Dear Editor,
Kevin Myers wrote movingly (4 May) about the death of someone he knew ‘not well’ in the Irish Times, when its upper echelons and secretarial departments were staffed mainly by Protestants. She turned out to have been an unmarried mother, though ‘never complained’ (something Kevin Myers thinks is a southern Protestant trait). Perhaps this was not because she was a member of a minority religious group and more because she was a member of a then fairly powerless majority, as an Irish women.
There are differences in Protestant and Catholic cultural experience, but there may be more similarities than differences. I write from personal experience. In 1941 I was born in the Protestant Bethany Home that was also a place of detention for criminally offending Protestant females. That in itself is an indication of attitudes to unmarried motherhood, one shared with the wider society.
My mother was obliged to give birth to me in secret because my father, who did not know what happened to my mother, was considered an unsuitable marriage partner. He was a Roman Catholic. The circumstances of my birth and entirely inadequate dysfunctional upbringing have been exposed in the media. They indicate that there was a conspiracy of silence within the Protestant community and in the state about neglect of Protestant bastards – which is what we were in every negative sense of that term. I was ‘surrendered… to the anonymity of adoption’ in 1945 by being given to a family who would have had difficulty raising a dog, which is effectively how I was treated.
In 1939 the state’s Deputy Chief Medical Advisor, the son of a Church of Ireland bishop, was confronted with record levels of death in the Bethany Home and critical reports from his own inspectors and the media concerning neglect of Bethany Children (see Irish Independent 24 August 1939). He explained that in fact all was well: ‘it is well known that illegitimate children are delicate’. He then set about curing what really caused him and his department a media headache. He ordered the Bethany Home to stop trying to convert Catholics, or state funding would be put in jeopardy. The home complied, though the funding took ten years to arrive. Many children suffered extreme neglect (including me) and more died during those years. But then we were ‘delicate’, or rather the subject of our existence was. The Irish state effectively washed its hands of Protestant bastards.
Recently, I have been trying to track down my official existence. I was in a home regulated through Acts of the Oireachtas and I was moved about the place in my early years. Contrary to law, there appears to be no official record of these movements. Like over 200 dead Bethany children in unmarked graves in Mount Jerome cemetery, I am a non-person as far as the state is concerned.
Perhaps, to paraphrase Kevin Myers, I should not cause a fuss, I should get on with my own life, and I should endure whatever degree of Catholic governance Dáil Éireann wishes to impose upon me. I think not. Like the Magdalen women who were also products of prejudice, the state has (to paraphrase the 1916 Proclamation) a responsibility to own up to its neglect of 'children of the nation equally'.
Yours sincerely,
Derek Linster
Chairperson Bethany Survivors
42 Southey Road
Rugby CV22 6HF
Warwickshire
England
0044 1 788 817311
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