The Democratic Programme of the First Dáil, which could be read as a “blueprint” for the independent Irish state’s social agenda, acknowledged the concept of public responsibility for the care and well-being of children, not only as the human resources upon which the future social, political, and economic viability of the state rested, but as valued members, in their own right, of post-independence Irish society.¹ Specifically, it asserted the state’s fundamental responsibility to feed, clothe, shelter, and educate children as the future citizens of the independent Irish state: “It shall be the first duty of the Government of the Republic...

The years from the 1920s to the 1950s were characterized by periods of endemic poverty and austerity that had a profound impact on poor families. Children seem to have suffered the most from this poverty: at best they went to bed hungry and lived in home environments that were unhealthy and perhaps even dangerous; at worst, they were removed from homes where parents simply could not care for them out of their meager (and sometimes non-existent) resources. During bouts of particularly high unemployment thousands of men migrated to England in search of work. For some families this strategy literally was...

As will be seen in later chapters, an examination of official attitudes and responses to infanticide reveals a remarkable degree of ambivalence among clerics, lawmakers, and judges, about their responsibility to protect illegitimate children from harm at the hands of their unwed mothers. But each group was ambivalent for slightly different reasons. The Catholic hierarchy paid lip service to Catholic “sanctity of life” doctrine while tacitly acknowledging that infanticide was inevitable in a country like Ireland, and that the life of an illegitimate child was not valued, by the state or by society, to the same degree that the life...

Chapter 2 examined state provision for illegitimate children in other than institutional settings. Many illegitimate children remained with their mothers or extended families and were raised in ways similar to other children of their social class. Others were raised in foster homes where they were, at best, treated like the biological children of their foster parents and, at worst, ignored, neglected, exploited, and abused. As Chapter 2 demonstrated, often there was a gap between what Department of Health inspectors thought was best for children, and what local authorities were willing or able to do for the children in their care....

The previous chapters have examined the way the state, in the form of the Departments of Health and Education and local authorities, provided for poor, neglected, and illegitimate children through social policy and more informal measures. Two issues in the mid-twentieth century, the age of consent and legal adoption, required more formal action on the part of the state. The debates, both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary, that occurred around these issues provide further insights into how the state conceived of its responsibility to vulnerable children. Even here the best interests of children became secondary to more pressing political issues, such as...

As previous chapters have suggested, the life of the illegitimate child, or the poor child whose parents for whatever reas on could not or would not care for them according to middle-class standards, could be grim. Many children spent all or parts of their childhood in industrial schools, county homes, or exploitative and abusive foster homes either because their parents violated society’s standards of sexual purity and “respectability” or because ISPCC inspectors and district court justices decided their parents were unfit. One can imagine that the system that prevailed to deal with ”problem” children in the first half of the...

Previous chapters have examined policy and practice and, to the extent possible, the lived experiences of illegitimate children who either remained with their biological families or came into state care. But a striking feature of twentieth-century Ireland was the relatively commonplace incidence of infanticide. This might seem like an extreme method of dealing with unwanted children, but all of the accumulated evidence suggests that it was widely tolerated and often excused, if not necessarily condoned. In February 1929 Helen Dignan stood trial in the Limerick Circuit Court for the manslaughter of her newborn infant. Although Dignan likely played an active...

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of infanticide in twentieth-century Ireland is that, while lawmakers, the judiciary, and the clergy responded to it as if it were an inevitable but unpalatable fact of life, in fact infanticide was the exception rather than the rule when it came to dealing with an unexpected or unwanted pregnancy. The question then becomes: why, when the majority of unwed mothers found less drastic solutions to their dilemmas, did a small but not insignificant percentage of women resort to infanticide? It is clear that there was a certain element of desperation inherent in some...