The women found the sisters, in their
experience, to be kind, compassionate, and hardworking. Photo: CNS 
While mother and baby homes were a product of a cruel and unforgiving culture towards unmarried mothers, some women found compassion and kindness, writes Jason Osborne
The final report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes cast further light on the disturbing treatment of many women and children in institutions throughout the 20th Century. The commission said that the bottom line was that women should not have been in the homes in the first place. It said that: “Responsibility for that harsh treatment rests mainly with the fathers of their children and their own immediate families.
“It was supported by, contributed to, and condoned by, the institutions of the State and the Churches,” the report said.
In a finding that some former residents have found unpalatable, the report said starkly that “it must be acknowledged that the institutions under investigation provided a refuge – a harsh refuge in some cases – when the families provided no refuge at all”.
Kindness
A number of women who spoke to this newspaper spoke of the “kindness” and “respect” they found from the sisters during their time in Bessborough home in Co. Cork run by the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.
The report covered the period from the 1920s to the 1990s and was critical of aspects of the running of Bessborough for large parts of that period. The three women who spoke to The Irish Catholic spent time in the home in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s.
A woman whose mother was a resident in the home said: “not all its history was good. Before my mother’s time, I think it was a different place, with different attitudes, but also different people. You know, personalities can make a huge difference”. She spoke on behalf of her mother who spent a number of months in Bessborough in the 1960s. Both wished to remain anonymous out of fear of a potential backlash for speaking out favourably of the sisters she encountered during her time there.
Speaking of her mother, she said, “Her experience was really very good.”
“Her entire time there she would have felt that she was always treated with dignity and respect, and that she felt she wasn’t being singled out for special treatment. Everybody there would have been given the same respect as she was given. She never saw anything contrary to that.”
Both this woman, and her mother through her, expressed the notion that because the coverage of the homes has been overwhelmingly negative, the good that was done in them is often overlooked, saying that a “full account of the truth” was only possible if positive experiences such as her mother had were heard, too.
Given a house name upon entering Bessborough, her mother understood that this was done out of care for her anonymity. “Her experience was that the anonymity of the girls and the women was paramount. They were trying to protect her anonymity, so they would always have been called their house name,” she said.
This was intended to safeguard their reputation from wider society, though some former residents have said they felt this stripped them of their identity. For all intents and purposes, life ‘within the walls’ had its own communal effect, with this woman describing the working conditions her mother experienced. “In a community, in those communities, everybody does their part to make it work together. So while she was assigned duties, the nuns worked alongside the women. It was a communal thing,” she said.
Communal
She continued, “It wasn’t that the nuns were sitting with their feet up on a stool while the rest were slaves. Everyone worked alongside each other. She said for the most part, in her experience [her mother], the nuns worked much harder than the girls because they knew what they were doing, whereas the girls wouldn’t always. It was more like communal living.”
Her mother established an “affectionate” relationship with the sisters, writing to some of them for a long time after she’d left the home.
This personal relationship with the sisters was experienced by other women too, with Mary (not her real name) being another recipient of their kindness, this time during the 1980s. Speaking of the vilification of all religious in the wake of the reports throughout the years, Mary said, “It wasn’t like that. It just wasn’t like that. I am eternally grateful to the nuns. I’m eternally grateful to them.” As with the woman who’d experienced Bessborough during the 1960s, Mary acknowledged that things hadn’t always been as she experienced them. However, she was keen to defend the sisters whose care she experienced first-hand.
“They spent their time protecting us. They protected me and they respected me. I never felt judged by the nuns. I used to go and when you’d have a bad day you’d have a chat with them or whatever,” she said.
Mary entered Bessborough following a pregnancy during her first relationship. She had just started work at the time, and described the “overriding” shame she experienced as a result of her situation.
“I went in, I went to Bessborough as I was in Cork at the time, called around to the nuns and I asked them, I said, ‘Look, you know, I’m going to need a place,’ and they said, ‘Fine, you just come whenever you want. We always have a place for you’. So one day I couldn’t hide it any more.
“The accommodation was lovely. There were kind of cubicles that we had. Very comfortable wardrobe, dressing table, a bed, it was fine. I would’ve come from a nice, respectable family, I suppose. There was every kind of situation in there. Every kind of age group, situation – everything. We all were given a name,” she said.
Corroborating the other woman and her mother’s explanation of the premium put on anonymity, Mary explained the culture of shame and gossip that she found so overwhelming.
“At one point a local girl from my hometown came in and I saw her coming in and I said to the nuns, ‘I’ve got to get out of here’,” she continued, “So they sent me to a family to stay with in Cork for a few weeks, but this girl left and actually went home and spread the news that I was there and that was a million times more destructive to me than anything.
“It was the gossips and the people who are now judging [the nuns] were the ones who looked down on us. My mother and father were just devastated and they’re very traditional and very Catholic. They wanted to protect me as well because I would have been looked at as a ‘fallen woman’, so to speak” she said.
The one place Mary, and many of the other girls at the time, didn’t experience this sense of shame was “within the walls” of the home. She described another experience she had that contrasted her treatment by wider society with the reception she received at Bessborough.
“I had to go into the hospital in Cork…The way I was treated there by a gynaecologist was just shocking, it was probably one of the most awful episodes of my entire life. I was treated like a piece of dirt,” she said.
“When I went back and told the nun who was the nurse there, she was just so horrified. I mean, they treated us with such respect. I never felt the shame inside the walls of the convent. Like, some of the girls used to go out shopping in Cork – we were free to come and go. I didn’t want to go because there was so much less charity, if you like, on the outside of the walls than there was on the inside,” she said.
Belonging
Another woman, Patricia (not her real name), shared the same sense of belonging that she encountered at Bessborough. She stayed there during the 1970s.
“They were very welcoming and they made me feel at home straight away,” she said, continuing, “I felt quite comfortable from the very beginning, even though I had all this inner turmoil, how everything was going to turn out and all that. They certainly made me feel at home there,” she said.
Patricia described the rules in Bessborough as “clear” and “reasonable”, saying that there was a division of time between work, meals, free activity and silence. While there was Sunday Mass and Confession on offer to the women, she said there was “no rule or pressure” to attend during her time there.
She also said that the majority of women were grateful to have found somewhere where no one gave them “stupid grins” or “disapproving looks” on account of their situations. As such, she says that any inner turmoil she experienced while there was a result of “personal” worries or troubles, which had their source outside the home.
“I had my worries naturally enough, I had my own worries and I would have confided in a friend, my inner worries I guess and what I was going to do with myself. I wouldn’t have opened up in great conversations with the sisters, so it’s nothing like that. It was more like a business arrangement. But they were so kind to me and as far as I was concerned, it was like home away from home,” Patricia explained.
“I can’t say that I ever felt uncomfortable there at any period, if I was uncomfortable, it was because of my own predicament.
“I was sad leaving the place to be honest. I suppose I was sheltered to some extent for five months, and then going back into the outer world, it was a bit scary,” she said.
While her time there was reasonable, Patricia is quick to acknowledge that she’s also aware that Bessborough was not always the place she experienced.
“The home was there from 1922, so when some of the things that some people have said have happened to them, God only knows when it happened. It could have been the 60s. It could have been any number of decades. Things would have been fairly strict going back further from 1922 to the 1960s anyway,” she said.
In all, Patricia said she enjoyed her time there and remains “forever grateful” to the sisters there, relying on the final entry to the Bessborough chapter in the most recent report, which states:
“One who was born in 1961 said that she never met her birth mother but her half-siblings told her that her mother had told them that the nuns in Bessborough treated her very well, and that ‘it was not at all like the portrayal of Mother and Baby Homes in the media.’”
Defend
The women were also quick to defend the sisters’ treatment of children in the home, with all three describing the “care” with which the babies were tended to.
Speaking on behalf of her mother, the woman explained the way the babies’ deaths were handled by the 1960s, saying, “The funeral was a proper Catholic funeral. Now the cemetery was on the grounds at Bessborough house and very obviously marked. It was an obvious, small, but obvious, graveyard. They were given all the proper, respectful prayers. It was exactly like anybody else. It wasn’t that they were thrown in the ground.”
She explains that the secrecy around the burial of the babies was to do with protecting the anonymity of the mother, rather than a disregard for the babies. She insists that the women attended the funerals, unless they were otherwise unable to.
“The other thing was that all of the mothers while she was there were encouraged to keep their babies. The thing that the nuns emphasised was that the best place for the baby was with the mother, and if there was any way they could keep the baby, that was the best option,” she said on the topic of adoption.
Mary related a story in an effort to communicate the care the sisters had for each of the women and their babies, saying, “Just to give you another idea; the day I was giving my baby up, the parents were late, and I turned around to Sr Anthony who worked in the nursery and I said, ‘Sister, this is a sign, maybe I’m supposed to keep her’. So when it came to taking the baby from me, she was in bits, they had to send in someone from the kitchen, you know, because the nuns were just crying.”
Relationship
Mary was unable to keep her baby, but now enjoys a “great relationship” with both her and the baby’s father.
Patricia was able to keep her baby, and explained that while it was a real challenge to do so at the time, it was a decision she’s “never regretted”.
Each of the women is frustrated with what they perceive as a biased or one-sided portrayal of the homes in the media, with Mary defending the Bessborough she experienced against today’s commentary on it.
“I know that in the 40s and 50s maybe, it was a lot different. But, the nuns didn’t come out into society and drag us in there. We went there and said, ‘I’ve nowhere to go’, and they said, ‘Come in’. That’s the way society was. Now, as to why society was like that, that’s a whole other issue. We can go back about that, and yes, to the Church’s role, everybody’s role. We all have responsibility. But the target is just shocking,” she said.
She is disappointed by the reaction to the latest findings as she believes they indicate a similarity to the society that produced the homes, just in a different way.
“It’s because of the society we’ve become. As I said, we’ve gone from one of guilt and shame, to entitlement and blame. We have to blame somebody. We have this sense of ‘It’s somebody else’s fault.”
The woman, speaking on behalf of her mother, echoed the sentiment, saying of her mother’s reaction, “It totally upset her. It really did, because she has such love for the nuns who were there when she was there.
“Everyone’s being tarred with the same brush, but that’s never the [whole] truth,” she said.
