Tag Archives: Bethany Home

Paul Graham, 80, (right and above) met his brother Rodney Whittaker, 75, for the first time on Saturday

Via BBC:

A survivor of an Irish mother and baby home has said he is “at peace with the world” after meeting his elderly brother for the first time.

Paul Graham, 80, travelled to London from Australia to meet his half brother Rodney Whittaker, 75, on Saturday.

He said meeting his first blood relative was almost indescribable.

Mr Graham spent his early years at the Bethany Home in Dublin, which was a place for unmarried Protestant mothers and their children.

“I held his hand for nearly half an hour. It was like holding the hand of the one you love,” he told BBC Radio Ulster’s Sunday News.

“He turned around and smiled at me, it broke my heart.

“We just connected and that was just wonderful. I always wanted to belong.”

Mr Graham was adopted by a wealthy family in Belfast in 1944, but ran away from his home at the age of 14 to join the Royal Marines. He later emigrated to Australia with his young family.

He only recently realised he had a brother after discovering Mr Whittaker’s signature on his mother’s death certificate.

He said the meeting allowed him to forgive his mother, from Castlederg in County Tyrone, for leaving him as an infant in Bethany Home, which closed in the 1960s.

Bethany Home survivor meets elderly brother for the first time (BBC)

Pics: Paul Graham

Thanks Derek Linster

previously: Bethany Home on broadsheet

Derek Leinster, a campaigner for survivors of the Bethany Home, Rathgar, Dublin 6 (top in the 1950s)

We read with anguish the many letters that Derek Leinster writes to the Church of Ireland Gazette relating to the babies and children who perished while in the care of the Bethany “Homes”.

It is a cause of immense shame to many of us who were unaware of this scandalous situation to witness the abject failure of the Church of Ireland to step up to the mark and shoulder a share of the cost, at the very least, of some tangible physical memorial stones to the memory of the babies and children who died in the various Bethany “Homes” and elsewhere, never mind offer an overdue apology and, where appropriate, compensation to the diminishing band of “survivors” who bravely and stoically bore the treatment they experienced in these questionable “Homes”.

Moreover, when the Church of Ireland finally decides to clearly support the memory of the dead babies and children and to actively help the survivors whom Derek Leinster and the Coalition of Mother and Baby Home Survivors represent, then pressure needs to be brought to bear on the Irish Government to acknowledge the existence of the “Protestant” babies and children at Mount Jerome and elsewhere in the same way that the scandal of the Tuam Angels has brought a response involving millions of euros for the work involved.

Surely there must be a serving bishop (even archbishop), serving cleric or office-holding layperson who is willing to speak up, speak out and enable the Church of Ireland to acknowledge failure with respect to this dreadful historic wrongdoing, exhibit compassion to the memory of these little ones as we approach Holy Innocents later this month and enable us all to delight in the babe in the manger on Christmas morn knowing that a wrong has been righted and that the babies and children have not been forgotten who perished in our care in these “Homes”.

Derek Leinster must no longer be “a voice crying in the wilderness”, action must follow.

Canon Ronnie Clark,
Cloughey,
Co Down.

Remembering the babies at Bethany (The Irish Times letters page)

Previously: ‘Our Protestant Dead Are People Too’

Derek Leinster, a campaigner for survivors of the Bethany Home, Rathgar, Dublin 6 (top in the 1950s)

Last week, the government agreed to launch a forensic excavation of the site of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home based on recommendations from Dr Geoffrey Shannon, National Child Protection Rapporteur,.

Further to this.

Dear Broadsheet,

It was wonderful to see Geoffrey Shannon’s report [on the Tuam exhumation] in the the Irish media but why did he and all other Irish academics exclude the Irish children and babies abused in other institutions as there were 14 Mother and Baby homes of varying sorts and they are all on the list of places the 2015 Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby homes is examining?

So why ignore the Protestant survivors yet again along with many of our Catholic brothers and sisters who are also excluded? It is 2018 and Geoffrey Shannon has let the Government off the hook yet again.

When it comes to the other Mother and Baby homes which are excluded by Minister Katherine Zappone and Shannon, there is none more excluded than the Bethany Home which has the oldest representation of all of the Mother and Baby homes groups by many years and have been looking for justice for over 20 years.

Mr. Shannon and Minister Zappone were nowhere to be seen during those long years of struggle and they ignore us now as they publish reports and jet off on junkets to America to discuss survivors with so called ‘experts’ while survivors groups are excluded and locked out.

Protestant survivors however, do not forget the great numbers of our Catholic crib mates who lived and died in the institutions. We were delighted that they got their apology and redress even as Protestant survivors and some Catholics were excluded and left out in the cold.

However, thousands of Catholics did get justice and redress in 2002 as they were in the Catholic Mother and Baby homes: many of them went onto older children’s homes and so called orphanages and although they had no paperwork or proof, their cases were accepted as genuine.

The Bethany home survivors stood outside clutching our irrefutable and undeniable proof but we were discriminated against in a blatant manner by the Government of the day.

The Bethany home group researched and found not just the death certificates of the hundreds of babies and children who were neglected to death in the notorious Bethany Home but, we even provided the plot numbers in Mount Jerome cemetery in Dublin.

Unlike our colleague Catherine Corless in Tuam, we did not have any outlines or shrines or historic myths to guide us. There were no flowers on the forgotten Protestant graves unlike the Catholic run homes

Our Protestant dead in their unmarked mass graves are people too. Protestant lives matter.

And yes, we now know why they died – from starvation – which the death certs listed as ‘Marasmus’.

Rickets and a host of other conditions and illnesses were rampant in the Protestant run homes and the houses where the babies were Nursed-Out (the State paid £-/15s per week) and the babies were left to rot.

I was one of those babies and my health is still suffering 70 years later. This abuse is not historical, survivors continue to suffer while Minister Zappone and her academic pals enjoy their junket in America at taxpayers’ expense while survivor groups are excluded as Protestants and some Catholic’s have always been.

This is not just hearsay. I have the paperwork and proof after more than 20 years research and Freedom of Information requests too numerous to count. Unlike the great and good currently talking about me in luxury hotels in America, I lived this life. I am a Survivor.

Academics and Mr Geoffrey Shannon and Minister Zappone and indeed all decent people, should be working to make Irish society all inclusive and adhering to the principle of ‘Nothing about us, without us’.

On Shannon’s point about death certificates and how there was a lot of wrongdoing and criminal behaviour by all of the people that reported and recorded the deaths in the Mother and Baby homes,

I am somewhat confused about his point on the babies and children that he says were never registered. In that case, there would not be 796 babies and children buried in Tuam?

Yes, there is a lot of very serious wrongdoing in all of the recorded history of these unwanted and forgotten Irish children and, that is a crime by the State and Church’s who now claim they can investigate themselves.

But one needs a lot more than just death certificates to find our fallen brothers and sisters who were dumped in unmarked graves: you need burial records from undertakers and cemeteries, books, personal testimonies, web research, hoctors and hospital records. Will the academics find them in Boston?

All this was the Law of the Land and should be in any civilised society, yet Shannon’s point that the State, by law, had to ensure the forgotten illegitimate babies had to have a decent Christian burial but instead choose to turn a blind eye as the nuns and religious dumped us in unmarked graves back then. but now we know the truth of how little the State and Churches thought of us.

The idea of a National Day of Remembrance or Memorial or Christian Burial or Reflection Day, has been advanced by many people including myself for many years. It is now time to turn it into a reality .

Our national Day of Christian Burial must include all Protestant homes as equals. So please Churches and State and Academics, no more talking about us, without us.

Listen to us and hear our voices instead of your own. We are living survivors, you are not.

We survivors must act now and get it right while the academics fiddle as we die without ever seeing justice..

Derek Leinster,

Bethany Home Survivors’ Group

 

bethany-home

unnamed

From top: Bethany Home on Orwell Road in Rathgar, a Protestant mother and baby home; and Derek Leinster at the Bethany Memorial at Mount Jerome Cemetery in Harold’s Cross last year

Paul Redmond, from the Coalition of Mother And Baby Home Survivors, writes:

The Bethany Home Survivors 98 group are holding their first commemoration at their Memorial Stone in Mount Jerome cemetery in Harold’s Cross, Dublin on the 22nd of July, 2015. The group are meeting outside the cemetery informally from 2.00pm onwards and at 3.00, Derek Leinster and bagpiper Robert Cameron will lead the survivors, supporters and their families to the Memorial from the Chapel.

Canon Gardner will lead prayers at the graveside. The Lord Mayor of Dublin Críona Ní Dhálaigh has graciously agreed to attend the ceremony in an official capacity.

Doctor Niall Meehan and Doctor Gerald Morgan, formerly of Trinity College, will also be attending. Daniel Mulvihill the man who designed the Memorial will be there. Many TDs have expressed their good wishes and will attend if possible. The Coalition of Mother And Baby home Survivors (CMABS) are attending in an official capacity representing several Catholic survivors groups and individual Mother and Baby homes similar to the Bethany Home such as the Castlepollard and Saint Patrick’s home groups, etc., who proudly stand in solidarity with their Protestant brothers and sisters.

The survivors of the notorious Bethany Home call upon the Government to immediately introduce a parallel scheme to offer redress to the elderly Protestant survivors while there is still time. We also call upon the Government to include all Protestant survivors in the current Commission of Inquiry into Mother and Baby homes regardless of where they were born. This includes Westbank in Greystones, Ovoca House in Wicklow, Breamar House in Cork, and all others.

Previously: Remembering Bethany

Justice For The Survivors Of Bethany House?

svp
00065540

[Top: The Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul (now called the Daughters of Charity) and, above, Mary Hanfin in 2004]

Dr Lindsey Earner-Byrne’s book Mother And Child, which detailed how many deaths took place in 1933, in Tuam in Galway; Bessborough in Cork; Sean Ross Abbey in Tipperary and Pelletstown in Dublin showed St. Patrick’s/Pelletstown recorded the second highest level of illegitimate infant deaths (53) behind Sean Ross Abbey (60) in that year.

St Patrick’s  also sent 254 children to the US for adoption from the 1940s to the 1970s.

In addition  between 1940 and 1965, St Patrick’s and its sister hospital St Kevin’s (now St James’s) ‘donated’ the bodies of at least 461 dead babies to all the major medical teaching institutions in the state, including Trinity College Dublin, the College of Surgeons and UCD medical school.

So they must be really worried now?

Well.

The Residential Institutions Redress Board was a board set up under legislation in 2002 to compensate residents of certain institutions who were victims of institutional abuse.

The redress scheme was linked to an indemnity agreement brokered between the then [Fianna Fáil] Education Minister Dr Michael Woods and 18 religious organisations – including the Daughters of Charity – who paid a contribution in return for the State, essentially taxpayers, to pay the bill for all the claims arising from the redress scheme.

Last year, a Prime Time investigation, showed how the Protestant-run Bethany Home in Rathgar, Dublin 6, was repeatedly refused its requests to be added to the redress scheme because it was a mother and baby home.

In contrast, St Patrick’s mother and baby home was added to the scheme, following lobbying by the Daughters of Charity.

Their request for St Patrick’s mother and baby home to be added to the redress scheme was granted at the end of 2004, by ‘ministerial order’ by Mary Hanafin, then Minister for Education.

Good times.

Watch the Prime Time programme from last year here

Related: Church And State And The Bethany Home

Previously: What About Dublin?

BethanyHome

[Bethany Home, Orwell Road in in Rathgar, Dublin  (above), in 1934, was a Protestant-run ‘mother and child’ home and as such was excluded from the redress scheme for victims of institutionalised abuse. It closed in 1972.}

We the undersigned are writing to you to express our deep concern at the situation of the survivors of the Bethany Home, Rathgar, Dublin.

We are aware that Justice Minister Alan Shatter and Minister of State Kathleen Lynch have met with representatives of the Bethany Survivors Group. They heard testimony that included evidence of state responsibility for death, abuse and neglect of children at the home.

The fact that these survivors have to date been excluded from both the Residential Institutions Redress Scheme and the Magdalene Redress Scheme (despite initial indications, that the Bethany Home may be considered for inclusion in the latter scheme), leaves them in a state of vulnerability, uncertainty and in many cases poverty.

We call on the Taoiseach, as a matter of urgency, to ensure that justice is served to the survivors of the Bethany home and that the state affords them the peace and security that they deserve in these, their older years. We call on him to provide them with a process of non-adversarial redress and to provide assistance to them in their
attempts to access to their records.

Niall Meehan, Secretary, Bethany Survivors Group; Orla O’Connor, Director, National Women’s Council of Ireland

On behalf of;

 Breffni Belles Cavan Women’s Network; Children’s Rights Alliance;Community Workers Co-operati; Domestic Violence Response; Dublin Rape Crisis Centre; European Anti Poverty Network Ireland;Headford Women’s Group; Irish Feminist Network; Irish Traveller Movement; Justice for Magdalenes; Migrant Rights Centre Ireland; National Collective of Community Based Women’s Networks; Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed National Women’s Council of Ireland; One Family; One in Four; OPEN; Pavee Point; Rape Crisis Network Ireland; Rowlagh Women’s Group; South West Kerry Women’s Association; Survive and Thrive – breast cancer support and advocacy group; Women’s Aid; Women in Media and Entertainment; Women with Disabilities in the West; Global Women’s Studies Centre, NUIG; Irish congress of Trade Unions; Irish Nurses and Midwives Association; National Union of Journalists; SIPTU; UNISON; UNITE the Union; Dr Anne Byrne School of Political Science and Sociology, NUI Galway; Professor Patricia Coughlan , School of English, University College, Cork; Anastasia Crickley, Centre for Applied Social Studies, NUI, Maynooth; Dr. Breda Gray, Gender, Culture & Society Programmes at the University of Limerick.Dr. Amanda Haynes, Lecturer in Sociology, University of Limerick; Mark Kelly, Director Irish Council for Civil Liberties; Prof Siobhán Mullally, Director, Centre for Criminal Justice and Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University College Cork;Dr. Sandra Mc Evoy Coordinator, Women’s Studies, University College Cork; Dr. Chris McInerney, Course Director, BA Public Administration/BA Politics and Public Administration, Department of Politics and Public; Administration University of Limerick; Dr. Mary Murphy Department of Sociology NUI Maynooth; Professor Ray Murphy, Professor of Law, Irish Centre for Human Rights, NUI Galway; Dr Katherine O’Donnell, Director-Women’s Studies Centre, School of Social Justice, University College Dublin;Orlagh O’Farrell, Consultant and researcher on equality and human rights;Dr. Martin J. Power, Lecturer in Sociology, Course Director: MA in Sociology, University of Limerick; Dr. Niamh Reilly, Senior Lecturer, School of Political Science and Sociology NUI Galway; Professor Neil Robinson, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Limerick; Ailbhe Smyth, researcher and consultant in gender equality, LGBTissues and human rights.

Previously: Prime Time Bethany Homes Special

Justice For The Survivors of Bethany Homes