[2] On opening the home in May 1922 the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, John Allen Fitzgerald Gregg, declared Bethany "a door of hope for fallen women".
[4][5] In a letter dated 9 April 1945 from the Church of Ireland's then Archbishop of Dublin, Arthur William Barton, to Gerald Boland, then Minister for Justice, he described the home as "a suitable place for Protestant girls on remand".
Sterling Berry rationalised mortality and illness in Bethany Home in October 1939 with, "it is well recognised that a large number of illegitimate children are delicate and marasmic from their birth."
Sterling Berry observed that the home's most objectionable feature, that caused public controversy, was admittance of Roman Catholics into a proselytising institution.
The Residential Secretary, Hettie Walker, claimed in 1940 that the measure was only agreed to because of a threat of refusal of funding under new legislation.The high mortality rate that has occasioned controversy abated in 1940, but thereafter increased again up to 1944.
[21] Former Bethany residents called for inclusion in an inquiry headed by Senator Martin McAleese, into the state's role in the Magdalene Laundries, as similarities were drawn between both institutions and the needs of survivors.
Irish Education Minister Ruairi Quinn, subsequently announced in June 2011 a refusal to include Bethany Home in the McAleese inquiry.
[22] In fact, the Deputy Minister, at the Ministry of Health, Kathleen Lynch was expelled from the Irish Parliament while trying to raise the issue of the survivors of Bethany House with the then minister of the center right party Fianna Fáil[23] Justice for Magdalenes (JFM) then opposed Quinn's announcement and supported the call for the inclusion of the Bethany Home in the McAleese Inquiry.