‘I was sold to a family in America’
A NUN based in the US has hit out at the order of Sisters at the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Co. Cork who sold her to a family in America.
Sr Brigid O’Mahony told the Irish Post she was bought by a Texan family in 1954 after an Irish priest facilitated her adoption from Ireland.
Sr Brigid, who is based in New York with the Missionaries of the Heart of Jesus, said her adoptive parents ‘explained to me that babies were sold to American parents and that I was lucky enough to be sold to them as many of the children in those homes never got out’.
‘I was adopted first, I came over just before I was two years old, and then they went back to Bessborough and got my brother Gerard.’
Sr Brigid never sought out her birth mother because she didn’t want to ‘wreck her life’ by finding her, she said. However, six years ago she received a letter from another woman who had been in Bessborough and discovered that her own mother had been looking for her.
Sr Brigid finally met her mother and 13 siblings five years ago at Shannon Airport. She told the Irish Post no words could express what her mother, who gave birth to her when she was 19, had gone through.
‘It renders me speechless that anyone could treat people that way, and anyone who supposedly represents God. It’s mystifying,’ she said.