The Tablet: Home truths – mother and baby homes in Ireland

Michael Duggan 05 February 2026, The Tablet 

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Link: https://www.thetablet.co.uk/features/home-truths-mother-and-baby-homes-in-ireland/

The Children’s Home in Tuam is perhaps the most notorious example of the depravities of Catholic Ireland, and the nuns who ran it have become a byword for cruelty. But the reality of what happened could turn out to be more complicated

In 2023, the government of Ireland offered three new postgraduate scholarships for research into childhood disadvantage. The scholarships were established “in memory of the children who died in Mother and Baby Institutions” and the scheme was named after a remarkable woman called Alice Litster (1894-1980).

Litster was born in the Wicklow hills, one of seven children, and baptised in the Church of Ireland. (Late in life, when it came to religion, she would say: “I’m nothing and haven’t been for a long while.” She was, she observed, “born a rebel”.) Her father was a gamekeeper, whose family followed him to different posts in Ireland and his homeland, Scotland. According to a family tradition, their ancestors had taken part in the Peasants’ Revolt.

Oddly enough, Litster was convent-educated, which, she explained, arose in part from her father’s preference for single-sex schools. Clever and determined, she went on a scholarship to University College Dublin, in the process deliberately eschewing Trinity College, the ostensibly more suitable choice for someone of her background – an early demonstration, perhaps, of her independence of mind.

As a 17-year-old she joined the tiny Irish suffrage movement and then the Irish Women Workers’ Union, where she served at a soup kitchen established by Delia Larkin and Countess Markievicz for those made destitute during the 1913 Dublin lockout. Here she became best friends with Helena Molony: Gaiety actress, republican, trade unionist and feminist. When Litster married, she kept her surname, ready to “let people think what they liked”. The problem in Ireland, she once said, was “the Church and the Bible, where the man has to be head of the whole thing … It’s a terrible proposition.”

Eventually, she joined Sinn Féin as well. She went about persuading businesses to pay their rates into “the movement” and not “the Castle” (that is Dublin Castle, the centre of the British administration). Litster came to know several of the participants in the Easter Rising – she was a great admirer of James Connolly, the socialist signatory of the Proclamation of Independence – and even smuggled one ex-prisoner out of the country using British Army papers lent to her by one of her soldier brothers. A young man she was very fond of died in a British internment camp while she and her escapee were holed up in Southport. During the War of Independence, she joined the civil service of the first Dáil and became an inspector for the new Department of Local Government.

By 1932, Litster’s responsibilities as an inspector had expanded to include mother-and-baby homes. She spoke forthrightly about the mortality rates in these institutions, making her, according to the Dictionary of Irish Biography, perhaps the first critic of the system to emerge from the ranks of public servants.

She became a particularly notable critic of the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork, advocating its temporary closure in 1944. (After the matron was removed in the following year, infant mortality improved significantly.) Litster saw the problems she uncovered as societal, not just attached to this or that institution. In 1945, she stated that “before the unmarried mother can keep her own child with her and maintain her place in the life of the community, a great change in public opinion will have to take place. At present, in this country, society is opposed to the unmarried mother.”

Litster also conducted at least one inspection of the children’s home in Tuam in 1947, though she certainly knew of it before then. Over the last decade or so, Tuam – due to an avalanche of stories, beginning in 2014, of children being starved there and of dead babies being dumped in their hundreds into septic tanks – has become perhaps the single most notorious example of the institutionalised cruelties and depravities of Catholic Ireland. And some of this reporting has alighted on the heroic figure of Alice Litster. In 2017, for example, a New York Times article, “The Lost Children of Tuam” (which, incidentally, has provided the inspiration for the film Liam Neeson is making about the home), praised the “longtime government health inspector” for repeatedly denouncing – “mostly to silence” – a system that marginalised Irish women and turned their offspring into, in Litster’s own words, “infant martyrs of convenience, respectability, and fear”.

And yet there is a certain evasiveness at work in much of the reporting and commentary about Tuam and Litster. It is detectable, for instance, in The Revelation of Ireland 1995-2020 by the eminent Irish historian Diarmaid Ferriter, which contains, in a segment on the breaking of the Tuam story in the 2010s, a paragraph specifically about the Litster’s work; in a 2024 article on the website of RTE (“Tuam Mother-and-Baby Home survivors’ hopeful search for justice nearing end”), which dips into inspection reports from the Litster era; in an Irish Times piece commending her “fearless and fastidious reports”; and also in the statement by the then Minister for Children, Roderic O’Gorman, about the 2021 Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, in which he heaps praise on Litster, quoting and paraphrasing her repeatedly.

What is this evasiveness? Well, in short, no one – whether historian, or journalist, or politician – seems minded to report what Alice Litster actually said she found behind the high, grey, workhouse walls of the Tuam Children’s Home, even though her 1947 report was the most comprehensive inspection of the institution seen by the Commission of Investigation, which devoted about four pages to it in their own final report.

At the time of her visit, there were 271 children resident in the home. Remarkably, Litster’s report appears to provide us with a rough survey of the condition of nearly all of these children. Just under 90 per cent are said to have appeared “healthy” or, slightly more expansively, “healthy and normal”. Meanwhile, the afflictions affecting the remaining children are described in greater detail and sometimes in the stark language of the day: “mentally defective”, “wizened”, “pot-bellied”, and so on.
According to the Commission of Investigation, Litster also commented on the care provided by the Bon Secours nuns who operated the home. She found that the infants “received good care” and that the sisters were “careful and attentive”. The doctor in charge was praised for his keen interest in the welfare of the children, their progress and their diet. (He was, though, 80 years old. “I think we are entitled to ask,” wrote Litster, “that the advice and assistance of a younger doctor with more up-to-date knowledge and methods should be available.”)

Litster was greatly concerned by the high mortality rate and included within her report numbers for the previous four years. These years, we now know, were among the worst years for mortality in Tuam: almost one in three of all child deaths recorded at the home occurred between 1942 and 1947, 305 in total. (The number of deaths fell precipitously immediately afterwards and then carried on declining for most of the 1950s.)

Litster wanted an inquiry into the possible causes of the death rate. However, she did not believe that the children were poorly fed or under-nourished. Instead, “excellent diets were available … It is not here that we must look for the cause of the death rate.” In this respect, her findings are in keeping with the report, from two years earlier, of another female inspector of Tuam, Dr Florence Dillon: “The children are well cared [sic], weekly weight charts being kept in case of non-thriving infants also case histories.”

Instead of food and diet, Litster’s eyes turned – as had Dr Dillon’s – towards the risk of infection caused by the constant “admissions of entire families, itinerants, destitutes, evicted persons etc. into the Children’s Home”. Other than one room in the maternity unit used solely for women giving birth, there was no isolation unit, which meant that newly admitted children, untested for disease, were soon mingling with others. As it happens, by 1945 a number of mother-and-baby homes had created isolation units where mothers or children were kept upon arrival, until the authorities were satisfied that they were not carrying an infectious disease. Indeed, the nun in charge at Tuam had been anxious to demolish the entrance block and construct an isolation unit since at least 1945. However, such a move would have been down to a decision, and subsequent investment, by Galway County Council, which owned, funded and ultimately controlled the home.

It is not an exaggeration, I think, to say that reading Litster’s findings on Tuam and its nuns, having previously absorbed much of what has been said and written about them elsewhere, leaves one wondering whether the two bodies of evidence relate to the same place and the same people; whether there has been some enormous error of misattribution. The nuns of Tuam have become a byword in Ireland for the infliction of horror-film levels of cruelty and neglect. Yet here is Litster (who bears all the hallmarks of a reliable witness) calling them “careful and attentive”, showing them pressing for improvements, and praising how they fed and looked after the children, at least for a period of time in the mid-1940s.

What to make of this? The conditions in Tuam were, beyond question, primitive and inadequate. The home formed part of a wider system built on attitudes that were unjust and repressive, a system that was in desperate need of reform and investment. Nevertheless, the evidence about the Tuam nuns from official inspections (and indeed other sources too), all of it in the public domain, is sometimes more conflicting than it seems the public is encouraged to know. In The Revelation of Ireland, for instance, Ferriter – quite rightly – quotes from an excoriating inspection report on the children’s home from 1956, and from a censored critique of Irish attitudes to illegitimate children, made by Litster herself, in 1948; but he does not quote from or mention her 1947 inspection report and what she actually had to say about the care given by the Tuam nuns.

Fortunately, greater clarity concerning the specific question of burial practices at Tuam does appear to be on the horizon. The Office of the Director of Authorised Intervention, Tuam (ODAIT), currently carrying out a full excavation of the old children’s home site, is going about its work meticulously and transparently. ODAIT should allow us to understand so much more about the burial practices, which may also prove to have been more complex than suggested by countless newspaper headlines (“Tell us the truth about the children dumped in Galway’s mass graves”; “Almost 800 forgotten Irish children dumped in septic tank mass grave at Catholic home”; “Scandal of cesspit babies”) and political soundbites.

At the time of writing, ODAIT has reported on the recovery of 11 sets of infant remains. All, it seems, were contained within coffins and all were found in an area labelled as a “burial ground” in historical documents. (They were not, therefore, located in the infamous multi-chambered tank built within the walls of an old sewage structure, found underneath what became a memorial garden. The memorial garden will be excavated later in the ODAIT process.) Radiocarbon dating and other analysis is being carried out to determine the era of origin of the remains. However, the layout and size of the graves is consistent with the time of the operation of the children’s home, according to ODAIT.

One can imagine Litster following the developments at Tuam with the intense, scrupulous interest that characterised her professional life. A fascinating, hour-long interview with her, recorded when she was 83, can be found on the website of the London School of Economics as part of an archive of oral evidence on the Suffragette and Suffragist movements. In it she proclaims herself “a socialist still” and expresses her support for Mary Robinson, who would go on to be elected Ireland’s first female president 10 years after Litster’s death. A public servant who was always firmly on the side of the poor, she sounds every bit as redoubtable as her record suggests.

Michael Duggan is a freelance writer living in Surrey.