Born: 29 September 1894, Ireland
Died: 28 June 1980
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Alison H. Litster, Eilis Lyster
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Niav Gallagher. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Litster, Alice Howden (‘Alison H. Litster’, ‘Eilis Lyster’) (1894–1980), civil servant, was born in Laragh, Co. Wicklow, on 29 September 1894, the second of five daughters and two sons (her siblings were Jane, Nancy, Peter, Margaret, Jessie and John) to Peter William Steel Litster, a gamekeeper, and his wife Joan (née Wilson). Peter was born in Innerwick, East Lothian, Scotland. In 1892 he eloped with Joan and by 1893 was working as a gamekeeper in Laragh, Co. Wicklow, where Jane and Alice were born. By December 1895 the family had moved to Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, where their third child Nancy was born, after which Peter was employed as a gamekeeper at Glenfinart in Argyll. The whole family moved to Scotland to be with him (the youngest four children were born there), but by 1901 they were living in Oak Park (or Painestown) outside Carlow town, where Peter was once again employed as a gamekeeper. Sometime after that date Joan and the children moved to a house and shop on Dublin Street in Carlow town.
Litster’s parents placed great emphasis on the importance of education and, though the family were Church of Ireland (Litster was baptised in Derrylossary parish on 9 November 1894), paid for Litster and her sisters to be educated privately at St Leo’s Sisters of Mercy convent on Dublin Road, Carlow. There, Litster excelled and in 1908 placed third in the country in English in the public examinations introduced by the Intermediate Education Act, 1878, and the following year was awarded a prize for passing the junior grade exams with honours. In 1911 she sat the intermediate senior and obtained an honours grade, and in 1913 was one of three Carlow students awarded a £40 scholarship by the county scholarship committee, which was tenable at any Irish university. She chose to go to University College Dublin rather than Trinity College Dublin or Queen’s University Belfast, as would have been more traditional for members of the Church of Ireland (she believed the new university would be innovative and breed new ideas but was instead disappointed). She graduated in autumn 1915 with a second-class honours Bachelor of Arts (BA) in English language and literature, after which she accepted several teaching positions, first in Lurgan (1915–18), then Waterford (1919) and finally Belfast (1919–20).
Suffragette and revolutionary
Litster was a student in Dublin at the start of the decade of political and social turmoil that culminated in the war of independence (1919–21) and civil war (1922–3). An admirer of the Pankhursts, Litster’s mother Joan had introduced her to the suffrage movement and Litster joined one of the Irish suffrage groups that emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century, likely the Irish Women’s Franchise League. Given the demands of her studies, her participation was limited to selling newspapers and putting up bills and posters. Of far greater concern to her, however, was the plight of Dublin’s poor, especially during the 1913 lockout. When Countess Markievicz and Delia Larkin – both founding members of the Irish Women Workers’ Union – established a soup kitchen at Liberty Hall to feed the thousands thrown into destitution during the lockout, Litster joined them there. This brought her into contact with, among others, Charlotte Despard and Helena Molony, who remained one of her closest friends until Molony’s death in 1967.
Through her activities with the suffrage movement and friendship with people such as Molony, Litster’s sympathies gravitated towards Irish republicanism. She became a member of Sinn Féin and, during the war of independence, joined the civil service of the first dáil. She was one of the delegates sent by the minister for local government, W. T. Cosgrave, to convince local councils to send their rates and taxes to his department, thus bypassing the British administration. She knew several of the participants in the 1916 rising, among them the poet Gerard Crofts, who had served in the General Post Office and Imperial Hotel. Crofts’s health had deteriorated while imprisoned for his participation in the rising, first in Dartmoor and then Lewes, and he suffered further following his imprisonment again in March 1920; a doctor who examined him that December asked Litster to help smuggle him out of the country. Using her brother Peter’s British army discharge papers (both of her brothers had served during the first world war), in early 1921 she and Crofts travelled together to Southport where she set him up in digs while she briefly taught Latin at Stoneycroft Wesleyan school, Birkdale (now St Wyburn).
Mother and baby homes inspector and adoption advocate
After the January 1920 local elections, Sinn Féin took control of 172 of Ireland’s 206 borough and urban district councils, allowing it to implement a major reform of the poor law system. Workhouses and poor law unions were replaced by a county-based system, with county hospitals, district hospitals and county homes. Litster returned to Ireland and on 19 July 1921 she was appointed as a ‘post-truce’ inspector for the Department of Local Government, one of seven women in a staff of forty-one alongside Gerard Crofts’s wife Margaret (née O’Callaghan) who was also an inspector in the department (Litster had been a witness at their wedding in April 1918). In 1921 and 1922 Litster’s work mostly involved the general business of county councils and their health institutions: in September 1921 she addressed a meeting of the Wexford poor law union about the hospital and workhouse amalgamation scheme (a matter she continued to consult on into early 1922), and from October to December that year she attended meetings and corresponded with the Wexford unions (boards of guardians) and county, rural and urban district councils on various matters including collection of rates, appointment of officers, housing, franchise lists and the establishment of the public health board. She also collected data on inmates in workhouses who could be boarded out with family or friends, and consulted on the case of a boarded-out child and the conditions in which he was accommodated. In 1923 Litster was appointed as temporary inspector for boarded-out children with the department (renamed the Department of Local Government and Public Health (DLGPH) in 1924). Shortly after her appointment she criticised conditions for boarded-out children in Kilkenny, noting that many of the homes were unsatisfactory and the children neglected: ‘The board would fail in their duty unless they took vigorous steps to remedy this state of affairs’ (Kilkenny Moderator, 8 Sept. 1923). Yet as a temporary inspector, Litster had few powers. Her reports to the department were conveyed to the relevant county board of health; this devolved structure led to what Litster discreetly labelled ‘a considerable diversity of practice’ between the different county boards (DoH, RM/INA/0/505478).
Over the next decade Litster traversed the country carrying out inspections and her appointment was made permanent on 26 February 1932, by which time her responsibilities had expanded to include inspections of county, mother and baby, maternity or nursing homes, and hostels. Prior to 1919 there were only two small homes providing accommodation for unmarried mothers and their children – the Magdalen asylum (later Denny House) in Leeson Street, Dublin, and St Gerard’s in Bishopstown, Cork. In 1919 Pelletstown (later St Patrick’s) opened on the Navan Road, with several major mother and baby homes opening over the following two decades: Bethany, Bessborough, Kilrush, Glenamaddy (later Tuam), Sean Ross and Castlepollard. The establishment of these homes was prompted by a number of factors, including a desire to reform the poor law; to curb a perceived rise in ‘illegitimacy’ and the associated infant mortality rate (a 1923 report put infant mortality in Ireland at sixty-six per thousand births, but at 344 per thousand among ‘illegitimate’ children); and moral backlash at the end of the first world war. It was also believed that the homes would provide opportunities for ‘repentance and rehabilitation’ (Final report, 4.28). Others, however, such as local government commissioner Sean O’Farrell, were critical of homes like Bessborough – not because they were too punitive but because when brought together in large numbers ‘those girls’ could lose their sense of shame (ibid, 4.29). Speaking to the commission on the relief of the sick and destitute poor in July 1925, John Gallagher, secretary to the Galway county board of health, observed that single mothers pregnant for the second time were beyond reform. He advised they be separated from their children shortly after birth and the mother sent to a Magdalen home. When asked by the commissioners if unmarried mothers should be treated as quasi-criminal, Senator Edward MacLysaght agreed that they posed ‘a possible danger to the community’ and suggested that legislation should be introduced enabling them to be kept in an institution for an unspecified period (ibid., 4.31).
The Registration of Maternity Homes Act, 1934, required all maternity homes to register with their local authority, which gave DLGPH inspectors power to inspect all places where women gave birth or received postnatal care. While the inspectors could bring the failures – and occasional successes – of the homes to the department’s attention, they had little power to effect meaningful change, and local authorities were free to implement or ignore recommendations as they chose. Margaret Crofts was inspector-general of boarded-out children until 1938; during her tenure there appears to have been little criticism of how mother and baby homes operated across Ireland. When Litster succeeded Crofts in 1938, one of her first acts was to signal her concern at rates of infant mortality for babies born outside marriage: of the 1,878 ‘illegitimate’ births registered in Ireland in 1938, 426 died before their first birthday – 352 of them in institutions supposedly founded to combat mortality among ‘illegitimate’ infants. Her conclusion was damning: ‘the chance of survival of an “illegitimate” infant born in the slums and placed with a foster-mother in the slums a few days after birth is greater than that of an infant born in one of our special homes for unmarried mothers’ (ibid., 4.116). If no attempts were made to explore the causes of this abnormally high death rate, she expressed grave doubts about sending patients to these special homes. These appear to have been the first criticisms of mother and baby homes by a public servant. They were, however, part of a handwritten draft that was ultimately omitted from the typed official report, most likely on the recommendation of either the secretary or assistant secretary of the department.
Litster’s fears were fully realised during the Emergency (1939–46), when more than three-quarters of all child deaths historically associated with the homes at Pelletstown, Tuam, Bessborough, Sean Ross and Castlepollard occurred. Although Litster and the Joint Committee of Women’s Societies and Social Workers (JCWSSW, a body that represented fourteen women’s groups) produced papers critical of existing arrangements and that proposed several changes, there was little desire in either the department or among the religious orders that operated the homes to effect any of the recommendations. Nonetheless Litster continued to raise concerns, especially about Bessborough. On 16 June 1943 she highlighted the home’s excessive infant mortality rate. When she inspected the home there were twenty-seven babies in the day nursery, aged from three weeks to nine months. She described ‘the greater number’ as ‘miserable scraps of humanity wizened, some emaciated, and almost all had rashes and sores all over their bodies, faces, hands and heads.’ Children in the second day nursery had sores on their faces, hands or scalps (ibid., 5.41). A handwritten note on the file suggested Litster’s comments should be omitted from the final version of her report but another official in the department noted: ‘That sixty per cent of these children die would seem to show that very little pains are taken to keep them alive, this is borne out by the fact that the babies still alive are covered with sores’ (ibid.).
Litster faced numerous hurdles in her attempts to implement reforms in mother and baby homes, not least resistance from church authorities to any perceived secular interference. In addition, there was little money and few resources available during the Emergency and after, and there was a certain desire to be seen to punish rather than care for the women who entered these homes. There was also a degree of collusion with local authorities; the medical officer responsible for Bessborough reported that the nuns provided the best of care and placed the blame for the high rates of infant mortality on their ‘illegitimacy’. By December 1944 Litster was so concerned with the infant mortality rate in Bessborough that she recommended closing it to all patients maintained by local authorities for at least six months – the only power open to her. Dr Francis Constantine ‘Conn’ Ward, parliamentary secretary in the DLGPH, called for ‘drastic action’ on foot of her report but, as another departmental official pointed out, ‘the authorities of this Institution have never been amenable to our advice and instructions … and the Matron has the confidence and support of the Bishop in this case’ (ibid., 5.47). Bessborough closed to local authority patients on 12 January 1945, though private patients were still admitted. Of the thirty-nine babies born there between 18 January and 20 July 1945, twenty-nine died. Despite the appalling infant mortality rate, Daniel Cohalan, bishop of Cork, maintained that the running of the home was an ecclesiastical matter in which the state had no authority to interfere. Sr Martina, matron of the home, was not replaced until September 1945; infant mortality improved significantly thereafter.
As well as advocating for changes in the mother and baby homes, Litster was also a vocal proponent for legal adoption. On 16 April 1940 she wrote to the departmental secretary highlighting the need to regulate institutions and societies sending children out of the country for adoption, which then operated with no oversight. She suggested creating a list or register of these children with the details of their adopters, investigation of the financial circumstances of the adopters and their suitability, and a certificate of suitability from the local authority, not just the local clergyman. For the rest of the decade, Litster continued to advocate for regularisation. In December 1943 she noted the need for adoption legislation, following up three years later with the observation that ‘so long as there is no legalised adoption in Éire, there can be no scheme sponsored by this Govt. by which children may be adopted. That is the first difficulty’ (DoH, CCL/INA/O/478958). Later in the decade she joined forces with the Adoption Society (founded in 1948) and the JCWSSW, who mounted a public campaign. The campaign coincided with the appointment of Seán Mac Eoin as minister for justice, whose strong religious views aligned with the catholic church in opposing adoption because of a perceived risk to the religious welfare of the children. After a prolonged campaign, the church was finally persuaded of the need for formalised adoption and on 1 January 1953 the adoption act came into effect. As legal adoption was now available, boarding out became a less important avenue for children exiting mother and baby homes. Litster was consulted on the provisions of the health act of 1953 that governed the boarding out of children, which strengthened the regulations, mandated monthly inspections and reports on school attendance, and introduced the power to remove children from unsuitable homes.
In parallel with her work with women and babies in institutions, Litster also liaised with her English counterparts regarding unmarried Irish women giving birth in Britain. At an informal meeting held in 1931 between catholic social welfare committees and the DLGPH in London it was agreed that two committees would be established – one in London, the other in Dublin – to co-ordinate a repatriation scheme for unmarried Irish mothers. Until these committees were established, it fell to the inspector-general (first Crofts and, from 1938, Litster) to co-ordinate with British rescue societies. In autumn 1938, and again the following year, Litster visited London to discuss the matter and continued to cultivate links with British charities thereafter, though the outbreak of the second world war significantly impacted the scheme. In a later report to Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, Litster noted that initially the number of repatriates was few but ‘the war having started, girls were repatriated in numbers … [to such an extent that] the scheme was threatened with collapse, [it] had gone far beyond the bounds of a departmental scheme’ (DoH, RM/ARC/0/489778). As a result, the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society of Ireland (CPRSI, later renamed Cúnamh and dissolved in 2019) was asked to take responsibility, and Litster noted that no departmental personnel visited Britain to enquire into the issue of unmarried Irish mothers in Britain after her trip in 1939. Despite the CPRSI ostensibly taking charge of repatriations, it often fell to Litster to personally supplement any shortfall in funding. In a 1946 report she noted that her work involved repatriation and then transfer from Dublin to accommodation across the country: ‘Frequently these girls are penniless. Their railway or bus fares and money to pay for their meals or lodging have to be found from my own pocket in many cases’ (DoH, RM/ARC/0/489778). In an interview conducted thirty years later she hinted that she also provided temporary accommodation for some of these women in her own home.
Governmental indifference and even hostility to unmarried mothers reflected societal attitudes more generally. In November 1945 Litster noted that ‘before the unmarried mother can keep her own child with her and maintain her place in the life of the community, a great change in public opinion will have to take place. At present, in this country, society is opposed to the unmarried mother’ (Final report, 5.95). Shortly afterwards DLGPH was divided into three separate departments: local government, social welfare and health. As part of the reorganisation, Litster wrote to the departmental secretary outlining the strained resources of her office and those of the other two inspectors, Miss M. C. Kennedy-O’Byrne and Mary Murray. She suggested creating a central advice bureau similar to Britain’s National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child. She also recommended reorganising and widening the scope of the children’s section in the newly formed department, once more citing high mortality rates among ‘illegitimate’ infants. No aftercare was provided for unmarried mothers leaving maternity and county homes, while unwanted babies were neglected, poorly fed and ill-treated. Unless the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was informed, Litster noted, no official care was offered. She suggested expanding the role of the public health nurse or infant life protection visitor to include routine visits to these babies after they were taken home by their mothers, believing that both the baby and the mother were more vulnerable to abuse or neglect than most members of society.
Personal life and legacy
An admirer of James Connolly, Litster consistently demonstrated a commitment to socialist principles throughout her life. She believed in the importance of unions (she joined the Institution of Professional Civil Servants (Ireland) in the 1940s and by 1955 was one of five vice-presidents) and spent her career representing one of the most marginalised sectors of Irish society. From an early age Litster had kicked against societal norms – she was a protestant who attended a convent school and then a mainly catholic university, and claimed to have voted three times in 1918, despite being officially too young. She joined Sinn Féin at a time when it was dangerous to do so and sympathised with the 1916 rebels while her brothers fought with the British army, and she maintained a career in the civil service despite marrying and having a child. In an interview recorded in 1977 she called herself one of the first women’s ‘libbers’.
The circumstances of Litster’s marriage and subsequent birth of her son might suggest a wellspring for her commitment to vulnerable children and unmarried mothers, were she not already a fierce advocate on their behalf. She married William John Fagan, an engineer for Dublin corporation, in a registry office in Liverpool in late 1938 (she was registered as Alison H. Litster). Their son David was born on 24 February 1939 in a private nursing home on Upper Pembroke Street, Dublin, where she registered under the name Eilis Lyster (early in her career she had signed her reports as ‘Eilis’). Litster retained her maiden name after her marriage, which she seems to have largely kept secret, thereby consciously evading the marriage bar then in operation in the civil service. She was aided in this by Conn Ward, who, upon hearing of her marriage, told her, ‘We don’t want to lose you [but] I don’t want to know anything at all about it … don’t raise any scandals’ (‘Interview with Mrs [Alice] Litster’). Her marriage appears to have been unorthodox – although Fagan was listed as the ratepayer and tenant of their house at 31 Copeland Avenue, Clontarf, he was never recorded as a registered voter at that address and the earliest date the couple appear to have lived together was in the 1950s, when they moved to 111 Moyne Road, Rathmines. She later said that she had not married ‘pour le bon motif’ (‘Interview with Mrs [Alice] Litster’). Litster retired in 1957 and on 12 September that year sailed for New Zealand with her husband; they were both described as ‘single’ on the passenger manifest. Litster had family in New Zealand – her sisters had emigrated there decades before, as had her son in 1956. The couple remained there until William’s death on 25 April 1967. His death notice makes no mention of his wife. Litster subsequently returned to Ireland where she lived with her son in Rathgar for several years before moving to the Westfield Quaker residential home in Donnybrook.
Alice Litster died of a brain infarction on 28 June 1980 in Adelaide Hospital, Dublin, and donated her body to science. Her life was later celebrated in a service at Holy Trinity church, Rathmines, in 1983 and her remains were buried in the St Patrick’s section of Glasnevin cemetery. Although her religion was recorded as Church of Ireland at the time of death, Litster had been ambiguous about her religion for most of her professional life – when concerns were raised about a protestant inspector of catholic mother and baby homes, a departmental official declared she had converted to catholicism. There is no evidence for this and she later stated, ‘I’m nothing and haven’t been for a long time’ (‘Interview with Mrs [Alice] Litster’).
Although mother and baby homes were not a uniquely Irish phenomenon, the proportion of Irish unmarried mothers who were admitted to such homes or county homes in the twentieth century is estimated to have been the highest in the world. The commission of investigation into mother and baby homes estimated that 56,000 unmarried mothers and 57,000 children were admitted, with an additional 25,000 women and a larger number of children in county homes. Their treatment was especially harsh, and although some oversight was exercised by the government, there is little evidence to suggest that politicians or the public were concerned with the high infant mortality rate or the fate of the women giving birth to these babies. It fell to the women inspectors of the DLGPH to try and bring about changes, even if their efforts were largely in vain. The commission’s report, in which she is named 447 times, singled Litster out for the intensity of her efforts to effect change: ‘In almost all instances she emerges as an intelligent woman whose insights were far better informed than her peers’ (Final report, 9.93). In September 2021 the minister for health announced the department’s intention to establish a scholarship in her honour: the ‘Alice Litster postgraduate scholarship in childhood disadvantage’ was first offered in 2022.
The London School of Economics archives holds a recording of an interview with Litster, conducted in July 1977.