Ireland: 3,615 child deaths established at Pelletstown, the largest toll of any institution the Mother and Baby Homes Commission examined

Proceedings

1. 2021-01-12 · final report published

   Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, Ireland (statutory commission established under the Commissions of Investigation Act 2004). The Commission identified 3,615 deaths among infants and children associated with Pelletstown, the mother and baby home on the Navan Road in Dublin run by the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul — the largest number recorded at any single institution it examined. The figure covers children who died in the institution, children admitted to it who died elsewhere, and children never admitted whose mothers had been resident before the birth. A date of death was available for 3,605 (99.7%) and the Commission identified a General Register Office death record for 3,511 (97.12%). Mortality was concentrated in 1920 to 1942, in which 78% of all the deaths fell; it was highest in 1920 with 200 deaths and peaked again in 1936 with 188. Of the deaths where age was recorded, 81.2% occurred in infancy. The Commission reproduced the Department of Local Government and Public Health's own year-by-year returns for the 1920s: 96 deaths against 259 children resident in 1924, 119 against 240 in 1925 during a measles epidemic, 94 against 271 in 1926, 111 against 263 in 1927, 95 against 294 in 1928, 81 against 330 in 1929 and 66 against 336 in 1930. It further recorded that when the percentage of children dying at Pelletstown was described as 'very heavy' before the Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor in 1925, the response was that this was to be expected where infants of similar age were housed together, and the Board of Guardians' representative attributed the mortality to children admitted from the street rather than to those born in the institution, saying such children 'come into the world severely handicapped and are not normal at all'.

Documented coercion mechanisms

• an institution to which unmarried mothers and their children were sent because of the religious and social opprobrium attached to birth outside marriage
• day-to-day custody of mothers and infants held by a religious congregation brought in at the request of the Board of Guardians and with the approval of the Archbishop of Dublin
• a death rate raised contemporaneously as 'very heavy' and attributed to the condition of the children on admission rather than to the institution