Granny delivered
Our writer has a deeply personal connection to the ongoing revelations
WHAT happened at Tuam, at the Mother and Child Home run by the Bon Secours nuns, shocked everyone. But for me, it feels personal – for my Nora delivered many of those babies.
I grew up hearing stories about these abandoned children, the ‘Home Babies’, with whom my mother Mary and her sister Eleanor played as children.
I think I was about 10 when my mother first told me about the Home Babies. She told me how she was in fifth class at the Mercy Convent when Sister Lawrence attempted to teach the girls the ‘facts of life’. Puzzled by Sister Lawrence constantly prefacing every statement with ‘when you get married’, she shot up her hand.
‘No Sister, that can’t be right,’ she said. ‘What about the Home Babies, Sister? Their mammies and daddies aren’t married.’
The flustered nun accused my mother of being disruptive and sinful. That Sunday, Lawrence and another nun arrived up at my mother’s door. Mam and Eleanor, then 13, listened at the keyhole as the nuns gave out and my granny defended her daughter.
From then on, I was fascinated and haunted in equal measure by the Home Babies, those forgotten children with no mammies and daddies, locked away in an old house on the outskirts of town.
My granny died before I got the chance to ask her about her experiences. My own mother died almost 20 years ago, before I got the chance to ask her many things too — not least what went on in Tuam.
But I often spoke about it with my aunt Eleanor, my mother’s only sister, now a retired primary schoolteacher living in Wexford. This week we spoke again.
She remembers: ‘The home was an imposing grey building behind a 10ft wall and big gates. Every morning, the Home Babies were marched in lines down the Dublin Road to the Mercy National School and back in the evening.
‘At the school the worst insult a child could give was to call you a Home Baby. They were completely shunned. Our friends used to say, “Our mammies told us not to play with the Home Babies. If you play with them, we’re not allowed play with you.” Having a child outside of wedlock was considered the worst sin imaginable in those days.’
My granny, Nora Burke, trained as a nurse in London during World War II, before returning to Dublin to train as a midwife in Holles Street.
She met my grandfather, James, a welder, during a visit home. She returned to Tuam to work as the district midwife. When she and James married, Nora continued to work as part-time district midwife Among her duties was providing relief midwifery cover at the Mother and Child Home – delivering Home Babies.
My aunt remembers: ‘Just like their mothers, the Home Babies were shunned by everyone beyond those walls. Parents told their children not to associate with them. I knew people saw them as dirty.
‘The fact is, nobody wanted to know about them — these homes were society’s way of getting rid of a problem. Unmarried mothers and their children were seen as a filthy problem and this was how they solved it – they wanted them hidden, locked away. They had washed their hands of them and the nuns got their shillings to keep them out of sight.
‘It wasn’t just in Tuam, it was all over Ireland and it came from the top – the Church and the Government were almost one and the same in those days. Everything sexual was viewed as dirty, sinful.’
Eleanor describes the practice of ‘ churching’ – where women were publicly ‘ cleansed’ of the ‘sin’ of childbirth – to demonstrate how even married women
‘The Home Babies were marched to school’
who became pregnant were stigmatised as tainted.
‘In those days, every woman who had a child had to be purified before she could receive Holy Communion again, in a ritual called churching.
‘When my friend Maura went to have her baby christened, she told me she had to wait outside at the side door for the priest to march her up to the side altar.
‘He made her kneel down as he read out this horrendous stuff about her being unclean and forgiving her for her sins and ridding her of demons. I couldn’t understand what she’d done. It traumatised me – I was 16. It was like she had killed somebody. We look at certain religions now and condemn them for how they treat women but we were no better back then.’
Eleanor was shocked to read of the mortality rate at the Tuam home. A county board of health inspection report from 1946 noted some children were ‘emaciated, fragile’, ‘not thriving’ and had ‘flesh hanging off bones’.
‘I don’t remember thinking the children looked sick or hungry but perhaps the sick ones were in the infirmary. Their uniforms never fit them right so they were always dishevelled,’ Eleanor remembers.
‘They all had short hair and a pudding bowl hair-cut for the girls. I remember going up to play in their dorms and seeing the rows and rows of beds squashed together so tightly you could barely pass between them.
‘With TB and measles and gastro-enteritis, I would say disease would spread like wildfire. It must have been a major issue affecting the mortality rate.’
Did my granny ever complain about conditions at the home?
‘She had many a row up there. I remember her giving out about the numbers of children in the wards but you can draw the comparison between what’s happening with nurses now working in deplorable conditions.
‘What can they do only do their best in the circumstances? Mammy had a choice – to clear out or do what little she could.’
Eleanor points to the case of Dr James Deeny, Ireland’s Chief Medical Officer in 1944. Alarmed by the high mortality rate in Bessborough, a mother and baby home in Cork, Dr Deeny turned up unannounced and discovered babies with severe diarrhoea and skin infections.
He sacked the matron (a nun) and the medical officer and
closed down the institution. But he provoked the ire of Bishop Colohan of Cork, Dean of Cork Mgr Sexton, and Papal Nuncio Archbishop Robinson, all of whom complained about him to taoiseach Eamon de Valera.
‘Look at that man and what he came up against,’ says Eleanor. ‘If he couldn’t change it, there was no way a part-time midwife had any hope in hell. Even Dr Deeny couldn’t change it.
‘The nuns alone can’t be scapegoated. They cleaned up what society considered a sinful mess and were supported by the Church, the State and society in general, who all wanted them locked away.’