Reports of a lack of human kindness and compassion at Bethany Home, a residential institution run by Protestant evangelicals in Dublin’s Rathgar from 1922 to 1972, are “deeply disturbing” the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin has said.
Most Rev John Neill said he lamented the fact that women and children suffered through the reported failures of the home operated by charity with a protestant ethos.
"It is a matter of grave concern and deep pain that in the first half of the last century Bethany Home should have been inadequate to its task," he said.
Rev Neill said his paramount concern was a pastoral one for the women and children who suffered through physical neglect or abuse of any kind.
“I am deeply concerned at the information revealed by recent research and the Church of Ireland has repeatedly petitioned the State to have the home brought under the remit of the Residential Institutions Redress Board,” he added.
Niall Meehan, of Griffith College’s journalism and media department, discovered 40 unmarked Bethany Home graves at Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin last May.
He has since discovered a total of 219 Bethany graves in Mount Jerome for the period 1922-49, details of which were published for the first time in the latest edition of History Ireland magazine yesterday.
He established from records that 54 of the children had died from convulsions, 41 from heart failure and 26 from marasmus, a form of malnutrition.
As many as 86 deaths, or well over one-third of Bethany’s 219 child deaths in the 28 years between 1922-1949, occurred in one five-year period, during 1935-39. Almost two-thirds (132) died in the 10-year period, 1935-44.