SURVIVOR: TESTIMONY BLIGHTED BY ERRORS

MISQUOTED Noelle Brown

A SURVIVOR of a notorious mother and baby home – where more than 900 children died – said there are “glaring inaccuracies” in her testimony included in the report.

Noelle Brown was born in Bessborough in Cork, which was run by the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.

She said there are 10 mistakes in her transcript, including that she was raised by her birth parents.

Noelle told RTE’S Today with Claire Byrne it included answers to questions she was not asked.

She said: “There were not

222 questions asked of me.

“They listened, and they obviously took some of what

I said and shoehorned it to fit into these questions.

“I was asked about two or three questions. One of them I found really inappropriate, which was ‘have you had problems in relationships because you were adopted?’

ACCURACY

“There was a sense it was a wasted exercise. I spoke for an hour.”

Noelle, an artist and adoption rights activist, said she feels “raw” following publication of the findings.

She told RTE her testimony had arrived in the post on Wednesday after she had pushed for a copy.

Noelle was previously told the transcript could be read out over the phone to her to check for accuracy.

She said: “They’ve made it so difficult for people to access their transcripts.

“This is not a survivor-centred approach, it has never been.”

She added the questions included in the report “looked like they were written by nuns in the 60s”.

And the tone of the questions centred around religious affiliations and social class.

Noelle wants the Government to acknowledge “collusion with the Catholic Church that brought about this absolute horror in Irish history”.

She added: “We are still being denied our identity. We are still stigmatised, we are still othered.”