Mother and baby homes were institutions where unmarried women were sent to have their babies, often arriving destitute having been denied support by the child’s father, and even their own family, simply for falling pregnant outside marriage. The Irish government has recently published an inquiry into conditions at these homes, where 56,000 women spent time between 1922 and 1998 when the last closed. A report on similar homes in Northern Ireland has also recently been published.
The Irish government’s inquiry is the latest investigation into institutions that together constituted what we have described as a network of “coercive confinement”. This also included reformatory and industrial schools, psychiatric hospitals, county homes (former workhouses) and Magdalen laundries. Yet the largest part of this landscape of confinement – institutions run by the state, particularly psychiatric hospitals – has gone unexamined.