The revelations concerning broadcasting legend Frankie Byrne in a television documentary this week point to significant gaps in our understanding of the reality of life in Ireland during the middle decades of the 20th century. Her story adds an important dimension to an aspect of women's lives which has so far attracted relatively little research, writes Mary Raftery
The tragic irony of Frankie Byrne's story is the extent to which she, as Ireland's most famous agony aunt, propped up the severe societal norms which had caused her so much pain. The problems which she dealt with on her radio slot from the 1960s to the 1980s were of an innocuous nature, their blandness reinforcing the isolation felt by so many women who had fallen foul of the Taliban-like moral climate of the times, with its uncompromising condemnation of those who, like Frankie, became pregnant outside of marriage.
Frankie Byrne gave birth to a daughter in 1956. Her experience in this regard gives a rare insight into how class distinctions affected the fates of those who became pregnant out of wedlock at that time. While portrayed, undoubtedly accurately, as leading a life of hidden misery as a result of giving up her baby for adoption, Frankie's pregnancy and delivery were considerably easier than for many of her less fortunate contemporaries. With her privileged background and access to funds, she was able to give birth in a private nursing home. Those without money ended up in mother and baby homes, where the regime was often punitive and the moral condemnation absolute.
Even within these institutions, however, money talked. June Gouldring, in her enthralling book, The Light in the Window, has given us a unique account of life here. During the 1950s, she worked as a nurse for nine months in the Bessboro mother and baby home in Cork, run by Sacred Heart nuns.
She recounts how women could leave within weeks of giving birth if they paid £100 to the nuns, a substantial sum at the time. Otherwise, they had to spend two years in the institution, working to pay off their keep. Elsewhere, their "sentence" could be up to three years.
Other options for poorer women were to go to one of the Church of Ireland mother and baby homes. These took in women of all religions, and required that they spend only nine months working off their keep.
Alternatively, many managed to raise the fare to England, where they could give birth and return home within days. Long before it became a safety valve for Irish women in terms of abortion, the boat to England was the last refuge for those too fearful to give birth in this country. Various Catholic organisations, desperate to safeguard the faith of the infant, patrolled the maternity wards of English hospitals, trawling for Irish women in an attempt to force them to bring their babies home.
Many of the infants, however, ended up in a variety of British orphanages, and were eventually adopted. Some remained in institutions from where an as yet unknown number of Irish babies were transported to Australia as part of an extensive child migration scheme which lasted well into the 1960s.
As a general rule, the poorer the unmarried mother, the more gruesome was her fate and that of her child. Babies like Frankie Byrne's, born to better-off women, were more likely to be offered for adoption. Those from the poorer social classes tended to end up in the industrial schools, where they made up roughly one-third of the children within those institutions.
It is still only by piecing together the fragments of experiences such as Frankie Byrne's that one can even begin to develop a picture of the complexity of arrangements which existed across the social strata to punish women who broke the arbitrary rules of society.
The most severely affected were those who became trapped within Magdalen laundries, in some cases for most of their lives - a fate reserved for the poorer classes.
Despite a general view that we now know all about the grim nature of life in Ireland during the 1950s and 1960s, we have in fact heard very little about the precise nature of women's experiences within these institutions, or indeed of the detailed structures used by society to confine them. In the midst of the tens of millions quite rightly being spent to compensate victims of children's institutions and to inquire into the abysmal conditions within them, it must surely be possible to find the relatively small amount of money necessary to uncover and record the stories of mothers who also suffered.
There remain in Ireland many women and indeed many of their children for whom such a project would serve as a long overdue official recognition of their suffering and a kind of public act of contrition for the persecution that was visited upon them. However, we are already in danger of losing forever their stories, as year by year more of these women take their experiences to the grave. It seems that some secrets may sadly be destined to remain hidden, even in our brand new, shiny Ireland.