BACKGROUND: The exclusion of Bethany Home residents
from the Magdalene laundries redress scheme has prompted allegations of
double standards and religious bias.The Protestant-run residence for unmarried mothers and their children operated between 1921 and 1972, initially in Blackhall Place, Dublin, and later Rathgar.
About 20 former residents are known to the Bethany Home Survivors group, which stresses that the financial implications of their inclusion would be relatively small.
But the Department of Justice is concerned about the precedent it would set.
According to some estimates, in excess of 10 times as many women and children would have gone through Catholic-run mother-and-baby homes, which have been excluded so far from any official inquiry.
A number of such homes were set up in the wake of a 1927 Free State commission report, which expressed concern that unmarried mothers were being held with the infirm, elderly and “imbeciles”.
While purporting to have their welfare at stake, the report divided such women into two classes: “(1) those who may be considered amenable to reform and (2) those . . . regarded as less hopeful cases”.
“These essentially became the dividing mark of the entire system,” says UCD history lecturer and author on the subject Dr Lindsey Earner-Byrne.
While “first offenders” or women from middle-class families would be sent to “special homes”, she said “women from the working-class backgrounds were sent to the county home; those deemed ‘repeat offenders’ – a term widely used – were sent to the Magdalene asylum or the county home”.
The main “special homes” were at Bessboro in Cork; Seán Ross Abbey, Roscrea, Co Tipperary; and Manor House, Castlepollard, Co Westmeath. They were funded through a capitation system, whereby the State paid a grant per mother and per child.
Dr Earner-Byrne said the average “detention” appeared to have been between one and two years, adding the Bethany Home “was considered the Church of Ireland equivalent to these ‘special homes’.”
The campaign for recognition for Bethany Home residents has been led by Derek Leinster, who was born in the institution in 1941. He moved to the UK at age 18 without any formal education and has since written two volumes of autobiography about his experiences.
He has been supported since 2009 by Niall Meehan, head of journalism at Griffith College Dublin, who says: “The issue of extension [of redress] to other mother and baby homes might superficially seem to be there but there is a specific case for Bethany because it was dealt with differently.”
The State used the home for the “sectarian privatisation” of care, he argues.
The college lecturer, whose research interests include censorship and historical revisionism, adds “by not looking at experience of people in the Protestant community we tend to have a somewhat superficial understanding of what happened in Irish society”.