WE DESERVE REDRESS TOO
‘This is politicians playing games and it’s insulting’
Babies dying of malnutrition, children ripped from their mother’s arms and adopted by abusive families, bodies dumped in unmarked graves: the stories from Bethany House are shockingly familiar. But the difference is, the survivors have been given no compensation by a Government which they believe is ignoring them because they’re Protestant J OYCE McSHARRY’S hands tremble as she struggles to pull out a wad of small black and white photographs from a well-worn wallet. She slowly hands them over one by one, after examining each of them carefully, even though she has seen them countless times before.
The first few show a handsome young woman with dark hair proudly cradling a sleeping infant, swaddled up in a white blanket. Later photos show the child on its own, a seriously bonny baby, plump and smiling, wearing pretty dresses with matching cardigans and woollen socks tied with white ribbons.
On the back of one of the later prints, in faded blue Biro, is written: ‘These snaps of Jacqueline were taken 22 November 1951. Six months, two days old.’
Jacqueline is Joyce’s birth name, it’s what she was christened by her mother shortly before she was fostered out from the notorious Bethany Mother and Child Home in Rathgar on Dublin’s southside.
When opened in 1922, it was declared to be ‘a door of hope for fallen women’ by the then Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, John Allen Fitzgerald Gregg. But like many other Irish institutions, it has since been claimed that children there were badly abused and horrifically neglected, leading to a phenomenally high mortality rate.
But Joyce’s precious photos, all of which were taken at the Protestant-run Bethany, show a very happy and healthy mother with her beautiful baby girl.
Proof, Joyce says, that her mother never planned to give her up for adoption.
‘She was feeding me properly and was obviously taking very good care of me,’ says Joyce. ‘God knows the ones running Bethany weren’t minding the children properly, half of them were dead. I just don’t think you would look after a baby that well if you weren’t going to keep it.’
Instead she believes her 22-yearold mother, Emily Sheppey, was forced into signing a cruelly draconian adoption agreement, relinquishing all rights to her daughter forever, and one that stated she would be fined huge sums of money if she ever attempted to contact her.
Emily, who was English, disappeared and Joyce was raised by a couple in Dublin. They told her she had been adopted but that her birth mother had died of TB when she was a baby and she had been found in the bed beside her body.
It was a massive lie, which Joyce only found out about when she tried to trace her roots properly for the first time in 2002. She was 52 when she discovered that her mother had, in fact, been alive for the first 25 years of her life.
It was a devastating revelation, one that led her to delve more deeply into her background and into the dark and murky history of Bethany House. Her investigations unearthed even more anguish.
She learned, through her birth family, that her mother had lived a lonely life and that they believe she was left broken after giving her child up for adoption.
They saw her only a handful of times before she was found dead in her flat by a neighbour at the age of 48. Her death certificate states she choked on vomit after a bout of gastroenteritis.
Joyce is adamant that it was her time in Bethany House that led to her downfall.
‘They did her in, and to a certain extent they did me in too,’ she says softly. ‘And that’s why I want justice.’
Hers, of course, is not the only tragic story to have begun in Bethany House. But at least it did not end there. Dogged research over the last 20 years by the Bethany Survivor’s Group found records that show around 250 children, probably more, died there between 1922 and the 1949.
Like other infamous children’s institutions around the country, the cause of death was often stated to be ‘marasmus’, in layman’s terms, severe malnutrition.
Other causes of death in these children, often just a few weeks or months old, were listed as bronco pneumonia, gastroenteritis or simply ‘convulsions’ and ‘delicacy’.
It’s a long and heartbreakingly grim history, one it shares with dozens of other institutions around the country where children were abused, neglected and often died. But unlike these other places, Bethany House survivors have never received any kind of compensation for what they suffered in a State-inspected residential home.
So far, successive Irish governments have failed to include them in the redress scheme that was set up in 2002. And the Protestant churches have refused to take any responsibility or speak out on their behalf. Indeed the Church of Ireland has said it ‘did not own or run the home’, while the Irish Church Missions, which is run by trustees made up of Anglican Evangelical clergy and laity, said it had ‘no responsibility for the administration or management of Bethany Home’.
Not even last year when the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes’ second interim report recommended, indeed urged, the Government to reconsider the survivors’ ‘strong case’ did the situation change.
‘The only difference between us and the children in Tuam is that we have the records of the names of those who died,’ says Derek Leinster, founder of the Bethany Survivors Group.
‘But unlike the Catholics, we’ve had no redress.’
The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, which was set up by the Government in 2015 in the wake of the Tuam babies scandal, was due to present its final report last month. But it got an extension of one year to go through the records of an estimated 70,000 mothers and even higher number of children. The Government has said it cannot decide on the issue of redress until the report is fully completed.
Derek says the Bethany House survivors, of which there are only a handful left, were ‘insulted’ and incensed when Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Katherine Zappone, last week invited Derek to join a selection panel for a ‘collaborative forum’ for former residents of mother and baby homes and related institutions.
‘Why would we need to get involved in a forum? It’s just another delaying tactic,’ he says. ‘We’re past all that. We’ve given our information, appeared before the Commission and made our case. A judge has already said they don’t understand why Bethany wasn’t included in the 2002 [redress scheme] list.
‘This is just politicians playing games and it’s insulting, so I’m not taking part in it.
‘I’ve been fighting for justice for 20 years and I’m turning 77 in a couple of months time. I don’t have much time left, none of us do. This needs to be sorted now.’
Derek has good reason to seek justice. He was born in Bethany House in 1941, his mother was a 17-year-old Protestant girl from Co Meath.
‘She was from a wealthy enough family.’ Derek explains. ‘My father was from close by. He owned a garage but he was ten years older than her. More importantly, he was Catholic, so they weren’t allowed get married, that’s my understanding of it.
‘Once her family found out she was pregnant she was shipped off to Bethany House. She had me, stayed for about another four months and then went to the UK. She did come to visit me once or twice and brought me clothes, a little coat.
‘Those poor girls were forced to do things that just weren’t natural, give up their babies.’
Derek believes, after reading his records, that he received minimal care after his mother left.
‘When I was seven months old I was what they called “nursed out” to a woman in Wicklow,’ he says. ‘Apparently when I got there my head was covered in scabs, blood and pus. That woman had a nineyear-old son then who, to this day, remembers me coming to their house. I’ve spoken to him about my stay with them, he told me I looked liked something they pulled from a coffin.’
When he was two-and-a-half he was returned to Bethany House,
where once again he fell seriously ill. ‘I ended up in Cork Street Isolation Hospital with diphtheria, whooping cough and bronchial pneumonia,’ he says. ‘I was there for four months and when I got back to Bethany they arranged to have me adopted.’
His new family was also in Wicklow but it was not a happy arrangement. His adoptive father was a violent man who rarely held down a job. They lived in abject poverty, made even worse when his adoptive mother died of TB when he was ten years old.
‘There were three kids at this stage, all of us living in one room while she lay there dying. No one came to visit us or see if we were OK,’ he says. ‘It was a horrendous childhood and the State allowed it to happen.’
He left school at 13, unable to read or write, went to work on a farm and saved enough money to escape to England by the time he was 18.
He settled in the town of Rugby in Warwickshire, where he still lives, and met and married his wife Carol. They have four children together. But he found it impossible to let go of his traumatic past. He managed to track down his birth mother, despite his surname being spelled four different ways on various official documents.
The reunion, however, was a muted affair. ‘I met her twice,’ he says. ‘But she felt it had been too long and too much had happened for us to have any sort of relationship. She died in 2013.’
Instead he threw himself into researching what had happened others who had been born at the Bethany Home and set up a survivors’ support group.
With the help of academic Niall Meehan, who researched the records of Mount Jerome cemetery in Dublin, they found evidence of well over 200 children who died at the home from when it opened to when it closed in the late 1960s.
Meehan published his findings in the journal History Ireland in 2010, giving a damning account of how the State failed to inspect and rescue children from the home who were known to be dying from malnutrition and related diseases at a horrendous rate.
Even those who managed to survive were left with life-long scars, both emotional and physical.
According to his doctors, the leaking valve in Paul Graham’s heart was caused by the malnutrition he suffered as a small child. His horrific childhood also led, he believes, to much of his early adulthood being spent as a chronic alcoholic. The father-of-three was born at Bethany House in 1939. ‘I only found out a couple of months ago that I was actually adopted twice,’ he says on the phone from his home in Sydney, Australia. ‘Once in about 1940 to a couple in Dublin who returned me to Bethany in 1941. Then I was adopted out again around 1943 to this family in Belfast.
‘They were very wealthy, my mother ran a flower shop but she drank a lot. She used to get drunk all the time and she would beat me. My father was about 30 years older than her and he was bedridden, TB I think.’
Not only neglected, Paul was horrifically abused while he was just a youngster.
‘I was raped by a male family friend and then abused by the headmaster of my school, but nothing was done to either of them,’ he says. ‘Instead I decided to run away when I was 14 and I signed up with the Royal Navy.’
It was while serving abroad that he began a pen-pal relationship with his now wife Hilary. They’re married 58 years but their early life together was tough.
‘So much had happened to me as a child, my life was a mess and I became an alcoholic,’ he says.
Yet through the haze of his drinking he knew he wanted to move his family out of Belfast.
It was when emigrating to Australia, when he was 31 years old, that he first discovered he had been adopted.
‘When I was applying for my passport I was told that I wasn’t a British citizen, just a British “subject”,’ he explains. ‘That’s when I found out I’d been born in Dublin, in Bethany House. To be honest, it made sense to me.’
After settling in Australia and finally giving up alcohol 38 years ago, he set about trying to find his birth family. His adoptive parents were long dead at this stage, his mother having ended up in a mental institution while his father died in a TB hospital.
‘I went to a solicitor in Sydney and we found finally found my birth mother,’ he says. ‘But she had died six months before that.
‘She was from Castlederg in Co Tyrone, on the Donegal border, and was one of seven sisters, two of whom were still living.
‘So I went to meet one of my aunts, she was wonderful. She passed away last year. She was the first person to give me a photo of my mother. To be honest I don’t know how it would have been if I’d got the chance to meet her, I hated her for a very long time. For giving me up.
‘My aunt explained to me that my mum was 18 when she had me and that she’d been pregnant before when she was 16, I had a half-brother. I wrote to him and my son went to visit him but he’s died since.
‘My aunt also told me her family were strong Presbyterian and my mother was sent to Bethany in February 1939.
‘I was born in May and she wasn’t allowed to leave until the December because she had work there to pay them back. It must have been terrible for them...
‘I wrote to the Protestant Archbishop, I said to him: “You [the Protestant church] were in charge of this place, why can’t you stand up and say sorry?” His secretary wrote back to me, saying the Archbishop did not wish to reply as he found my letter offensive or some such thing.
‘What’s hard to believe is that I was one of the lucky ones, at least I got out of there. All those children who died and they just threw bodies into a hole [in Mount Jerome] and didn’t even mark them. You wouldn’t do that to animals.
‘I want it acknowledged: “Yes, all those terrible things happened, we admit it and accept it.” Instead of setting up even more forums and committees, the evidence is there, why do they need another forum? I’m now 79 and have the onset of dementia, I want this sorted while I’m still mentally sound.
‘I want to know we got justice, like all the other poor souls this happened to.’
Back in Kinsealy in North Dublin, where Joyce McSharry lives with her husband Kevin, she tells of how immensely grateful she is to at least have the photos taken at Bethany House when she was an infant.
‘My uncle found them in her flat when he was cleaning it out after she died,’ she explains.
‘My mother had kept them with her all that time. I couldn’t believe it when I saw them, the two of us together and she looks so happy.
‘From what my birth family have told me, I really don’t believe she gave me up voluntarily. She never married or had children and apparently she changed utterly after I was adopted.
‘Once she turned up at my cousin’s house, looking for her sister, and they said they didn’t know her, she looked so awful, so sad and beaten down.
‘I want justice for my mother and I think we should be treated the same as all the other people who were born in these kinds of places. What happened to all the children and their mothers was so wrong. There’s no difference between us. Another forum isn’t going to change anything.’
‘I looked like something pulled from a coffin’