The God Squad

With the coalition government firmly established in power in the Republic the clerical child abuse scandals which rocked the very fabric of Irish society may seem to have receded into the background. A previous government has paid our more than 1.8 billion Euro to victims of abuse at the hands of Catholic religious and in Catholic schools and institutions. The Redress Bill had sanctioned giving priority to awarding compensation to those survivors who are now advanced in years or in poor health. But one tireless group of campaigners is determined that their own appalling childhood miscarriage of justice will be officially acknowledged and compensated- justice they believe has been denied them because they are of a different religious tradition. Felicity McCall takes up their story
They are scattered across Ireland, the UK, Canada, the US and beyond. The youngest are touching forty; many more are in their sixties and seventies. All have spent a lifetime carrying the emotional and physical scars of their early years in care. They are still finding each other. They are the Bethany Survivors.
The cruelty they suffered was at the hands of institutions run by the Church of Ireland- most notoriously, the Bethany Home, in Dublin. The home took in non-Catholic unmarried mothers, their children, and women convicted of various crimes ranging from larceny and prostitution to infanticide, for fifty years, starting in 1922.

Last October, while in opposition, Junior Minister Kathleen Lynch urged the government to ‘do the decent thing and end this outrage.’ The Bethany survivors are appealing to the Fine Gael coalition to honour this commitment. Under the Redress Bill, priority was given to those victims of Catholic abuse who were in advanced age or in declining health. Many Bethany Survivors are now in their sixties and seventies. Time is running out for them.
Their spokesperson, Derek Linster, is understandably angry:
‘We were excluded from the Redress system. We also applied to the Department of Education for compensation. Again we did not qualify. The state has thrown money unaccountably at this problem, trying to buy off its responsibility for running a dysfunctional sectarian health, education and welfare system. It is now ‘solving’ it in a sectarian manner, leaving non-Catholics outside the door.
‘Officials claimed the Bethany was a privately run mother and baby institution in which the state played no role. When corrected on this they changed the story that in order to qualify for inclusion children would have to be sent to a home by court order. Yet while there were 50 institutions on the compensation schedule where this was the case, there were over 100 where it was not.’
So who are the Bethany Survivors? Most have spent a lifetime trying to find out. More often than not, they were given up as babies not because of social deprivation or economic necessity, but because their very existence contravened the religious fervour, social mores and downright bigotry and snobbery of a relatively affluent Anglican society. Unmarried Church of Ireland women from all over the island of Ireland were secreted in the home before their condition became apparent, gave birth there and stayed for the first few months of the baby’s life.

Many of the babies were born from a relationship with a Catholic man. The Catholic dictum of the time was that any child with at least one Catholic parent had to be raised in the faith. Anglican families more preoccupied with the religious upbringing of the unplanned child chose to commit it to the Bethany Home which was renowned for its staunch fervour and missionary approach.

The child would be brought up in its mother’s faith- secondary to this was the fact that the infants were deprived of adequate nutrition, medical care, warmth, stimulation, social contact and love. Afraid that the Catholic parent might try to become involved in the infant’s upbringing, they were also deprived of their true identity. Names were frequently changed.

Perhaps because the Bethany at Rathgar in Dublin served as a maternity home, detention centre and nursery, its ethos lacked any notion of or intent for caring for these youngsters as they grew up. As a result, rows of cots were left in cold, damp and unsanitary rooms, their occupants deprived of adequate food and clothing. Diseases such as whooping cough, enteritis and bronchial pneumonia were rife and babies who were eventually admitted to hospital were not expected to come out alive. Personal contact, care, and stimulation played no part in the regime. Images of the Bethany invite close comparison with the appalling conditions in Romanian orphanages in the 1980s and 90s.
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While allegations of infants being smothered in their cots can and will never be proved, more than two hundred babies died within their first few months. To date Derek and his team have discovered the identity of two hundred and nineteen Bethany babies who were quietly buried in an unmarked grave in Mount Jerome cemetery. They have held a memorial service, where one NI reared survivor and campaigner, patrick, ………………….. read out the infants’ names, one by one, at the graveside, a poignant litany of loss.
The state Deputy Chief Medical Adviser dismissed their deaths in 1939 with the observation that it was ‘well known’ that illegitimate children were ‘delicate’.

Few, if any, children remained in the home after the age of five. Adoption was illegal in Ireland until 1952; but with generous funding of fifteen shillings a week for each foster child, and little or no vetting and follow up care, it was an attractive proposition for the feckless, the greedy and the impecunious. Many came to homes in NI where the Anglican tradition was stronger. The one proviso was that all the children would be raised in their mother’s religious tradition. This, despite the fact that their mothers had abandoned them and in many cases obscured their very existence.

Derek Linster is self educated. He was rarely allowed to go to school as a child, used instead as unpaid labour on local farms. Dressed in a boy’s ragged shorts he did a man’s backbreaking work from before puberty. Despite this he has written two volumes of his life story, Hannah’s Shame and Destiny Unknown. Together, they have sold more than ten thousand copies.

Derek is the driving force in the campaign for the Bethany Babies. Most of them are now in their sixties, seventies and beyond, scattered across the UK and Ireland. Hundreds of others lie in unmarked graves in Mount Jerome, silent testament to the inhumanity of church and state.
Yet despite this Derek Linster’s story is one of triumph over adversity, of hope, of a generosity of spirit which belies his upbringing. It is a call for justice and recognition and, above all, inclusion in retrospective state compensation.

The Ireland branch of the miscarriage of justice lobby group, Portia, supports the Bethany Survivors’ campaign.
If you would like to make contact with the group:

Derek Linster
Chairperson Bethany Survivors
42 Southey Road
Rugby CV22 6HF
Warwickshire
England
01788 817311