Evidence of historic sexual assault and medical experiments at north of Ireland mother and baby homes

Content warning: This article contains descriptions of sexual violence and cruel treatment

A panel of experts and victims-survivors has released its shocking findings on mother and baby homes in the north of Ireland.

The Truth Recovery Independent Panel (the IP) published a report detailing horrors that included sexual assault, forced labour and non-consensual medical experimentation on residents. The IP’s work examined the period from ‘Northern Ireland’s’ creation in 1922, up until the closure of the final operational institutions in the mid-1990s.

Mother and baby homes were institutions often run by churches. They were used to house single mothers who had a child outside marriage. Conservative social norms led families, doctors and social workers to view these settings as an appropriate way to hide away the ‘shame’ of ‘fallen women’.

They were sometimes attached to workhouses in which even heavily pregnant women were forced into gruelling work.

Homes carried out policies of forced adoption, stripping mothers of their children. British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, recently apologised for the state’s role in this appalling practice in England.

Mother and baby homes locked the ‘shame’ away

The IP’s report, indicating its intention to focus on victims-survivors, began with a series of heartbreaking quotes from people who have passed through the cruel system. One person recalled her family’s willingness to abandon her to a home.

She said:

I was certain that as soon as they saw my beautiful boy they couldn’t help but change their minds and take me home with them. Of course, I was deluding myself and although my mother cooed over him, there was no way
they were exposing my shame to the world.

Another remembered the theft of her child:

“Take her away, take her away. This one’s for adoption, this one’s for adoption. Take her away, take her away.” And someone said to me, “Close your eyes, close your eyes”. So, I closed my eyes, I didn’t see her. I felt her,
but I didn’t see her [sniffs] and she was taken away.

An upcoming public inquiry on the institutions will use the IP’s recommendations as a basis for its own investigations. The IP flagged a series of cases of “serious human rights issues” that it expects the inquiry to look at.

These include:

• “A systemic failure on the part of the state to exercise effective oversight of the operation” of the homes.
• Discrimination against people with disabilities, as institutions kept “very few records” on what happened to disabled children who were admitted into the homes.
• A failure of the state to protect against inhuman and degrading treatment, which residents at the homes suffered.

The panel said “no woman or girl should have been sent to the St Mary’s institutions”.

It added that some of the appalling abuse may meet the “threshold of inhuman treatment”. This includes that meted out by a Sister Z, who is alleged to have sexually assaulted residents at GSS Marianville Mother and Baby Institution.

Obscenity of medical trials done without consent

Non-consensual medical experimentation, such as when researchers from Queen’s University Belfast and then Glaxo Laboratories, carried out vaccine trials on residents. In the sickening, Nazi-esque words of Professor Patrick Meenan, who led research in Ireland:

There was a tradition of doing testing in orphanages. You went to where the material was, to put it crudely.

Forced labour such as:

…washing windows while standing on ladders or scrubbing floors – [which] was manifestly unsuitable for pregnant women or women who had recently given birth.

Homes holding women against their will, who in some cases “were brought back by the police” when they escaped. This amounted to an “unlawful deprivation of liberty”.

The IP also went into specifics on some of the homes. Hopedene Hostel in Belfast was managed by a committee containing influential individuals from the Church of Ireland, Presbyterian Church and Salvation Army.

There is a public perception that mother and baby homes were a predominantly Catholic endeavour, but in fact, the majority in the Six Counties were run by Protestant bodies. The majority of women caged in the homes were also Protestant.

‘Prison-like’ Marianville home fooled inspectors

Hopedene “styled itself as a more modern and progressive institution”. However, the testimony from former residents revealed this was not the case.

One woman said:

They regarded us as fallen women and were in the home due to our own loose morals.

The IP revealed:

The work routine was viewed as punitive: ‘you’ve screwed up and this is your punishment’.

Even worse was the case of:

One birth mother [who] described her experience of sexual abuse by a predatory male who visited the institution.

Meanwhile, the panel found Marianvale Mother and Baby Institution in Newry dealt out “physical mistreatment” and provided “inadequate medical treatment”. Residents described cases of sexual abuse, such as:

…internal examination taking place in view of other girls and women.

The IP flagged failures from government inspectors. A 1988 report described another home, Marianville, as:

…warm and comfortable environment in which the needs of unmarried mothers and when necessary, babies can be met by a totally committed staff.

This was in total contrast to testimony of ex-residents, who said it was like “a prison”.

The IP also highlighted the fundamentally discriminatory essence of the whole system — namely that only women were forced into such institutions. There was no shame, imprisonment, sexual abuse or forced labour for the men who fathered the children.

The panel found 12,062 people had passed through mother and baby institutions, about 2,000 more than the previous estimate. The higher figure is likely to be an undercount as some institutions did not cooperate with the panel’s investigation.

Participants in the IP’s work said the primary purpose of it must be to ensure that their pain “should never [be] allow[ed] to be forgotten”.

Featured image via Konstantin Mishchenko