How It Works

Irish Orphanages

• London Times 31 May 2015
  
  They were unmourned, unloved — and buried in unmarked graves. Yet only now is Ireland coming to terms with the tragedy of thousands of illegitimate children who simply disappeared.
  
  Her name was Adeline. She passed through the ornamental gates of the Manor House mother- and-baby home in Castlepollard, Co Westmeath, Ireland, in November 1964. She was 20 years old, pregnant and unmarried. She stayed in a room on the third floor; her father, a wealthy Dublin solicitor, had paid £100 for her to have her illegitimate baby at Castlepollard. She did not have to do manual work like other pregnant women, who had no money, and she could leave after six weeks.
  
  Adeline is one of tens of thousands of Irish women who were locked up in the 20th century for being pregnant and unmarried, and whose children were stolen from them. The Irish state is undergoing a thrashing catharsis of its treatment of unmarried women and their babies; exactly one year ago, the story, long a fetid secret, exploded out to the world. This is a story of wrecked lives and dead babies in unmarked graves.
  
  Adeline gave birth to a child on December 4. She named him Jude, after the patron saint of lost causes. After 13 days, they were transferred to St Patrick’s, an enormous mother-and-baby home on the Navan Road in Dublin. Adeline handed Jude to a nun and went to wait for her father by the gate. Four days later, he was collected by his adoptive parents. His birth certificate was faked, naming his adoptive parents as his real parents. (There was another, true birth certificate, but if he did not know his original name, he would never find it.) And that was that. It was as if it had never happened.
  
  You were not supposed to read this story. The Irish government is preparing to tell the truth only now. Sex out of marriage was a sin in Ireland, so church and state devised a punishment for those who sinned. They would be consigned to institutions for up to six years and they would lose their children; and all this would take place in secret, because illegitimate children, by their very existence, were a threat to the Catholic Church — a living symbol of transgression against it.
  
  But you cannot always bury the past. Sometimes it returns, demands to speak. I know about Adeline because of a remarkable woman called Catherine Corless. She lives in Tuam, Co Galway. When Corless was a little girl, 50 years ago, she went to school with children from the local mother-and-baby home. The town children were taught to despise these “whores’ droppings”. Corless played a trick on one of them. She wrapped a stone in a sweet wrapper and gave it to the child. But she knew she had done a wrong, and she never forgot it. She wanted expiation. So, half a century later, she began to investigate what had happened at Tuam.
  
  Sean Ross Abbey, Co Tipperary, in the 1950s, from which hundreds of children were sent to America for adoptionSean Ross Abbey, Co Tipperary, in the 1950s, from which hundreds of children were sent to America for adoption.
  
  Corless applied to the Galway register office for the death records of children born in the Tuam mother-and-baby home between 1925 and 1961. She discovered that at least 796 children had died. But she could find only one grave. Her question was: what had happened to the bodies?
  
  Either they had vanished, or they were buried at the back of the home. It is long demolished and a council estate was built on its site. Two boys found some skeletons in 1975, when they disturbed a stone slab while playing games; a woman fell into the ground, and also reported seeing tiny skeletons.
  
  When Corless published her research it was picked up by national, and then international, newspapers. The world learnt what Ireland had taught itself to forget. There was international disgust. In February, a commission of investigation was established by the Irish government to investigate mortality rates, burial practices, vaccine trials on children and forced adoptions from the homes between 1922 and 1998. It will report in three years, but activists are already distraught that anyone not born in a mother-and-baby home — for instance, women forced to hand their babies over in public hospitals and private nursing homes — is excluded.
  
  I meet Corless in her farmhouse outside Tuam. She is a small, red-haired woman with an air of sinewy defiance. She shows me plans of the old Tuam home, maps of the area, lists of the dead. “Julia Coen, 6 days, premature birth; Annie McAndrew, 5 months, congenital debility; Bernadette Purcell, 2½ years, convulsions; Joseph Macklin, 33 hours, premature birth.” The death rates in these homes was sometimes extraordinarily high; in Bessborough mother-and-baby home, in Cork, for instance, in 1942-43, of 180 children born, 121 died.
  
  Corless drives me to the site of the home. She walks with hands in pockets, face braced into the wind. The houses are ugly orange brick. There is a gap; then, preposterously, a wide and windy playground. Beyond this is a small burial plot, established by local people after the skeletons were found in the 1970s. Corless believes that children are also buried under a patch of grass backing on to the houses. She points out how the gardens are small and oddly shaped, because, she says, the council knew that there were graves here. Didn’t the authorities investigate? You may ask. There was no need: it was the authorities who put them here.
  
  Ireland began to hand control of social affairs to the Catholic Church after the Irish Free State was established in 1922. When the devout Catholic Eamon de Valera became prime minister in 1932, he accelerated the process. He was, himself, the son of an unmarried mother. If de Valera set out to punish his mother, and all mothers like her, he succeeded. When women became pregnant outside marriage — through rape, incest or their own agency, and contraception was banned in 1935 — they would be locked up behind high walls.
  
  Tuam was run by the Sisters of Bon Secours. The Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary ran the mother-and-baby homes at Bessborough, Sean Ross Abbey and Castlepollard. The mothers would stay in the home for two years, on average, to repay their “debt”. The children would usually be adopted, sometimes to America in return for “donations”, fostered by local families, or sent to orphanages, after which they would enter the notorious industrial schools. While researching his book Banished Babies: The Secret Story of Ireland’s Baby Export Business, the journalist Mike Milotte found at least one case of a female child being handed to a violent paedophile.
  
  Adeline’s son, Jude, was renamed Paul Redmond. He runs the Coalition of Mother and Baby Home Survivors, and is an advocate for adoptee rights, although he has never told his own story until now. He is a tall, rather handsome man, both emphatic and gentle in manner. He agrees to drive me to Castlepollard, where he was born. He wants to say, before we begin, that he loves his adopted parents and is grateful to them: “They have been and still are amazing parents.” He brings his friend and fellow activist Clodagh Malone, who was born in St Patrick’s in Dublin. She is blonde, beautiful, quiet.
  
  We drive through the gates, as Adeline did. The Manor House is large and agonisingly grey. The adjacent hospital was sold to the Irish government in 1971. It is now closed; we cannot enter. Redmond points at a window on the third floor; he was born there. Then he points to a small outhouse; it was a mattress laundry. Any woman who screamed in labour was taken here. One 16-year-old girl, he says, went temporarily blind in this outhouse.
  
  The arrangements at each home varied, depending on the whims of the nuns, but survivors report that women were denied painkilling drugs, were forbidden to scream in labour, and were not stitched if they tore. There was never a doctor — they gave birth standing over a steel commode. If they developed mastitis, they were denied medication, and were even made to continue feeding their babies. Their hair was cut. They were not allowed to wear bras. They were not allowed to post letters. Their names were changed. In labour they were sometimes asked by the nuns: “Was it worth the five minutes of pleasure?”
  
  We visit an ugly modernist chapel with a gaudy and expensive stained-glass window; there was money in at least some of these mother-and-baby homes, but not for decent food for the women and their babies. This is why so many of the death records say “marasmus” (malnutrition) and “inanition” (failure to thrive). Redmond thinks that some of the children essentially starved to death.
  
  The pregnant women sat at the back of the chapel, in segregation, while the priest, Father PJ Regan, would insult them: “He used to stand up there and give them hell. ‘You penitents! You sinners!’” He shows me the font in which he was baptised. He lingers here; adopted people sometimes cling to whatever remnants of the past they can find.
  
  We creep inside the house. He shows me the room where women signed adoption papers. “There would be a solicitor and a couple of nuns,” says Redmond. “They would say, ‘Sit there. Sign that.’” Some of the women gave their children up passively. Others were separated screaming.
  
  Redmond began to search for his mother, Adeline, when he was 15. It took him 30 years to find her. Adopted people are not entitled to their real birth certificates in Irish law, although they are sometimes presented with false certificates that name the adopted parents as the real parents. If an adopted person is not told he is adopted, he will never know. And Adeline changed her own Christian name to foil him.
  
  He has only spoken to her once, and he has never, since his babyhood, met her. They had a 45-minute telephone conversation in 2013. Redmond thinks she has amnesia about her time in the home, and post-traumatic stress disorder. She does not remember his birthday; she does not remember the 13 days they spent together; she does not even remember the name “Castlepollard”. He wanted answers but, a compulsive researcher, he knew far more about Castlepollard than she did. “She kept saying, ‘It’s not your fault,’ over and over,” he says. “She also said, ‘I prayed for you,’ several times. I felt she really needed — I mean desperately and completely needed — me to believe that she had prayed for me. I can’t explain why that particular act meant so much to her. Something to do with atoning for her sins and asking God not to take it out on me? Wanting me to believe that she had done her best in the only way she had of helping me? And the only thing she could do to help me was pray at that time, and all down the years?”
  
  She asked about his wife and children; his school, job and home — “strangely ordinary questions, like you would ask an old friend”. He offered to take her back to Castlepollard “to try and make peace. She just moaned. A ‘mffff’ noise. She literally couldn’t speak at the thought of going back, even 50 years later. Pure fear. I vividly remember that tight, wound-up sound.” When he is angry with her, he remembers that sound, and reminds himself to blame only the Catholic Church and the state. She lives in America now, and she does not want to see him. Nor does she want him to contact his half-brothers. “I do cherish the moment when something always missing from my life was no longer missing,” he says, “45 minutes when I was temporarily healed and whole. I told her, ‘I have missed you every single day of my life.’” She could not say it back.
  
  “It’s more than some people get,” he says. “Some people only find a grave.” This, of course, was the experience of Philomena Lee, whose memoir The Lost Child of Philomena Lee was made into a Bafta-winning film. She searched for her son Michael Hess — and he for her — but they were thwarted by the only point of contact between them: the nuns at Sean Ross Abbey, who had arranged his adoption. They were not supposed to meet again, you see; that was part of the punishment. Hess had asked to be buried there before he died of Aids in 1995, aged 43, so his mother might find his grave.
  
  We walk to the Castlepollard graveyard. It is at the end of a long lane at the bottom of a hill. The grass is green and wet; the sort of wet that soaks your shoes. The plot is long and narrow, with a high stone wall. Redmond thinks there are between 300 and 500 children buried here. There is one grave, belonging to a girl who died in childbirth with her baby. She was 14½. Whatever the circumstances of her pregnancy were, they are lost.
  
  There are no gravestones for the children, just nails in the walls, placed by workmen when they buried each child. Redmond picks one up from the ground, puts it in his pocket. When survivors returned in 2011, and broke the ground, Redmond planted a tree; survivors call the graveyard “the Angels’ Plot”. There is a monument, too, of cheap limestone, put here by the nuns when the sex abuse scandals began to surface in the early 1990s. “In memory of God’s Special Angels interred in this cemetary”, it reads. “Cemetary” is misspelled.
  
  “It isn’t a sad place to me any more,” he says, “it is a place where they are remembered, not just thrown in the ground and forgotten. They are remembered now; and maybe if there is something after death, there is a sense of relief and joy that they have been remembered and not forgotten. I have done my best by my fallen crib mates.” He is crying.
  
  Until now, Clodagh Malone has been largely silent. Now she tells her story. Her mother, Eileen, fled to England in 1970, aged 23, when she learnt she was pregnant. She asked a Catholic charity there for help; instead, they put her on the boat back to Ireland. She was 40 weeks pregnant when she made the journey. She entered St Patrick’s and went into labour four days later, while scrubbing a step. Malone — whom Eileen named Aileen — was placed with her adoptive parents when she was two months old.
  
  Malone shows me her adoption records. They tell, coolly, Eileen’s love for her baby; they record her yearning.
  
  I thought we would hug: Clodagh Malone was 24 when she finally met her birth mother, Eileen. Eileen later cut off all contactI thought we would hug: Clodagh Malone was 24 when she finally met her birth mother, Eileen. Eileen later cut off all contact
  
  “It was noted that Eileen stated that she would have to place you for adoption, but at the same time she was quite emotional about you. She felt she could not consider confiding in her mother under any circumstances, and she would not be in a position to bring you home.” Then, a few months later: “She asked if it would be possible to meet your adoptive parents, but was told this was not possible.” The months go past, then this: “A letter was received from Eileen. She wrote: ‘I still miss my baby Aileen very, very much. I am anxious to know how she is.’ She wondered if she could ask if your name had been changed. She also wrote that she prayed for you often and her only wish was your happiness.”
  
  And finally this: “I am always thinking of Aileen. Have you heard any news of her recently?”
  
  Eileen wrote to the agency every time she changed address or telephone number, in case Malone was looking for her. When Malone finally decided to search, after her adoptive mother died, she was told: “Well, Clodagh, your mother has been searching for you from the time of your adoption.” They met in the room in which they had been separated 24 years earlier. “Jesus,” Eileen said, “you’ve cut the head off your father.” It’s an Irish phrase — it means, you’re the spit.
  
  They went for lunch. Eileen ate prawns and tossed photographs of unknown relatives at her. Malone hates prawns; she remembers this detail. She was, she says, “really frightened. It is weird to meet a woman you are not allowed to speak about all your life. It is like she was dead. All my life I felt my natural mother was shadowing me; she was hiding behind a tree. I loved my adopted parents, but they weren’t my people. I thought we would hug each other and we would have a bond. And it is not like that.” Eileen couldn’t mother her lost child. She was lost herself.
  
  They only met four times. Eileen stopped turning up to meetings; instead she started sending abusive messages to her child. She telephoned Malone on her 39th birthday to say, “Happy birthday you f****** bitch. I wish I had f****** aborted you.” She was drunk. The person who had missed Baby Aileen and begged to send her Christmas presents was gone. The last time they spoke, Malone rang to tell Eileen she had cancer. It was 2011. (She has now recovered.) “She pretended not to know me,” she says. “I said, ‘It’s Clodagh.’ And she said, ‘Never again, never again.’ And I said, ‘Please. Please. Eileen, I have cancer.’ And she said, ‘Never again.’ And she hung up on me.” Malone thinks that losing a child in these circumstances did this to her.
  
  I have asked activists to give my telephone number to anyone who wants to tell their story. Trisha Quinn telephones. She is adopted, and her natural mother will not see her. Quinn, too, had a baby at a mother-and-baby home, in 1991. She named him Eugene and gave him up for adoption. “I was told it was best for the baby, best for me, best for everyone,” she says. “You do what you are told.” In 2014 she decided to look for him. Now she begins to weep. A sentence explodes out of her sobs: “He died. He took an overdose last year. I’m grieving for someone I didn’t know.”
  
  She calms a little, and says: “I wrote a letter of condolence to the adoptive parents.” They complained to the adoption agency that she was harassing them: “I got a nasty letter from the nun.” She is gasping now, apologising repeatedly for her sobs. “I tried,” she says, “I wanted to say I was sorry.” No one will tell her where Eugene is buried.
  
  The day before this article goes to press, I receive an email. “I have got information where my son is buried and I am going tomorrow to visit the grave,” she writes. “My new-found brother is coming with me. It will be a very hard day, but I must say goodbye to my darling son.”
  
  Slowly, the mother-and-baby homes closed. The nuns have handed over or destroyed the records; most who were involved are dead, but their orders live on. Abortion is still illegal in Ireland, but women are no longer locked up — their children are no longer stolen.
  
  It will not be easy to break the ground, actual or in the mind. The religious orders are reluctant to speak. Their policy — to the press, above all — is silence. They will give testimony to the commission of investigation, which will be briefed by Corless, Redmond and others, but how much responsibility will they take?
  
  The Tuam nuns, for example, have hired a well connected PR called Terry Prone. When a journalist asked to interview nuns in 2014, Prone sent this astonishing reply. “When the ‘O My God — mass grave in West of Ireland’ broke in an English-owned paper, it surprised the hell out of everybody, not least the Sisters of Bon Secours in Ireland, none of whom had ever worked in Tuam and most of whom had never heard of it. If you come here, you’ll find no mass grave, no evidence that children were ever so buried, and a local police force casting their eyes to heaven and saying, ‘Yeah, a few bones were found — but this was an area where Famine victims were buried. So?’”
  
  Prone’s line is, therefore: there is no mass grave of babies. There might be famine victims in the ground; there are famine victims everywhere in Ireland. Prone’s statement is contradicted by her clients. In 2012, Sister Marie Ryan, the leader of the Bon Secours, wrote to a woman who wanted to find out what had happened to her brother. “I note,” she wrote, “that [John Desmond] unfortunately died on 11 June 1947 and the death certificate seems to indicate that the place of death was at the Home. As I understand it there would therefore be a very good possibility that his remains were buried at the small cemetery at the Home itself.” The sisters also donated €2,000 (£1,445) to the Tuam memorial last year — if there are no graves, why would they?
  
  I write to Prone’s office, asking her to explain this contradiction. No comment. Do the sisters have anything to say about the home? No comment. I also write to the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. Can you explain why the death rates in these “maternity hospitals” were between three and 10 times higher than the national average? No comment.
  
  I visit Bessborough, Co Cork, an ugly grey manor house in the Palladian style. Here, heavily pregnant women cut the grass on their hands and knees, and repaired potholes on the drive with tar and gravel; after they had their babies, on an appointed day they would dress the children and walk along a corridor, at the end of which the children would be taken. Bessborough is now a facility for “vulnerable” families. I ring ahead and speak to the manager. He asks me not to be judgmental; that the nuns did their best; that “the women had nowhere else to go”. That is true: church, state and family colluded to make it so.
  
  I take a path through the trees to a small graveyard; it sits by a picturesque ruined folly. There are neat, pretty graves for the nuns; for the children, only a plaque on the wall: “I gathered you in all your freshness before a single breeze damaged your purity”. This graveyard cannot possibly hold all the babies who died here. They are under my feet, stretching outwards towards the boundaries of the estate, where I can hear the soft whirring of a motorway.