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

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: