The publication of the Mother and Baby Homes Report has inevitably led to questions of where responsibility for what happened should rest. Was society to blame? Was it the fault of men who dodged their parental responsibilities, our politicians or the Catholic Church? Maybe a mix of all of them.
But what about the media? Did it not draw attention to what was going on? Did it not fulfil its function as the watchdog of society? The answers, in short, are yes and no: some media outlets reported on what was happening but such reportage did not create the necessary public reaction for things to change.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s some outlets drew attention to the existence of Mother and Baby Homes and the exporting of infants to America. In 1941, The Bell, then edited by Sean O Faolain, published an article – Illegitimate – which described the plight of the young mother of a three-week-old infant who had appeared in court charged with begging.
Sacked from her housekeeping job after her pregnancy had become apparent, she had given birth in a boarding house. Now in custody, the best the judge could do for her was to “see what can be done about getting her home or into one of the institutions”.
Having criticised “the export of Irish children in the name of lonely souls everywhere”, the article described the disparity that existed in terms of unintended pregnancies in different socio-economic classes: “The well-off young woman confesses to her parents; she is hustled off, normally to London, Paris, Biarritz, comes back without the baby, and nobody is any the wiser. The poor girl can only turn to the Clergyman, the Dispensary Doctor, the District Nurse or Midwife.”
However, as a small circulation monthly, The Bell was preaching to the converted. Three years later, O Faolain bemoaned the lack of public discussion The Bell’s frank articles had provoked: they had, he observed, not produced “a whimper of comment” from politicians, clergymen or academics.
Nine years later, in January 1950, The Irish Times reported on the growing phenomenon of Irish children being adopted by American couples. It noted how church-run institutions were expecting a busy time in the subsequent 12 months as it was "anticipated that many Americans passing through Ireland during the Holy Year will wish to take back Irish children, orphans or otherwise".
It reported that 40 to 50 children had been taken to America the previous year and that, as Ireland did not have an adoption process, it was considered “legitimate under present circumstances for American couples to come to Ireland, arrange to be shown over our orphanages, and to choose usually the healthiest boy or girl for adoption”.
The following April, the editor of the Times Pictorial, George Burrows, revealed that airlines were offering “cut fares to Americans and to Irish people who are adopting Irish children from Irish orphanages and homes”. Such a promotional gimmick, he surmised, arose from the airlines thinking “this outlay is repaid by a form of sentimental publicity, for which Americans apparently fall in quite a big way”.
He also revealed that he had “seen a request to newspapers that no publicity should be given to the removal of Irish-born babies from this end”. While Burrows did not record the origins of this written request, it was presumably deemed necessary as Irish newspapers were receiving detailed information about the adoption of Irish infants by Americans from news agencies such as United Press and Associated Press. This information was circulated as press releases on behalf of airlines such as TWA and AOA which sought publicity from the “cut fares” offered to those who travelled to Ireland to select a child.
In October 1951 The Irish Times reported that in one week alone 18 parties of children had been flown from Shannon to America, that 500 children had been transported the previous year, and that for 1951 that number had been already been exceeded in October.
The Irish Times and its sister title the Times Pictorial were the only newspapers to criticise this practice: the Irish Independent and the Irish Press simply published the agency photographs of the children arriving at their new homes in America, thus giving the airlines the publicity they clearly craved. Appearing in newspapers that catered predominantly to the southern Protestant community, critical coverage of the American adoptions could be safely ignored by those who held political and ecclesiastical power.
And those in power certainly did not have the worry about the Irish Independent or Irish Press. This was a time when as one reporter with the Independent later put it, the objective was to write “nice copy” that “did not ruffle the feathers of the Hierarchy or bring blushes to the faces of the ‘good nuns’ as we invariably seemed to describe them”.
Things were little better at the Irish Press. As recalled by Alan Bestic, during an epidemic of gastro-enteritis in Dublin, the paper was asked to highlight the fact that breast-feeding was the safest option for new mothers. After much argument about the morality of the phrase breast-feeding it was changed to the meaningless advice that mothers should feed their children themselves. “The blinds,” Bestic observed, “were as thick as that.”
Those journalists who had the audacity to think for themselves suffered immensely. When, in 1955, Liam MacGabhann accepted an invitation to visit the USSR he was denounced by the leading Catholic newspaper, The Standard, which accused him of “enjoying hospitality dispensed by the bloodstained hands of Kremlin murderers and persecutors”. This smear campaign ensured that MacGabhann’s regular appearances on Radio Éireann were abruptly ended. On his return from the USSR he was told by a station official that he was “no longer in good standing”.
Perhaps the most eloquent recollection of this era appeared in this newspaper in May 1999 after RTÉ broadcast Mary Raftery’s States of Fear series on the industrial school system. Writing of his experience as a young journalist, Brian Quinn observed that journalists “should have tried harder to find out the real truth”, though he also noted that they would most likely “not have been believed”. Journalists of mid-twentieth-century Ireland, he concluded, had been “trapped in a carefully designed plot that mixed lies with official evasion and ecclesiastical terror”.
If there’s any lesson in all of this, it is that a society gets the journalism it is prepared to pay for. How society should fund that journalism is another question entirely.
Mark O’Brien is associate professor of journalism history at DCU and the author of The Fourth Estate: Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland.
