‘MOTHER AND BABY HOMES REPORT MUST BE FOLLOWED WITH ACTION’
Samantha Long, pictured above, and her twin sister Etta grew up in Sligo after being adopted from a Dublin mother and baby home. In today’s Sligo Weekender, Samantha tells Claire Ronan about life growing up in Sligo, meeting her birth mother Margaret, and her reaction to the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, which was published last week. Samantha says: “I think that the government needs to act fast and give credence to public opinion, which is asking them to fix this once and for all. This will help the survivors, and indeed the nation, to heal and finally move on from these dark cruel days, which are actually so recent.”
Samantha Long and twin sister Etta grew up in Sligo after being adopted from a Dublin mother and baby home. Samantha told Claire Ronan about life growing up in Sligo, meeting her birth mother Margaret, and her reaction to the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, published last week
A WOMAN WHO was adopted from a Dublin mother and baby home before being brought up in Sligo has spoken out following the publication of the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes. Samantha Long was born in St Patrick’s home in Dublin and was adopted from there with her twin sister Etta in 1972.
On December 2, 1972, Samatha and her twin sister were brought by her adoptive parents to their new home in Sligo. It is a day they called their “other birthday”, and they celebrated that day and their official birthday on March 5 every year.
Samantha said: “Our adoptive parents were Dubliners Eamonn and Anne Thornton, who relocated to Sligo with their twin adopted toddler daughters in the early 1970s.
“We lived in Castlegal and Calry, and later dad built the Red Cottage on the Bundoran Road. We went to Dunally school with our younger brother Leonard, who was born in 1976 in Sligo General.
“I have great, happy memories of home and school in Sligo. At primary school in Dunally and at secondary in the Mercy College we were always just called the Thornton twins, but we were Samantha and Etta at home.
“Our parents were great friends with lots of people who were involved with business in the town and also in the wide family circle of the Sligo SubAqua Club.
“We spent a lot of childhood during our summer Sundays in Mullaghmore with the O’Kellys and other families. “Mum and dad’s closest friends in town were the Di Lucia family who ran the famous Cafolla restaurant and takeaway on Grattan Street. We often walked from the Mercy to Cafolla’s after school on a cold day for a plate of chips and curry sauce accompanied by a freezing cold milkshake.
“My sister Etta and I both had a parttime Saturday job at Broderick’s Hallmark card shop in the O’Connell Street arcade and we loved it.
“I later worked in Broderick’s china and gift shop on the corner of O’Connell Street.
“Some Saturdays were spent in Lyon’s Café if we had an afternoon off from our part-time jobs.
“The Mercy was a great school, quite strict in terms of standards and work ethic, but great craic too. There were girls there from all backgrounds and that’s what made it great. We knew diversity before the term was invented. “I haven’t seen my schoolmates in many years, but I will some day. Everyone moves on and grows apart, but some keep in touch from time to time. “One of my best friends at school is now a nurse and she has been in touch during this mother and baby homes report period. I think of her and other brave nurses out there on the front line in Sligo and elsewhere.”
When Samantha and Etta were approaching their 21st birthday, Etta became curious about their birth mother. Until then, Samantha said, she had a “woman’s magazine idea” about her birth mother, that maybe she had had a boyfriend and just couldn’t mind them at the time they were born.
It was sadly far from the reality of what had actually occurred. Following counselling from a woman from St Louise’s adoption agency, a meeting was set up in the Gresham Hotel in Dublin between the
two girls and their birth mother. Samantha said: “I wasn’t going to go then my sister said, we’re twins, you can’t send 50 per cent.”
Samantha and her sister Etta went to the Gresham with their parents and they met their birth mother, Margaret. What struck them was the fact that Margaret was wearing a polyester dress which looked like it came from a charity shop and was carrying a navy blue handbag which had a gold clasp. During the meeting the bag fell open and it was completely empty. This seemed to Samantha to be sign of what sort of life Margaret really had.
It was an afternoon tea meeting, but Samantha was very surprised to realise that Margaret had never had coffee before.
Speaking on the Ray D’Arcy Show, Samantha said : “The first time we had ever voted was for Mary Robinson. We were living at this more liberated time for Irish women.
“Then, we met this woman who had given birth to us, who had suffered so many denials in her life.
“The penny dropped with us. We were just absolutely stunned and it took us a long time to process what she didn’t have and what we did. “Towards the end of the meeting they said to us, just to let you know, your mother is quite institutionalised, she’s been in a Magdalene laundry basically all of her life.
“We didn’t know what that was. The only time we ever heard the word Magdalene was in the bible as kids.”
The twins found out that they had been born in the St Patrick’s mother and baby home on the Navan Road in Dublin and that their mother had spent most of her life living in the Seán McDermott Street-Gloucester Street laundry.
Margaret Bullen, Samantha and Etta’s birth mother, had a very sad and tragic life. She was born in Kimmage in Dublin in the early 1950s to a father who was an alcoholic and a mother who suffered from post-natal depression.
As was common in those times, Margaret’s mother was treated in Grangegorman Mental Hospital.
Every time she was released she would become pregnant again and end up back in Grangegorman. Margaret’s father, who was a taxi driver, was reported for neglecting his seven children and they were all taken into care.
At two years of age, Margaret was sent to an industrial school, and she spent her whole life in institutions. She was never properly educated as she was deemed only fit for work. Margaret became pregnant at 19 years of age and gave birth to her twin girls Samantha and Etta, who she breastfed until they were taken away from her at seven weeks.
Four years later, Margaret gave birth to another baby girl, who was also given up for adoption.
Questions remain unanswered as to how Margaret became pregnant when living in an institution. Samantha asked Margaret if she had left the institution at any stage and she said: “Sure I am not allowed leave now, and where would I go anyway?”
When Samantha and Etta’s adoptive mother Ann died in 1999, Margaret understandably saw a gap.
Samantha said: “She asked if she could be our mum and come out and live with us. But it just wasn’t possible. We didn’t have the skills to care for her. She just would not have been able for the world we live in.”
Samantha recalled bringing Margaret to the cinema. When the lights went out she screamed with terror, thinking that she had been put in a boot room, where the children were sent when they were bold.
At 51 years of age Margaret died from an illness that was caused by inhaling chemicals from doing gruelling laundry for years.
Samantha learnt the news of her mother’s death four months later when she was listening to Liveline on RTÉ One.
A caller to the show was speaking about her friend’s life and explaining how she had died. When asked her friend’s name, she said Margaret Bullen. Samantha and Etta had not been informed of her death.
Speaking of her birth mother,
Samantha said: “She worked seven days a week from dawn to dusk. She was lovely, she was good humoured, she was incredible actually when I think of her. Although she was childlike and institutionalised, she had a happy spark inside her. That carries me through. I feel so blessed, I feel so lucky.”
Samantha said she never saw herself as a survivor until reading the horrific details of the mother and baby homes report. When she saw the high infant mortality rates in the institutions in the report, she said she thought: “I am a survivor – I lived.”
Speaking to the Sligo Weekender this week, Samantha described the details of the commission’s report into the institutions as “absolutely horrific”. She said: “Overall, I am glad that we have reached a point where the report has finally been published because people, overwhelmingly women, who have lived through these experiences have waited many years for acknowledgment, never mind apology and possible supports.
“Many survivors are disappointed with some of the language of the report, which some feel serves to minimise their experience. But I believe that the personal testimonies are so strong that there is no option to ignore them. As such they have already dominated the news cycle and airwaves since publication on January 12.” When asked what she thinks should happen now, Samantha said: “I think that the government needs to act fast and give credence to public opinion, which is asking them to fix this once and for all.
“This will help the survivors, and indeed the nation, to heal and finally move on from these dark cruel days which are actually so recent – the last of the homes closed in 1998.
“The church authorities also need to put resources behind their apologies as the State has enough unexpected expenses during this difficult time for our citizens and our economy.” On Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s apology, which was read out in the Dáil, Samantha said she felt it was sincere and that the laying out of 22 concrete actions, many with tangible deadlines, gave her cause for hope.
She said: “But I won’t be shy about calling out any foot-dragging or delayed action. If I didn’t believe that things could be made right I wouldn’t have spent more than half of my life speaking out on this, ever since I found out my origins in 1995 and more so since our birth mother Margaret died in 2003 while still in a Magdalene laundry.
“My mother was in institutions until her death aged 51, and gave birth to three children despite never living in the free world. She had no education, no pay, no family, no love – and no babies, because they were taken away as well.”
Samantha is a member of the Collaborative Forum for Survivors of Mother and Baby Homes and has been very active and vocal regarding the recent report.
Etta now lives in New York and has two children. She is an editor and author.
Samantha works in politics as a parliamentary assistant to Senator Michael McDowell in Leinster House. Samantha said: “I have two children with my husband Derrick. Our son Julian is 17 and in fifth year in Templeogue College. Our daughter is 12 and will be starting secondary school this August.
“As it happens they were born in Sligo as we lived in Leitrim for a few years after we got married and later returned to Dublin to help care for my husband’s parents, who have now died. “I hope my daughter’s experience at school is as happy as mine at the Mercy. I was head girl in 1989 and it was possibly one of my parents’ proudest moments – mine too. That role was the start of my confidence to speak up and speak out.”
“She was lovely, she was good humoured, she was incredible. Although she was childlike and was institutionalised, she had a happy spark inside her”