About TÚS
TÚS: Pregnancy and Giving Birth in Ireland, 1950-2020
TÚS (‘beginning’ in Irish) is the first comprehensive historical investigation into the experience of pregnancy and childbirth in the Republic of Ireland, 1950-1990. This is the most transformative period on record in terms of where, when, and how women women gave birth. State provision of maternity care expanded dramatically in this period, but this remains under-examined by historians.
TÚS recovers and highlights women’s voices and experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, from detection to delivery. Employing an intersectional methodology, the project analyses the differing experiences of women in a network of maternity institutions historically dominated by Catholicism.
Background
The TÚS (‘to begin’ in Irish) project provides the first comprehensive historical investigation into the experience of pregnancy and childbirth in the Republic of Ireland, 1950-2020. This period marks the most dynamic transformation on record in terms of where, when, and how often women gave birth in the Republic of Ireland. In 1950, Noël Browne’s Mother and Child Scheme, which proposed universal free healthcare for mothers and their children, was met with systemic resistance from the Catholic hierarchy and the Irish Medical Association.
This opposition led to a major political crisis, best remembered as the first public fault line between the Irish government and the Catholic Church. A devolved, means-tested State scheme of care for mothers and their children was introduced by the next government in 1953.
This scheme was nevertheless a landmark, resulting in a substantial reduction in the number of mothers who gave birth at home, falling from 33.5% in 1955 to 0.3% in 1991. Increasing access to birth control led to a notable decrease in how often women gave birth; from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the percentage of women giving birth to their eighth or subsequent baby fell from 10% to less than 2% of all birthing mothers.
The average age of mothers at their first birth rose from 27.5 years in 1955 to 33.1 years in 2020, the highest age on record for the state. In 1950, 2.6% of registered births were declared as ‘illegitimate’; whereas by 2020, 39% of all births occurred outside of marriage or civil partnership. The ethnicity and nationality of birthing mothers in Ireland have also diversified; the number of children born to a mother of foreign nationality stood at 23.9% of all births in 2020. These figures are a macro representation of the social transformation which the Republic of Ireland has undergone since the mid-twentieth century.
TÚS Team
Meet the people working on the TÚS project at TCD.
Deirdre Foley
Principal Investigator
Ella Armstrong
Doctoral Researcher
Get in touch
Have questions about TÚS?
If you gave birth or worked in maternity care between 1950 and 2020 and are interested in participating in an oral history interview, please email dfoley6@tcd.ie.
This project has been granted approval by the TCD Research Ethics Committee (reference number 5411).