Sir, – We wish to express serious reservations about the recently published draft terms of reference of the forthcoming inquiry into mother and baby homes, and related matters.
We have every confidence in the capacity of the distinguished members of the commission to investigate. We are not confident that the commission will be allowed to examine lives blighted outside institutions where unmarried mothers were forced to abandon their children.
The terms of reference mention “exit pathways” from mother and baby homes. It is not clear if such pathways will lead up the entrance path of similarly dysfunctional institutions to which abandoned children were sent.
For example, some of the undersigned were sent from the Bethany Home to the Westbank Orphanage in Wicklow, which had the same Protestant fundamentalist ethos as Bethany. The orphanage had one main purpose, to raise money for the institution, with one main effect, the denial of a right of adoption to most children. Children were paraded in front of gullible but sincere church congregations in Northern Ireland as the South’s poor Protestant orphans. We were, in fact, exploited, unpaid, professional orphans, illegally transported back and forth over the Border. Some “children” remained in Westbank, which closed in 2002, into their twenties. Many suffered systemic physical, sexual and psychological abuse.
We insist on being allowed to tell the Commission of Inquiry of our experiences.
If we succeed, and lives of children who arrived from Bethany are examined, that will leave those who arrived from other “pathways”.
They arrived sometimes direct from maternity hospitals, or from the Braemar House Mother and Baby Home, Cork, which (unaccountably) is not listed in the terms of reference. Their situation too should be investigated. Similarly, the exit pathway from the Church of Ireland Magdalen Home to its associated Nursery Rescue Society, which farmed out children from the age of three, should also be examined.
We demand to know why we were abandoned and ignored by regulatory authorities.
It is time for the State to accept responsibility. The draft terms of reference should be tightened and clarified so that our experience may be recognised, investigated and validated. – Yours, etc,
CAILIN ANDERSON,
(Bethany Home,
Westbank Orphanage)
Kilwinning, Ayrshire;
COLM BEGLEY;
(Westbank Orphanage,
Bethany Home),
Carrigadrohid,
Co Cork;
ELIZABETH
CHIKANEY O’TOOLE,
(Bethany Home,
Westbank Orphanage),
Newtownmountkennedy,
Co Wicklow;
HELEN FITZPATRICK,
(Westbank Orphanage),
Langhorne, Pennsylvania;
SIDNEY HERDMAN,
(Westbank Orphanage),
Richill, Co Armagh;
JOHN HILL,
(Church of Ireland Magdalen
Home, Nursery Rescue
Society),
Stamullen, Co Meath;
DEREK LEINSTER,
(Bethany Home),
Rugby,
Warwickshire;
JOYCE McSHARRY,
(Bethany Home),
Kinsealy,
Co Dublin;
VICTOR STEVENSON;
(Braemar House,
Westbank Orphanage)
Bangor, Co Down;
ANDREW YATES,
(Bethany Home,
Westbank Orphanage)
Newtownards, Co Down.