Truth must be told about Bethany Home
Posted on September 10, 2010 at 12:00 PM
The Government can no longer stand idly by in the face of new revelations about the appalling conditions and the startling number of deaths of children that occurred in Bethany Home in the 1930's and 1940's.
A full scale inquiry must be instituted and the Institutional Redress Scheme must be activated for the survivors of Bethany Home.
The Department of Education has refused again and again to allow Bethany Home, an Evangelical Protestant Institution in Rathgar, to be included in the list of qualifying Institutions for the Residential Institutions Redress Scheme set up in 2002.
Thus the survivors of Bethany Home have been deprived of the opportunity of having their case heard and of obtaining some justice and redress for the abuse they suffered as young, innocent and vulnerable children.
In recent times some tenacious survivors and dedicated researchers have begun to piece together the grim picture of what happened in Bethany Home over the decades.
They have discovered new startling information that Bethany Home was a place of detention and that the State deliberately ignored warnings from its own Maternity and Children's Act inspectors about medical neglect in Bethany Home. This is truly shocking. That the State sought to regulate sectarianism as between Catholic and Protestant Homes for unmarried mothers rather than addressing the health needs of small children who died there in record numbers in the late 1930s and early 1940s, adds a new dimension of shame to the Irish State's record on this matter.
The government's objections to placing Bethany Home and Magdalene institutions on the schedule of the Redress scheme for victims of institutional abuse are now totally undermined. The government must do the decent thing and end this outrage.
I will be attending the press conference in Buswell's Hotel, on Monday the 13th of September at 12 noon, to give my full support to survivors of Bethany Home and their campaign for justice.
