I have just visited Castlepollard at a gathering of survivors. Why does The Catholic a church not represent themselves or comment or more importantly help and counsel.
This article below is a hoax, like Tuam I DON’T THINK SO.
CASTLEPOLLARD MOTHER AND BABY HOME
The nuns did not waste money on luxuries such as medical equipment, painkilling drugs, gas and air, etc. Babies were kept in large rooms or wards on the ground floor while mothers stayed on the second floor in dormitories housing anywhere from six to 12 women, depending on how many were held at any one time.
The third floor had two large rooms at the back where all the births took place with mums and newborn babies remaining on the third floor for a couple of weeks after the birth.
The third floor also had a few ‘private’ rooms where well-off families who could afford to pay handed over the huge sum of £100 for privacy and a speedy exit.
There was a small standalone room built in the middle of the back lawn that served as a delivery room of sorts. Since no screaming was allowed during labour as part of the punishment, any girl who couldn’t help screaming was put out into the outside delivery room. It is nicknamed the ‘Screaming room’.
They were often in and out in as little as five or six weeks.
Shoebox burials
During its time, 3,763 babies were born and had their births registered. All were baptised within days of their birth in the Font in the Chapel.
Nobody knows how many more died but best estimates are between 400 and 500.
The babies are buried in a small Angels’ Plot down a laneway, about a quarter of a mile from the Manor house. Local tradition has it that the workmen who dug the small graves hammered a homemade nail into the granite wall for every baby that was interred. It is now known that babies who died were buried in shoeboxes.
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A change
Mortality rates in the first years of Castlepollard’s existence were barely above the national average. But within a few years of Mother Lawrence’s death, mortality rates went up and Castlepollard began to gain a harder reputation (although never as bad as Sean Ross Abbey). In fact, girls in Castlepollard were threatened with being transferred to Sean Ross if they didn’t toe the line and behave themselves.
They were given ‘house names’ upon arrival and provided with a rough cloth, shapeless uniform, drawstring underwear, and hard clogs. Bras were not allowed.
The girls were not allowed to talk to each other or form friendships. They were underfed and undernourished and forced to do hard work as ‘penance’. They remained for two years on average, working on the farm or in the laundry or cleaning and scrubbing floors. They picked fruit and made jam, anything to ‘repay the debt’ the owed for their care.
Many stayed for three to four years.
Days began early with prayers coming from a tinny loudspeaker system during the 1960s, while the girls washed and dressed followed by daily mass with fire and brimstone sermons from the local priests, particularly Father PJ Reagan.
Girls sat at the back of the chapel and the nuns entered from the corridor from the Manor house. Girls would faint at mass and were punished for their ‘disrespect’. Father Reagan was heavily involved with the adoptions, particularly foreign adoptions to America; he also ran the Saint Claire’s Adoption Society which also handled adoptions from Saint Clares in nearby Stamullen – a huge ‘Holding Centre’ for unaccompanied babies and children. Reagan also had some involvement with another M&B home named Ard Mhurie in Dunboyne, county Meath.
Marriages
Girls who ran away were quickly recaptured by the local Garda and returned. They were locked into a room on the ground floor as punishment.
The local Garda station is directly across the road from the front entrance to the M&B home.
The nuns solicited “donations” from natural and adoptive families and profited greatly from running a farm with free labour.
They also operated a small hand laundry and if they could find any small local contracts, they’d grab them.
Banished Babies
There are also six Castlepollard children listed as test subjects in the Borris-Wellcome vaccine trials. As far as is known, the nuns burned almost every record when they left. In fairness, it should be pointed out that this was a tradition in Ireland and worldwide at the time. People in the countryside simply burned their rubbish every so often. It was also the norm when moving property.
When the nuns left Castlepollard in 1970, they burned almost everything but the bare adoption files and the four main ledgers. This is all that is left as the sum total of the lives of the almost 8,000 mothers and babies who passed through.
Personal letters, financial records, all of it – up in smoke. All surviving records are now held by the HSE South.
The nuns did exactly the same in Sean Ross Abbey when it closed in 1970.
In the early 1990s (at about the same time as the Irish public was learning about the child abuse scandals and the horror of the Industrial schools), the Sacred Heart nuns sent money to the Department of Health staff running Castlepollard, to have the Angels’ Plot cleaned up. They also arranged for a small memorial stone to be erected. It is made of cheap limestone, weathers badly and the last word on the stone ‘cemetery’, is misspelled as ‘cemetary’.
St Peters became a residential center for adults with learning difficulties in 1997 and they began to receive people from an Institution in nearby Mullingar.
In 2011, seven adoptees returned to Castlepollard for a visit after meeting on the internet in an adoption group. In the Angels’ Plot, they planted a tree and left a notice attached in memory of their fallen brothers and sisters. The visit and reunion now takes place every year. There were over 20 in 2012, over 30 in 2013 and about 45 in 2014. The survivors of Castlepollard have formed a Facebook group and it now had about 180 members
