexual and reproductive activities. Women who

rallied behind Joanne Hayes did not reject wholesale Catholic doctrine; rather, they rejected those

attitudes and policies that bred hypocrisy, ignorance, and shame, and that held only women

accountable for violations of society’s moral codes.

The tribunal’s findings did little to dispel the sense of unease generated by its

proceedings. Although the tribunal was established to investigate the Hayes’ family’s allegations of

garda misconduct, Judge Kevin Lynch’s conclusions suggested that, officially anyway, Joanne

Hayes was on trial. Of Lynch’s 43 findings, at least 25 addressed the actions and statements of

organized by the Tralee Women’s Group. The Kerryman (Kerry North edition), 1 February 1985, 10 .

54Irish Press, 16 January 1985, 5.

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the Hayes family while only 4 addressed allegations of garda misconduct. The tribunal concluded

that Joanne Hayes had murdered her baby.55 Judge Lynch further found that:

The Tralee Baby (Joanne Hayes' baby) was bom alive, but was 'chesty,' that is to say it had difficulty in establishing proper breathing on its own. The Tralee Baby cried and Joanne Hayes put her hands on the baby’s throat to stop it crying by choking it, as a result of which it died. Joanne Hayes also hit the Tralee Baby with a bath brush in the presence of Mrs. Hayes and Kathleen Hayes. The Hayes family and Bridie Fuller agreed together to dispose of the body and conceal the birth of the Tralee baby.56

These findings are extraordinary given that they are based solely on the confessions elicited from

the Hayes family on 1 May 1984, and are wholly unsupported by forensic evidence. The Hayes’

family's allegations against the gardai were glossed over and, while the tribunal acknowledged

that gardai may have “bent the truth” slightly in their haste to solve the murder of the Cahirciveen

baby, their prevarications were dismissed as “gilding the lily”, while the Hayes family were branded

as liars.57 In blaming Hayes and excusing garda misconduct, the tribunal implicitly re-affirmed the

state's right to define appropriate and inappropriate moral behavior, and to investigate the lifestyle

and behavior of any woman found guilty of the “moral crime" of giving birth out of wedlock.

Nell McCafferty’s vitriolic commentary reflected the feminist rejection not only of

Judge Lynch’s report but also of the hypocrisy and moral and sexual double-standards that it

perpetuated:

The apparent contrast between the restrained language which the judge employed in assessing the truthfulness of police witnesses who gilded the lily, and the moral virulence of his criticism of the Hayes family, barefaced liars who feared to tell him what he thought was the full truth, is less astonishing when placed in the context of the last few years. In 1983 Bishop Cassidy declared that the most dangerous place in the world is in a woman's womb. It is in the womb that the actions and consequences of male sexual behavior are made flesh. By limiting the male role for taking ‘what’ is available and imposing on women total

55Report of the Tribunal of Inquiry, 155.

56Report of the Tribunal of Inquiry, 155.

57ibid, 51-58.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 234 responsibility for the babies that might result, a conclusion may be drawn that the male buck stops at the entrance to the womb. After that, woman is to blame.58

The tribunal punished Joanne Hayes not alone for her sins but for the sins of womankind, and,

more significantly, for the sins of men who were unable to control their sexual behavior and

unwilling to take responsibility for that lack of control. In spite of the public outcry over the

tribunal’s treatment of Joanne Hayes, there was no discussion about where men's responsibility

lay in the Lovett and Hayes cases, nor has there yet been a sustained discussion about the

“problem" of unmarried fathers in Irish society. Women continue to bear a disproportionate share

of the social, political, and economic burdens of single parenthood. The flip side, however, is that

the public shock and shame over the death of Ann Lovett, and the outrage over the very public

airing of Joanne Hayes’ private affairs, did contribute to a change in attitudes toward unmarried

motherhood. While conservative politicians, church moralists, and some segments of Irish society

continue to condemn what they see as an alarming lapse in moral standards, there is a general

acceptance of unmarried motherhood in 1990s Ireland, to the point where one in five births occur

outside of marriage.59 Unmarried mothers no longer are shamed into hiding their pregnancies,

nor are they denied the right, as they were for much of the twentieth century, to be mothers to

their children.

Conclusion

The events of 1983 and 1984 mark a watershed in contemporary Irish history.

The Kerry babies and Ann Lovett episodes forced Irish society to confront, in a very public and

self-conscious way, issues that had long been considered unsuitable for public discussion. In spite

of the individual challenges to the church’s moral authority in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and of

the perceived liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s, Irish society continued to cling to conservative

58McCafferty, A Woman to Blame, 175.

59Sunday Independent, 19 September 1999, 4.

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views of womanhood, motherhood, and sexual morality, reflecting the firm grasp that the church

continued to have over the voice of authority and morality. Few Irish people had given serious

consideration to the nature of Catholic influence in virtually all aspects of Irish social, cultural, and

political life, nor was there a particular concern for the extent to which an insistence on Catholic

moral codes as the foundation of social policy marginalized and excluded those, including non-

Catholics, lapsed Catholics, and non-believers, who found Catholicism a stifling and alienating

force. The abortion referendum debate was extremely bitter and contentious precisely because it

revealed the cracks that had begun to develop in Irish society since the 1960s, between those

who continued to embrace Catholic moral principles and those who wanted a more secular, open,

and tolerant society. But abortion was too sensitive a platform from which to demand change, as

those who opposed the referendum did not necessarily favor abortion but deplored the bullying

tactics adopted by Catholic conservatives to enforce compliance among the electorate. Ann

Lovett's death and the Kerry babies scandal, and particularly the way the media reported these

events, provided a unique opportunity for Irish people to examine the values and attitudes that

they had long taken for granted, and that had underpinned their society for much of the twentieth-

century.

Although there was official recognition, with the implementation of lone parents

allowances in 1973, of the unmarried mother's right to rear her child, there continued to be a

general disapproval of sexual activity outside of marriage and of unmarried motherhood. Ann

Lovett's death did not immediately change opinions about sexual morality, and even in the 1990s

there continue to be conservative elements hostile to any diversions from narrowly prescribed

moral and sexual norms, but it did challenge Irish women and men to acknowledge, at least

theoretically, an individual’s right to privacy, choice, and individual conscience in the conduct of

their sexual lives. It also forced them to consider the extent to which prevailing notions of

acceptable and unacceptable, inclusion and exclusion, prompted unmarried pregnant women to

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remain silent rather than seek help, thus compounding an already difficult situation. Following Ann

Lovett’s, death a number of agencies specifically established to assist women confronting crisis

pregnancies undertook campaigns to raise awareness about the availability of such services and

to begin to break down public prejudice against unmarhed mothers. People in Granard are still

reluctant to discuss Ann Lovett's death, reflecting the continued belief that they were maligned in

the media frenzy, but many people from around the country regret that a young unmarried mother

had to die before social attitudes began to change.60

The new emphases on privacy and individual conscience evident in the public

response to the Kerry babies tribunal marked a shift in attitudes toward the Catholic Church in

Ireland. In the “old" Ireland people sought not only to be good Catholics but also to be regarded as

“respectable” by their friends and neighbors, and a primary component of respectability was an

outward show of Catholic faith and piety. Many people accepted without question the church’s

interference in all aspects of their lives and bowed to the dictates of the local priest. The

difference between the vocal, outspoken, anti-tribunal reaction to the Kerry babies case, and the

sensitive, self-conscious and uncomfortable soul-searching resulting from Ann Lovett’s death,

illustrates the tension between the old, obedient, outwardly pious society of the mid-twentieth

century, and the impulse toward change and liberalism that first became evident in Ireland in the

1960s and 1970s. For perhaps the first time since the emergence of the independent Irish state in

the 1920s, there was a wide scale challenge to the long-held conviction that the Catholic Church

60The producer of 1996 RTE documentary Letters to Ann, tried to interview people in Granard about the lingering effects of Ann Lovett’s death. With rare exceptions, few people were willing to discuss the matter on the record, and it was not unusual for the producer to have doors slammed in her face. During the 1992 “X” case controversy, in which a 14-year-old girl initially was prevented from traveling to England to abort a pregnancy that resulted from rape, an anonymous source produced and sold t-shirts bearing the slogan, “Remember Ann Lovett." Letters to Ann, produced by Loralei Harris, Radio Telefis Eireann, Radio 1 Dublin.

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alone should determine the social and moral values that informed Irish social policy, particularly in

areas of sexuality, reproduction, and family life.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. APPENDIX A

1923 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980

All births 61,549 58,274 56,510 63,263 60,730 64,092 74,388

Illegitimate births 1,624 1,863 1,824 1,557 967 1,715 3,691

% Illegitimate births 2.64% 3.20% 3.23% 2.46% 1.59% 2.68% 4.96%

‘1923 was the first year for which the Irish Registrar General began recording illegitimate births.

238

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Table A.2: Adoption as a Percent of Illegitimate Births Adoption Adoption orders Adoption as % of Illegitimate births =j>ass|K)rtsjssued_ granted illegitimate births 1951 1,593 122 7.66%

1952 1,602 193 12.05%

1953 1,333 128 381 38.18%

1954 1,332 182 888 80.33%

1955 1,078 184 786 89.98%

1956 1,169 111 565 57.83%

1957 1,031 122 752 84.77%

1958 976 146 592 75.61%

1959 959 141 501 66.94%

1960 967 145 505 67.22%

1961 968 125 547 69.42%

1962 1,106 107 699 72.88%

1963 1,156 65 840 78.29%

1964 1,280 51 1,003 82.34%

1965 1,389 43 1,049 78.62%

1966 1,413 21 1,178 84.85%

1967 1,507 20 1,493 100.40%

1968 1,557 10 1,343 86.90%

1969 1,638 8 1,225 75.27%

1970 1,715 4 1,414 82.68%

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Table A.3: Charge and Conviction Rates in Central Criminal Court Infanticide Cases No. charged % charged No. convicted % convicted

Murder 213 91% 16 7%

Manslaughter 6 3% 79 34%

Infanticide 3 1% 7 3%

Concealment of birth 12 5% 67 29%

Abandonment 0 0% 2 1%

Insane 0 0% 7 2%

Not guilty 0 0% 42 18%

Unknown 0 0% 14 6%

Total 234 100% 234 100%

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Table A.4: Sentences in Central Criminal Court Infanticide Cases

Number Percent

Death 12 6%

Prison/hard labor 6 3%

Prison/penal servitude 36 19%

Magdalen asylum 51 27%

Fine/suspended 61 32% sentence No sentence 4 2%

Other 1 1%

Unknown 21 10%

Total 192 100%

Table A.5: Crimes Against Children 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970

Murder (of infant under 1) 10 5 3 1 1

Infanticide 0 0 0 1 1

Abandonment 10 13 0 4 1

Concealment of birth 50 36 12 10 5

Source: Annual Reports of the Garda Commissioner

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. APPENDIX B Glossary of Irish Terms

Pail Eireann - One of two houses of the Oireachtas, or Irish legislative body. Similar to the British House of Commons or the American House of Representatives.

Garda Siochana (garda/aardai) - The Irish police force (the Irish translation is Guardians of the Peace). The police typically are referred to as gardai (plural form of garda) or the guards.

RTE (Radio Telefeis Eireann) - The Irish national broadcasting network. It includes a television and radio station (RTE 1 and Radio 1 respectively).

Teachta Dala (TD) - Member of the Dail. Akin to the British MP or the American congressman.

Taoiseach - Prime Minister. The Taoiseach is the leader of the Irish government.

242

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