Children in Care Homes
When I was young there was a children’s care home in our town. My friend told me about it and occasionally when we drove past I wondered what it was like. Was it like a hospital inside? Did they have teddy bears? Were the people nice to them?
Then many years later I met someone who had spent time in this particular children’s home. He was very young at the time and I suppose he didn’t really remember a lot about it. He didn’t talk about it very much except to say that his father had died and his mother had difficulty coping with himself and his brothers.
I remember seeing that Peirce Brosnan film “Evelyn” where the mother had died and the Catholic Church took the children off him and put them into a home. This is based upon a true story. The father fought hard to have his children returned to him and he got them back. But he really had a battle on his hands.
Nowadays people have smaller families than they did in the past. But don’t forget that contraception was not readily available in Ireland until the 1990s. Women may have had 9 0r 10 children to feed and that was one thing if they lived in the country and could grow their own food but how did they manage living in a tenement block?
There was a case on Jersey Island a number of years ago where there was scandal involving a children’s home. In Ireland there has been a multitude of institutional abuse at the hands of nuns, priests and brothers. The Catholic Church has come out of this very badly.
I also read recently about a Protestant Care home in Dublin called Bethany Home. Many of the infants and children living there starved to death and were buried in unmarked plots. Bethany Home opened in 1934 and closed in 1972. A trawl through the records held at Mount Jerome Cemetery and minutes of Management Meetings by Mr. Niall Meehan brought to light a number of unmarked graves at the cemetery. The State tried to deny any responsibility for the home by saying that it was privately run but in early 2000 the Department of Justice admitted that the home had been used as a detention centre for petty criminals awaiting trial.
Survivors who lived in the home are now appealing for compensation but it is uncertain whether they will be successful if they cannot prove that the State is responsible for conditions in Bethany Home.
