CASTLEPOLLARD MOTHER & BABIES HOME / NEWRY MAN LOST
St Peter’s Mother & Baby Home”The Baby Snatchers” is the title of the book written by Mary Creighton recounting her horrific experiences as a young mother trying to keep her baby and escape the Sacred Heart Nuns at St Peter’s Mother and baby Home Castlepollard.
The Sacred Heart Nuns arrived in Ireland in 1922 not long after the formation of the Irish Free State on request by the newly formed Irish government to deal with what they called “the problem of women having babies out of wedlock.”The building of St Peter’s, a 120 bed purpose built Mother and Baby Home was completed in 1937 funded by the Irish government with a grant of £65,000 which saw the 3rd of the Sacred Heart Nuns establishments being completed having previously set up homes in Bessborough and Roscrea.
Not one Doctor or Nurse was ever employed in St Peter’s and only one Midwife was in residence to meet the bare minimal standards set out by the government in It’s 35 years in existence as a mother and Baby Home. The Young expectant Mother’s suffered horrific treatment at the hands of the Sacred Heart Nuns with first hand accounts telling of the an external room of the back of the main building called the “Screaming Room.” Part of the girls punishment was to be forced to suffer child birth in silence and if you could not oblige you were sent to the “Screaming Room” to give birth alone with nothing for comfort but an old mattress lying on the concrete floor.
Other eyewitness accounts tell of the force feeding of babies to fatten them up for prospective adoptive parents coming to visit.During its existence as a Mother and Babies Home some 3,763 babies were born and registered with records showing over 8,000 Mothers and and Babies passing through its doors and 278 babies being sent to America, while the numbers of deaths are unknown it is estimated that between 400 and 500 died at Castlepollard and were buried in shoe boxes in a small Angels plot 200 yards up the road.In Ireland alone between 1904 and 1996 it is estimated at 35,000 unmarried mothers passed through the doors of these Catholic Nun institutions and over 6,000 babies have thought to have died when the last one closed its doors.
