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

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.