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The two Church of Ireland Archbishops have acknowledged “with shame” that the church was “complicit, as with the rest of society at that time, in a culture of hypocrisy and judgement which stigmatised women and children and endangered their health and well-being”.
Responding to the report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, Church of Ireland Primate Archbishop John McDowell and Archbishop of Dublin Michael Jackson said the women and children who passed through the homes “deserved much better”.
“We are sorry and apologise for the role that our Church played in shaping a society in which unmarried women and their children were treated in this way. They deserved much better,” they said in a statement.
“We also want to pay tribute to those former residents of homes, and others, who have focused society’s attention on mother and baby homes. One of the most prominent groups was associated with the Bethany Home, which operated under a general Protestant ethos while being independently managed.”
The commission said that across 49 years Bethany Home, which began in Dublin 7 and later moved to Rathgar, admitted 1,584 women and 1,376 children. The deaths of five women and 262 children were associated with the institution, and the commission found that Bethany was “no exception” to the high rates of infant mortality seen in all mother and baby homes until the late 1940s.
The archbishops acknowledged “the Commission’s detailed and extensive reporting and we must all feel ashamed when we consider the social pressures and judgements that drove so many women and their children into these deserts within our community”.
Revelations in the report of “pain and hurt experienced by the women and children in these homes has been shocking and disturbing, and their response has been courageous and inspiring,” they said.
In seeking “to understand the injustices endured,” they said, the report “also recognises the difficulties faced by those who ran the homes in a society that often did not want to know or to help, and in a State that did not help enough”.
The archbishiops said the commission’s recommendations “on access to available information for residents in the homes deserve urgent consideration to ensure certainty in future” over knowledge of their identity”.
They concluded that “this is a sombre time for us all”.