Updated 27 June 1999
Submitted by Jane Lyons and posted herewith her kind permission.
© Copyright Jane Lyons 1999The Foundling Hospital
The Foundling hospital, while located in Dublin took in children from other parts of the country....and descriptions of life in Ireland at that time make me think of places like India today where there are people of every class and many living on the streets in abject poverty. If any of you have ever seen photographs/documentaries on poverty in India..then you have seen Ireland as it was.
The Foundling Hospital:
Part of the Dublin workhouse. Named in 1730
Children received were foundlings and all illigitimate. No babies amongst them, children under the age of 6 supposed to be cared for by their own parishes.
Churchwardens employed a woman. the 'lifter' and it was her job to go round the Parish at night 'lifting' any babies she found lying about. She brought them to the next Parish and dumped them! Sometimes she placed a lump of narcotic called diacodioum in the mouth to stupify the child and stop it from crying! Sometimes the 'lifter' in the second parish found the child and dumped it somewhere else if not back in its own. One woman had 'lifted' 27 children one year, and 7 died in her hands. These women knew nothing of what happened the chldren once they dumped them....
Babies brought up here were fed on Panda..bread and milk...At an inquiry in 1797 the matron said the diet was unfit to sustain life! 67 years on.....
Ghastly happenings reported: once 13 babies bodies found buried in a pit. workman found two dead infants wrapped in a cloth, these were identified by the marks on their arms,. Babies 'branded' before being sent out of this place to nurses around the city to be minded.
Children from all over the country brought to this workhouse, carried by women in baskets, just thrown into the basket, up to 8 at a time. Some found dead on arrval or seriously injured.
Inquiry 1797: corpses thrown into a hole and covered with quick lime, 1750-1760: 7,781 admitted; 3,797 died..and 3,932 put out to nurse.
Mothers often tried to get their children back...came from country...didn't get them back
Older workhouse children:
Breakfast: 1/4 lb porridge and a pint of milk
Dinner: pint of milk porridge
Supper: 1/4lb bread, spread with fresh butter
3oz cheese twice a week
Older children still:
1/2 pint beer & 1/4 lb bread (beer not very strong)
Comments from inmates and experts or people who had anything to do with it in later years.
Food always bad, cockroaches, crickets, earwigs. Stirabout thin and watery full of lumps. Maggots in bread,, meat often stinking.
Clothes: for girls very scanty. One peticoat, which was last years frock. Neither frocks nor coats worn by boys were lined. No waistocats.
Children in the infirmary slept on straw, thrown on the bed. One thin underblanket and another same sort for covering. When a child died, it's boots and stockings and linen weren't buried with it.
Overcrowding dreadful. 4-8 to one bed. Windows in room where children assembled in morning broken.
Feet covered with sores, hands often so swollen that they could not draw the thread sewing. Afflicted with the 'itch'.
Children savagely punished at times:
Boy complained about badness of bread: 20 lashes with cat of 9 tails.
Others stripped to waist and lashed,
a 7-8 yr old got 8-9 lashes for being slow to go to bed.
An older offender (big) got 60 lashes and had an iron weight tied to his leg.
One part of house known as 'Bedlam'..reserved for lunatics. Children sent there for complaining (considered refractory): place even dustier, darker and more generally uncomfortable, confinement there was dreaded.
Two old women, both infirm minded 60 sick children under 8 in the infirmary...beds filthy. The 'dead hole' was a step or two from the infirmary door. Carpenter once told someone that she had three dead children in a bed. One witness declared that he had seen 30-35 dead children come away for burial at one time.