Wicklow Sinn Féin TD John Brady has issued an appeal to Taoiseach Simon Harris on behalf of survivors of the Westbank Orphanage in Greystones, to use all of his power and influence in support of calls for Greystones Orphanage to be included in the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, and the Residential Institutions Redress scheme, as recommended both by a Joint Oireachtas Committee in 2022, and in two separate reports by the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation.
Westbank Orphanage was situated in Greystones, having moved there from Harold’s Cross in 1952, where it was known as the Protestant Orphan Home for Destitute Girls. The Orphanage was associated with the Presbyterian Church, the Church of Ireland, and mostly with the Bray Gospel Hall, also known as the Christian Assembly Bray.
It was a Protestant-evangelical orphanage, for which the Irish state had a statutory responsibility. In which residents suffered horrific abuse, including sexual, emotional and physical abuse.
Children were often whipped and beaten, with flex’s and pokers, hosed down with cold water, given injections as punishment, and had to perform forced labour without adult supervision, sometimes from the age of five.
Brady said:
“The record of suffering endured by the children who passed through the Westbank Orphanage in Wicklow is truly heartbreaking. Its story is one of young lives being destroyed by abuse and neglect.
I am appealing to the Fine Gael Taoiseach Simon Harris, a Wicklow man, to offer his support to the survivors of the Westbank Orphanage. Many of whom have suffered an appalling litany of sexual and physical assaults, including forced starvation, along with wide scale emotional abuse, in their campaign for inclusion in the Residential Institutions Redress scheme.
Both a Joint Committee of the Oireachtas, and the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation have called for the Westbank Orphanage to be included in the Residential Institutions Redress scheme.
Westbank Orphanage was subject to state inspection, which led it to qualify for inclusion in the Residential Institutions Redress scheme. Continuing attempts to exclude the survivors is wrong on so many levels.
These were children who were beaten, starved, in some cases sexually abused, along with enduring terrible emotional abuse.
Some of these children were taken across the border illegally to work as farm labourers, sometimes from as young as five years of age.
They were in many instances denied adoption. Children were lied to about their parents, often having their names changed.
Many children had siblings in the orphanage that they knew nothing about, they were lied to and made to believe that they were alone in the world.
The Irish state had a statutory responsibility for the orphanage, to which all protestant denominations sent children.
Today, the state has both a moral and legal responsibility towards these children, that cannot be allowed to be swept under the carpet.
I am calling, indeed appealing to Taoiseach Simon Harris to give his support to the campaign of the survivors of this terrible abuse which took place in his own hometown of Greystones.
In the words of one survivor the story of the Westbank Orphanage is a ‘blot on the landscape of Wicklow. Taoiseach Simon Harris has the opportunity and the power to make this right.”