Bethany House: Responsibility yet to be acknowledged

Bethany survivor: Derek Leinster

ERIC CONWAY has written offensive letters to newspapers in which he asserted that an ill-defined group called the “liberal/feminist commentariat” were, amongst other things, “quite sanguine/blasé over Bethany House”, where I was resident from 1941-45.

Inadequacies in the treatment of women and children in the Bethany Home have been raised by the following TDs and senators: Ivana Bacik, Joe Costello, Michael Kennedy, Paul Keogh, Tom Kitt, Kathleen Lynch, David Norris, Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin, Fergus O’Dowd and Aengus Ó Snodaigh.

When Niall Meehan of Griffith College released details of 40 graves of Bethany children in Mount Jerome Cemetery Dublin in May and a total of 219 in September 2010, the issue was comprehensively covered in newspapers and on radio and television, North and South.

Two daily newspapers editorialised on the subject.

Are the public representatives, journalists and newspapers responsible in Mr Conway’s ‘liberal/feminist’ rogues gallery? If so, he might reconsider the point, not least as I believe they also addressed the deaths of children in state care. Mr Conway’s letter suggested they did not.

Mr Conway’s point in relation to 200 children who died recently in state care can be extended to the abandonment of the state’s duty of care in the past to women and children in institutions run with a religious ethos, such as the Bethany Home. The state was more concerned with regulating sectarian rather than health provision in such institutions. As a direct result, large numbers of children died in the Bethany home while others suffered illness and abuse.

Ireland has moved from stigmatising certain groups, such as unmarried mothers and their 'illegitimate' children, to general indifference toward marginalised children. This links the eras of religious and secular unconcern toward the vulnerable.

In each era the state had/has a responsibility.

This responsibility to former residents of the Bethany children and of Magdalen institutions has yet to be acknowledged through some form of redress. Though one institution was Protestant and the other Roman Catholic, the state facilitated a sectarian social care system that it then failed to regulate in the interests of residents. That is where injustice lies.

The Bethany Survivors’ Group welcomes support from all who support our claim for acknowledgment and redress, be they liberal, Catholic, feminist, Protestant or Dissenter.

DEREK LEINSTER

Chairperson

Bethany Survivors’ Group

42 Southey Road

Rugby

Warwickshire CV22 6HF

England