MAM TRIED TO SAVE THE BABIES
It may seem like everyone denies they knew what was going on in the mother & baby homes but Finbar O’Carroll knows his mother tried her best, and got lambasted in the Dáil for her efforts. In fact, she went one better, and adopted a child out of Artane
FOR some reason Finbar O’Carroll was off school that Monday morning the guards arrived at his front door. They were looking for the boy who stayed with his family over the weekends and for most of the summer. It was time for him to return to St Joseph’s Industrial School in Artane and the guards had been sent by the Christian Brothers to get him. Finbar’s mother, the indomitable Maureen O’Carroll, came to the door and politely explained how the 13-year-old had fallen off a wall the day before and broken his arm. He was up in bed resting and would be staying on with them until he felt a bit better.
About an hour later the two guards returned, this time with a detective. They were under strict instructions to collect the boy, regardless of his condition, and bring him back to Artane.
Maureen stood her ground. She was not the type to be intimidated by the police or the Brothers.
‘I was behind the door listening to her,’ recalls Finbar, who was just eight at the time.
‘She told them, “I’ve already explained the situation and if the Brothers really had the child’s interests at heart, they wouldn’t be pushing this. They’re only worried about losing their grant. He is not going anywhere with you, and furthermore he’ll never be going back to that place.”
‘With that, the door was shut. She told me a few years later that as soon as she closed the door she thought to herself, “What on earth am I after doing?”
‘She contacted a few of her political colleagues who advised her to get in touch with [Eamon] de Valera, to see what he could do.
‘So even though her politics were completely opposed to his, she did it and explained to him what had happened. To the day she died she always said that in fairness to him, the one time she did want a big favour, he came up trumps.
‘He sent down a soldier on a motorbike, with a letter that basically said she could keep the child until the finer details were sorted.
‘I’ll always remember the letter with its red wax seal, I’d never seen one of those before. The rest is history.’
Despite having nine children of their own at the time, all living in a small terraced house in Stoneybatter on Dublin’s northside, Maureen and her husband Gerard adopted this young boy into their family.
It was an extraordinarily generous thing to do, given their circumstances. But that was the kind of people they were, says Finbar. Decent and empathetic, who did their best to help those they saw suffering around them.
Indeed his brother, the comedian Brendan O’Carroll — who was born after the family moved from Stoneybatter up to Finglas and was the youngest of the clan — has spoken a number of times about their mother and her incredible strength and fortitude.
His very famous alter-ego, Mrs Agnes Brown, is based on the quickwitted Maureen and her sense of ‘hard fairness’.
Over the last couple of weeks Finbar, now 72, has been thinking a lot about their mother’s fearlessness and tireless campaigning for those who struggled.
Like many of us since the release of the mother and baby homes report, he has been deeply touched and distressed by the harrowing stories shared by the affected women and children.
But it has also brought back memories of how Maureen was one of the few politicians who tried to address the nefarious goings on in those places, in particular the dubious adoptions of hundreds of illegitimate children to America. Maureen became the first elected female Labour TD in 1954. For the next three years she served in the Dáil and was appointed the first ever female chief whip of any political party.
On July 18, 1956, she addressed the Dáil about a case of two children who had been flown out of Shannon Airport to be adopted in America.
’She had got a phone call from a very distressed grandmother in Limerick,’ Finbar explains. ‘So even though this woman wasn’t in her constituency, she went down there to meet her.
‘The grandmother explained how two children had been taken without permission from their parents and handed over at Shannon at 1am.’
This story, in fact, had already garnered a lot of attention when it appeared in a UK Sunday newspaper, The Empire News.
As Mike Milotte’s excellent 1997 book, Banished Babies: The Secret Stories of Ireland’s Baby Export Business recounts, it was about two children who had been sent to America from the Croom Hospital in Limerick.
Anthony Barron, two-and-a-half, and three-year-old Mary Clancy were born in the hospital to unmarried mothers, Kathleen Barron and Bridget Clancy. Both had been fostered out to Kathleen’s sister-in-law, Mrs Joan Barron.
Barron told the Empire News how the two infants had been taken from her ‘on various pretexts’ and
‘She was always out fighting various causes’
returned to the hospital, which was run by nuns. Soon after that they were dispatched to America. Flight arrangements for the children were made by a nun, Sr Christopher, who told the newspaper that ‘the Irish Government know and approve of what we are doing. ‘It is quite legal and we think it better for the children than the poverty of living, for instance, in Mrs Barron’s home. ‘We shall continue to send babies to America until the law is changed. Mrs Barron cannot bring up these children. She is too poor to do so.’
Mary Clancy’s grandmother told the newspaper that neither she nor the child’s mother, Bridget, who was in London, had received any payment for the infant.
After her own visit to Limerick, Maureen O’Carroll demanded in the Dáil that the basic facts of the case should be explained. She was rebuked by the Justice Minister who told her, ‘I have already given that information.’
Undeterred, Maureen brought the matter up in the Dáil again a month later.
This time she addressed the Minister who was actually over foreign adoptions, Minister for External Affairs, and future taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave.
Her very specific questions brought more information into the
public domain than had ever been available before.
It’s estimated that during the 1950s, up to 15% of illegitimate children born in Irish mother and baby homes were sent to America with the State’s approval, more than 2,000 children, most of them adopted by wealthy American Catholics.
But it’s also been alleged that thousands more were taken across the Atlantic without ever being publicly documented, that they were possibly sold into a thriving and illegal adoption network.
Far from being a dark secret that has only been investigated in recent decades, illegal adoptions were openly debated on the floor of the Dáil thanks to Maureen. Indeed, she was criticised by Liam Cosgrave for handing ‘English Sunday newspapers’ the opportu‘to smear the name of this country’.
The full exchange is available online in the Dáil records. It makes for fascinating reading and proves how committed Maureen was to investigate cases like the two children from Bruff in Co Limerick.
‘I submit that not only was there something irregular about the manner of the removal of those children but something definitely illegal,’ she said.
She claimed their removal from the State involved ‘serious contraventions of Section 40 of the Adoption Act, 1952’.
She added that she had no objection to children being adopted by American families as they would ‘not have to go through life in this country with the stigma they normally have to bear. But I do not see why it should have to be done in an illegal manner.’
While some in the chamber dismissed her interpretation of the Adoption Act, others — like Fianna Fáil’s Donogh O’Malley — praised her for raising the matter again. However, clearly still smarting from the English newspaper reports, the future Minister of Health resented the publicity he believed her questioning would attract.
‘There are too many outside bodnity ies waiting to have a crack at this country, without mentioning any names, and they lose no opportunity of vilifying us,’ he said.
‘What has been stated in all sincerity by Deputy Mrs Maureen O’Carroll will be splashed across many a paper, not only in Britain but in other countries, to the detriment of this nation.
‘I support Deputy Mrs O’Carroll 100% and congratulate her in bringing this matter to the Minister’s attention and in focusing the attention of the public on it. I hope, as a result of this debate, the whole system will be re-investigated, but I deprecate [object to] Deputy Mrs O’Carroll’s approach.’
It’s unlikely Maureen lost too much sleep over O’Malley’s deprecation.
‘She knew the Adoption Act wasn’t fit for purpose,’ says Finbar. ‘She was like a dog with a bone when it came to justice and injustice, she wasn’t going to let it go.’
Finbar and his twin sister Fiona — who died from a lung disease last April in Canada, where she had lived since she was about 17 — were born in the middle of the O’Carroll family.
It was a fairly typical working class Dublin upbringing, there was little money and many of the family emigrated to other countries over the years. Maureen, however, was far from typical.
‘She’d a fantastic command of the English language,’ says Finbar, who has been using his time during lockdown to research as much as he can about his mother’s political career. ‘She was fairly well educated, fluent in French, and she was forever pulling us up on our pronunciations.
‘We ended up living in Finglas west, and it was tough at times. My father died of cancer when he was pretty young, he was 56, Brendan was only ten and I was 17. But we never went to bed hungry and the whole family, thank God, done well.’
Finbar, a father-of-three who lives in Ongar, west Dublin, with his wife Una, worked for more than 30 years in a microbiology lab, a job he loved, before retiring.
‘We were brought up with manners and to respect other people and that stood to us in life. To have empathy and compassion, they were the things our parents instilled into us.’
Maureen was also a fiercely intelligent woman, who dedicated much of her life to improving the conditions of working-class parents. Her father, Michael McHugh, was a journalist from Galway, an Irish language revivalist who participated in the 1916 Rising.
After winning a scholarship to Gortnor Abbey in Co Mayo, Maureen spent time studying to become a nun, but left to join the civil service. After marrying cabinet maker Gerard O’Carroll, and in between having babies, she became a trade union activist.
Her path into politics included co-founding the Lower Prices Council, which campaigned against the rising prices of basic household goods.
‘She really put her heart and soul into all that stuff,’ says Finbar. ‘In fact she was rarely at home, she was always out fighting various causes, like the monopolies certain businesses had on supplying school uniforms and books.
‘She also believed no child could be educated on an empty stomach, so she fought for food in schools to be given to those kids who needed it.’
After being elected in 1954, she pushed for the introduction of
She became the first female Labour TD in 1954
women into An Garda Síochána. At her funeral in 1984, female officers served as her guard of honour. She also helped to get the long form birth cert changed, so it no longer included the word illegitimate, which stigmatised people.
‘In those days, women generally inherited their seats from their fathers or husbands,’ says Finbar. ‘So for Maureen, a housewife and mother-of-nine, to infiltrate this old boys club was an astonishing achievement.’
There were many, however, who failed to recognise how impressive this achievement was.
‘One newspaper said her time would have been better spent at home looking after her husband and children,’ says
Finbar. ‘That was an opinion held by many in those days — women know your place.’
She lost her seat in 1957 when the coalition she was part of took a hammering in the election. She decided not to run again, her decision possibly influenced by the fact she had discovered she was pregnant with her last child, Brendan.
However, her campaigning work was far from over. She continued to help homeless women and children, setting up a refuge while also remaining involved in the trade unions.
Finbar and his siblings have good reason to be proud of their mother. As well as raising 11 children, she dedicated her life to improving the living conditions of those around her.
‘Some people seem to think no one tried to do anything about the mother and baby homes or ask questions about all the babies being adopted over to America,’ says Finbar. ‘That’s the reason I’m talking to you today, mam didn’t keep her mouth shut or her eyes down.
‘That wasn’t who she was. In fact she put her money where her mouth was and adopted my brother, even when there was a big gang of us already to raise.
‘I recently remembered a great milestone from when I was a child, after he came to live with us full time.
‘There was a big turning point after about 18 months, I went into the kitchen and he was referring to my mother as mam and my father as dad.
‘That’s when I said to myself, he has crossed the threshold, he now feels part of the family. It wasn’t an easy age to be adopted at. But I know he enjoyed his life with the family, he loved being part of it.
‘He’s done really well for himself, he was full of gratitude to my mother and father, and he still keeps in touch with his brothers and sisters.
‘So you see, there were people back then who tried their best, and my mam was one of them.’
She continued to help the homeless, setting up a refuge