Madam, – Justice for Magdalenes – a survivor advocacy group – supports Derek Leinster and Niall Meehan in their demands for a full investigation surrounding the circumstances in which 40 children, resident at the Bethany Home, came to be buried at Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin (Home News, May 22nd). The State had a constitutional obligation to protect all children, to supply the place of the parents, to ensure a minimum education. The fact that these children died in an institution, “outside the home,” should be fully examined and all records made available.
Ireland has been confronted with the spectre of a mass grave related to institutional “care” before – the exhumation, cremation and re-internment of 155 former Magdelene women from the High Park, Drumcondra institution in 1992 still needs a full investigation: an additional 22 bodies were discovered, death certificates were missing although they were legally required since the 19th century, names on the exhumation licence and on the subsequent headstone at Glasnevin cemetery do not correlate. These questions remain unanswered!
Similar questions must now be asked about the children buried at Mount Jerome cemetery: how did these children die, do death certificates exist for each child, were family members informed? Answers to these questions will enable an appropriate memorial stone with accurate information.
The Bethany Home, like the Magdalene Laundries, is not considered a State residential institution. Therefore, it was not included on Schedule 1 (a) of the Residential Institutional Redress Act, 2002. Consequently, survivors of the Bethany Home, like survivors of the Magdalene homes, are deemed ineligible for redress under the current scheme. Like the Magdalenes, the State deems the Bethany Home a “private and charitable” institution that was not licensed or managed by the State. And yet, the courts referred women to the Bethany Home upon giving them a suspended sentence for certain crimes; they also placed women “on probation” and, in all likelihood, placed women “on remand.”
In this sense, the Bethany fulfilled the function of the Catholic Magdalene Laundries for women from the Protestant faiths. The State always relied on its existence and availability to deal with so-called “problem women”. In researching my book on the laundries, I discovered four cases at the Central Criminal Court, between 1929 and 1945, whereby Protestant women found guilty of “concealment of a birth” were referred to the Bethany Home for periods of up to three years.
Can the Department of Justice demonstrate conclusively what became of each of these women?
– Yours, etc,