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'Ireland's Lost Babies' - another hatchet job from our ABC

By Brendan O'Reilly - posted Tuesday, 18 November 2014


Our ABC has already been caught out once. On 5 June 2014 it ran the story

In County Galway, the remains of 800 babies and young children have been discovered dumped inside a disused septic tank.

The ABC was not alone in spreading this shocking tale, which was a gift-horse-in-the-mouth to journalists across the world seeking a sensational news story. The Sydney Morning Herald on 4 June, for example, similarly reported

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Bodies of 800 children, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers.

The story was exposed as "bullshit" on 30 June 2014 by none other than the ABC's own Media Watch programme, following investigation by the Irish Times. The problem is that the correction of the record (across the globe not just in Australia) got a lot less coverage than the original (thinly veneered) hoax .

To quote Paul Barry:

But ... how reliable was this story? And why were there no pictures of the bodies? Had good taste for once prevailed? Well no. You see no babies had been found. Nor indeed had the septic tank. Oh yes, and did we forget to tell you that those 796 children died of natural causes? With measles, influenza, pneumonia, TB and whooping cough topping the list. So how did this story get so out of hand? Well, if you're looking for a culprit, the Daily Mail Group's your man.

The Mail's article on 25 May said the remains of these 800 children were most likely 'Interred in a concrete tank beside the home.' So what was their evidence? A local historian Catherine Corless had collected death certificates for all who died at the mother and baby home between 1925 and 1961, when it closed. And after finding almost none of the children in cemetery records she'd concluded the nuns must have disposed of them.

The Daily Mail on 8 June went on:

The journalist (Martin Sixsmith) who wrote Philomena -about a woman's search for her son taken by Irish nuns- could hardly contain his horror: 'In nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent, I covered stories of mass graves in far-flung locations in Eastern Europe and Russia ... But never did I expect to be covering a mass grave from modern times on my own doorstep' ..." The story had lived up to an old saying by Mark Twain "a lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

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Given this past mistake you would have thought that the ABC would have learnt to be more cautious with related stories. Instead the ABC was at it again on 10 November, when it ran (as a Four Corners' programme introduced by Kerry O'Brien) a documentary Ireland's Lost Babies,reported by none other than the BBC's Martin Sixsmith. This had previously been shown as a BBC2 programme on 18 September 2014, and O'Brien noted that it exposed "breathtaking abuse of power and moral authority". The 800 dead babies story got another run as a small part of the documentary, only this time they were reported buried in a mass grave rather than a septic tank. The ABC (using text authored by Sixsmith) summarised the programme as follows:

The movie Philomena told the story of Philomena Lee, who was forced by the Catholic Church to give up her son for adoption. It showed her journey with journalist Martin Sixsmith to find her child 50 years later.

....... he investigates the Irish Catholic Church and its role in an adoption trade that lasted more than four decades. He reveals how they forcibly removed children from their mothers. In some cases, they were kept in orphanages while other children were sent overseas for adoption.

Often the Church authorities accepted healthy donations from wealthy couples wanting to adopt children, raising questions about the ethics and the morality of the process. At the same time, Sixsmith finds evidence that the Church did not properly vet the new parents and as a result some children were abused or ill-treated. ........He confronts the people who effectively stole the children, demanding to know why they remain unwilling to help families get back together.

I previously wrote a piece in this journal to the effect that the movie Philomena was a distortion of the truth, though the original book by Sixsmith (guided by first-hand narrative from Philomena herself) appeared true. The problem is that many people take a movie that is "based on a true story" as historically accurate (and form opinion based on it), when such a movie itself may be far from true to the original story.

To illustrate my point I will draw on a review of Philomena from Daily Telegraph journalist Jenny McCartney. She notes that

If you take an elderly Irish lady, a son unwillingly given up for adoption 50 years earlier and a quest that shuttles between Ireland and America, there must be a temptation to ramp up the pathos - and there is, of course, nothing so terrible on screen as genuine pain drowned in an excess of cheap sauce. Thankfully, the director Stephen Frears and his cast judge it precisely right

The problem unfortunately is that McCartney herself was sucked in by the movie and was unaware that many of the key scenes (including almost all the footage set in the US - half the film- and one key scene in Ireland were completely fictitious and had been added just to "ramp up the pathos" in the manner she so rightly condemns.

Turning to the Four Corners programme, while it is well known that conditions faced by unmarried mothers in Ireland were Dickensian up until about the 1960s, Sixsmith needlessly "guilds the lily". No one can dispute that the nuns took a highly puritanical attitude to the "fallen women" and were punitive (even cruel) in many respects. Nevertheless many of the accusations raised in Ireland's Lost Babies are greatly exaggerated for no obvious reason other than sensationalism.

In brief, the programme correctly noted that in the deeply conservative Irish society of that time, unmarried mothers were commonly disowned by their families and banished to corrective convent mother and baby homes in order to hide their "shame". These unmarried mothers rarely had any means to support their children, and adoption was an accepted inevitable consequence. Talk of "children forcibly removed from their mothers" is thus inappropriate to most cases. Similarly Sixsmith's "demanding to know why they (the Nuns) remain unwilling to help families get back together" is disingenuous. He would have known that Irish law has been based on a closed system of adoption (originally designed to prevent the mothers' "shame" from later coming to light), that places more emphasis on confidentiality than on reuniting the parties of an adoption. The nuns therefore faced legal constraints on releasing information.

Much of the BBC/ABC programme is taken up by Sixsmith pursuing the issue of Irish children being adopted by Americans, hinting of children being "sold" to Americans, who were allegedly not properly vetted.

In reality, a peak of only about 150 Irish children per year (a total of about 1,500, mainly in the 1950s, out of around 50,000 or so total Irish adoptions from the 1920s to the 1950s) were ever adopted by Americans. Sixsmith is therefore totally beating up the significance of such US adoptions.

The additional suggestion that adoptive American parents were not vetted by the Church is not credible because in that era the Irish Catholic Church was obsessive about only allowing Catholic families to adopt the children of Catholic mothers. Prospective American adoptive families would all have been required to supply a reference from their local US Catholic clergy, though even the best of such vetting will not ensure universal happy-endings. Sixsmith himself acknowledged the high cost of sending adoptees to the US, so it is hardly surprising that the Church would expect the prospective American adoptive families to bear this cost.

Sixsmith emphasises the powerful position of the Irish Catholic Church but fails to mention that the main religious communities of nuns involved in running mother and baby homes were not Irish orders (though most of the nuns would have been recruited locally). The biggest player (and the order that ran Sean Ross Abbey in Tipperary - setting of "Philomena" - as well as a large home in Bessborough Co Cork) was the London-based Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. Three French-based orders, the Bons Securs order, which ran the home in Tuam, County Galway (converted from a workhouse set up during the Great Famine and scene of the "septic tank" story), the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, and the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul were also important players. The only Irish order involved in mother and baby homes was the Religious Sisters of Mercy (R.S.M.), which ran a home in County Clare.

Irish society as a whole (rather than just the nuns) needs to accept responsibility for the happenings of this era. Mother and baby homes and the nuns who ran them, while they were responsible for many excesses and cruelties, were nevertheless virtually the only ones to offer any refuge or services to unmarried mothers and for this they deserve at least limited credit. The homes were subsidised to a degree by the Irish State but the nuns were only paid a relative pittance and had to rely on their own fund-raising to survive. This was a key reason for sometimes Spartan conditions, and why the unfortunate girls in most cases were required to work-off their keep.

Surprisingly, the programme failed to adequately cover one of the main failings of convent mother and baby homes, namely high infant death rates, which up until the 1950s were a lot higher than for the general population. Research shows that the infant mortality rates in these homes from the 1920s to the 1940s were between 20 and 30 per cent compared with rates of 5 to 7 per cent for the children of married parents. Childhood diseases, influenza, and tuberculosis were the main culprits, though crowding, lack of heating and poor medical practices contributed in many cases. The relevant orders of nuns claim they were doing their best in appalling conditions.

Dr James Deeny, a former chief medical officer for the Irish Department of Health, reportedly was so shocked by the high mortality rates of babies born at Bessborough that he temporarily shut the place down. In his book To Cure and To Care, Dr Deeny recalled:

Going through returns for infant deaths in Cork, I noticed that there was something unusual and traced the matter to a home for unmarried mothers at Bessborough outside the city. "I found that in the previous year some 180 babies had been born there and that considerably more than 100 had died.

Shortly afterwards, when in Cork, I went to Bessborough. It was a beautiful institution, built on to a lovely old house just before the war, and seemed to be well-run and spotlessly clean. I marched up and down and around about and could not make out what was wrong. At last I took a notion and stripped all the babies and, unusually for a Chief Medical Adviser, examined them. Every baby had some purulent infection of the skin and all had green diarrhoea, carefully covered up. There was obviously a staphylococcus infection about.

Without any legal authority I closed the place down and sacked the matron, a nun, and also got rid of the medical officer. The deaths had been going on for years. They had done nothing.

A couple of days later I had a visit in Dublin from the nuns' "man of affairs" and he was followed by the Dean of Cork, Monsignor Sexton. Finally the Bishop of Cork complained to the Papal Nuncio, who went to see (Prime Minister) De Valera. The Nuncio, Archbishop Robinson, saw my report and said we were quite right in our action.

Bessborough was disinfected and Dr Deeny further noted: "During the succeeding years, while many hundreds of babies were born each year, the number of deaths never exceeded single figures." Between August 1951 and June 1952, after Doctor Deeny's intervention, less than 2% of infants died at the home.

The death rates at some homes come across as shocking, but more the result of mismanagement and incompetence than anything else, though arguably some element of neglect/indifference may be inferred.

Overall, the era of convent mother and baby homes in Ireland was bad enough in reality that there is no need to embellish the story. Clearly many journalists, TV reporters and movie-makers cannot resist the temptation. The lesson for the public is to seek out first-hand accounts, if they wish to get an accurate picture of a story being sensationalised.

So why is the media so open to spreading exaggerated stories about Irish mother and baby homes? An explanation , offered by a professor of journalism, is that Ireland in recent years has been rocked by scandal after scandal involving the abuse of children, much of it involving the Catholic Church. The mass-grave-in-a-septic-tank story and other exaggerations match prevailing prejudices, especially in an increasingly secular Ireland and an already secular Britain. Sensational stories of this type make great headlines, that are too good to check. And who cares, if they can be taken suggest that those nuns were mass murderers?

P.S. The Irish Government has announced an inquiry into the mistreatment of unmarried mothers and their children in institutional care from the 1920s to the 1960s.

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About the Author

Brendan O’Reilly is a retired commonwealth public servant with a background in economics and accounting. He is currently pursuing private business interests.

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