Joan: My childhood hell in mother & baby home
Burton ‘ate away her fingernails’ by time she was ‘saved’ by mum
FORMER Tanaiste Joan Burton revealed her hands were “bandaged from eating my fingernails away” as she relived the horror of a Mother and Baby home.
In 2021, she told of her experience in the Sisters of Charity baby home at Temple Hill in Blackrock, Co Dublin, where she lived until she was two having been “given up” to the home at just eight weeks old.
Tomorrow night, viewers will watch as Ms Burton returns to the facility with host Brendan Courtney on his RTE One show Keys To My Life.
The former Labour leader reveals she had “eaten her fingernails away” when she first met adoptive mother Bridie King Burton, and recalls how it was “love at first sight” when the pair met.
She said: “It’s likely that a room like this could have had something like 24 cots. I’ve seen those photographs from some Irish archives of babies standing up in rooms like this or of course, looking for attention.
“And the cots are just all over the place in rows, taking up the whole room.
“When you see those, you get a sense of what a huge number of children were involved.
“It kind of chimed in to what I’ve been told of Bridie coming in and me standing up in the cot. My hands were bandaged, I’d basically eaten my fingernails away.
“She picked me up and it was love at first sight. Both of us kind of picking each other.”
In 2021, Ms Burton said: “I lived at home on a farm for two months.
“And my understanding was that social pressure, particularly pressure from people like the then parish priest in my area, resulted in my having to go to the home. And the midwife who attended at my birth actually wrote to me when I was a member of the Dail and invited me to come and meet her.”
Mrs Burton said the woman described her journey as an infant “crying and weeping” in the car as she made her way to Dublin.
She added: “I don’t want anyone to believe that the mothers in the homes easily gave away their babies.
“Some of the stories talk about mothers who spent three years with their baby in a home to then see the baby just taken away.
“These are incredibly insensitive actions and in my view crimes against the mothers who had given birth in very, very difficult circumstances.”
Mrs Burton also relives her tense time in Government during the traumatic years of the financial crisis when Ireland had to borrow billions from the the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.