He showed how the state had to battle with the Roman Catholic Church
to bring in reforms. Ó Fátharta demonstrated how even Bessborough’s
medical officer, Dr O’Connor, tried to justify death and illness,
because the children were ‘illegitimate’.
Dr James Deeny became Chief Medical Advisor of the new Department of Health in 1944. It was he who raised the storm between Church and State. He detailed visiting Bessborough in ‘To Cure and to Care’ (1989, p85’). “I… could not make out what was wrong; at last I took a notion and stripped all the babies and, unusually, for a Chief Medical Advisor, examined them. Every baby had some purulent infection of the skin and all had green diarrhoea, carefully covered up… without any legal authority I closed the place down and sacked the matron, a nun, and also got rid of the medical officer. The deaths had been going on for years. They had done nothing about it.”
http://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/yourview/no-effort-was-made-to-save-protestant-orphans-from-neglect-366809.html
Dr James Deeny became Chief Medical Advisor of the new Department of Health in 1944. It was he who raised the storm between Church and State. He detailed visiting Bessborough in ‘To Cure and to Care’ (1989, p85’). “I… could not make out what was wrong; at last I took a notion and stripped all the babies and, unusually, for a Chief Medical Advisor, examined them. Every baby had some purulent infection of the skin and all had green diarrhoea, carefully covered up… without any legal authority I closed the place down and sacked the matron, a nun, and also got rid of the medical officer. The deaths had been going on for years. They had done nothing about it.”
http://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/yourview/no-effort-was-made-to-save-protestant-orphans-from-neglect-366809.html