I am immune to apologies... we need to know our identities
SURVIVOR Mary Harney has told how she tracked down her mother, despite having been lied to and told she was dead.
Ms Harney was born in the Bessborough mother and baby home in Cork, in February 1949. Her mother had arrived there just the day before she was born, and Ms Harney went on to live there for two-and-a half years, before being fostered to a local family.
She said: ‘That was not a good situation. When I was taken from my mother, and I use the word taken because I do not believe there was any legal explanation for what happened to me… I was handed over to two middle-aged people who seemed to know nothing about children.
While with that couple, Ms Harney was subject to harsh discipline and a lack of proper care and feeding. They were reported for neglect when she was just five.
She told RTÉ’s Today With Claire Byrne: ‘I learned to open the front door and sneak into the neighbours, who would feed me and also noticed bruises on me and realised how thin I was.’
The neighbours reported her plight, believing they were doing the right thing. But Ms Harney then found herself in the Good Shepherd industrial school in Cork.
Shockingly, she could have been returned to her mother instead.
‘The lie that was told in court was that the whereabouts of my mother was unknown,’ she recalled. ‘At that time the nuns knew exactly where she was. They had put her there. They had sent her to Wales, the same order of nuns as Bessborough, to work in one of their hospitals.’
A second, even worse, lie was told when she was 11, and she was informed her mother had died.
‘The lie continued all the way through until I managed to trace my mother myself when I was about 17. And then I found out that my mother did not abandon me and together we pieced what happened to us,’ she said.
Ms Harney said she then went to live with her mother, to try to rebuild their relationship.
‘It was very awkward. We couldn’t put the bond back together. But we became lifelong friends and my mother has always been my heroine,’ she said. She added that her mother had always been reluctant to speak about the reasons she went to Bessborough, and that she had learnt to respect that.
Ms Harney said the leak of the report was no surprise to survivors, who were already disappointed that their report in 2018 to advise the Department of Children about their issues of concern had never been published.
She believes that although there was collusion by the Church and society, the ultimate responsibility for the homes lay with the State.
She added: ‘I am immune to apologies... An apology is not worth the paper it is written on unless you have commitment from the Government to the action that is needed for redress and justice. We must have the right to unfettered access to our identities.’
‘Not worth paper it’s written on’