A voice from the Tuam Home — Part 2

JULIA DEVANEY is unique in that she left a record of her almost 40 years in the Tuam Mother and Baby Home. From entering the home as a child in about 1923, to leaving it as an employee when it closed its doors for the last time on September 16, 1961, she had an insight into every aspect of the place.
Julia was born Julia Carter in 1916, to a married couple she believed to be from Oughterard. She was left in the care of the nuns who ran the home in the former Glenamaddy Workhouse, and when that closed she was transferred to Tuam.
As described in last week’s issue, she recorded her memories on a series of tapes made by Rebecca (Rabie) Millane of Tuam.
Also as stated last week, these articles are a distillation of over 40,000 recorded words, and are intended as a tribute to Julia, and to all the mothers and children who passed through the Home, which was run by the Bon Secours sisters on behalf of Galway County Council from 1923 until it closed.
They are divided up by theme, and all words within quotation marks are those dictated by Julia herself.
* Some names have been changed to protect the identity of former residents of the Home.

Growing up in the Home
JULIA was unusual in that, unlike almost all the other children in the Home, she was never fostered — “boarded out”. She said that she preferred it that way.
Most of the boys and girls received only elementary primary education in Tuam, and were gone from the Home by the age of seven. About ten of the girls from the early intake in the 1920s were kept on to work as domestics.
Julia was one of them, and completed her primary education at the Mercy Convent. Thanks to the interest of Mother Hortense, who was in charge of the home and appears to have had a fondness for Julia, she spent some years in the Mercy Secondary School, where she learned music.
She remembered one nun, Sr Raphael, “and she had an awful set on me because I was from the Home. She despised me and picked on me. She is buried near the Cathedral, and years after when I was passing that way, I would stick out my tongue at her grave!”
Julia felt that she always had an inferiority complex, because she knew “it was outside people paying taxes and rates that covered the cost of keeping us in the Home.”
In school she felt looked down on. “The fact that I was from the Home, it dulled my brain at school, and I couldn’t take in as much as another child would, things didn’t sink in.
“I was never anywhere but in the back desk, I was looked upon as stupid.
“Mother Hortense asked the Mercy nuns to let me into the secondary school, it was a kind of condescension to let me in.
“If there was anything missing from the class in [primary] school, they’d always blame the girls from the Home.
“When I was in secondary school, a girl called Maura H blamed me for taking her copy, but I didn’t. I was blamed, just because I had nobody it was absolutely believed. I was about 17, I hadn’t a leg to stand on, she was a big shot and a boarder. I was condemned, I had to put up with it … I didn’t tell it to Mother Hortense.”

Read the full feature in this week's edition.

Part 3, the conclusion will appear next week.