Citizen shame
Anguish of mother refused the right to live in Britain with her daughter
FRANCES Sullivan has been left “stateless” by a cruel ruling of the UK Home Office that she can’t live in the UK, even though her biological mum was Scottish.
She cannot prove, to the satisfaction of officialdom, that her late mother who gave her up for adoption in Canada was a Scot.
Francis wants to join her daughter Molly in the UK. But despite furnishing the Home Office with as much evidence as can be obtained, she is still being denied the right to reside in the UK.
It was the Tory Government that said they wanted to create a “hostile environment” for those hoping to become British citizens.
But shameful decisions like this only serve to highlight how inhumane our current system is.
THE daughter of a Scot who emigrated to Canada in the 1950s and later gave her up for adoption has been refused the right to live in the UK by the Home Office.
Frances Sullivan, 66, who has a daughter, Molly, living in the UK, has proof her late mother was Scottish.
But she has been left “stateless” by the cruel ruling despite support from her daughter’s MP, Peter Heaton-Jones and solid evidence that her mum is a Scot.
In January 2017, the Home Office refused her the right to remain in the UK, having kept her waiting 14 months for a decision.
She was forced to leave Britain and return to Canada where she no longer had a home.
On her last visit to Molly in October 2017, she was held for more than nine hours at Gatwick and later deported after only three days with her daughter. Frances has not dared to visit again. Molly said: “It was awful, one of the most traumatic experiences of my life, having my mother taken away from me, not knowing when she’d be able to visit me again.
“It’s coming up to two years and we’ve not seen each other.”
Frances Ann Collins was born to Catherine Collins on April 3, 1953, at the Salvation Army Bethesda Hospital, in Ontario, Canada, which had a residence for unwed mothers.
Her adoptive parents, Helen Gertrude Rutledge and Maurice Joseph Sullivan, who named her Mary Beth, lived in Wallaceburg, Ontario.
Her adoption records clearly state that: “Mother had immigrated to Canada from Scotland about a year and a half before Mary Beth’s birth.”
Records show Catherine Collins of 23 Tharsis Street, Royston, Glasgow, crossed the Atlantic on the Empress of Scotland, leaving on the Canadian Pacific Line from Greenock on October 21, 1951, bound for Quebec.
After her application to remain in the UK was rejected in 2017, she wrote to Hugh Collins, a former Glasgow gangster.
Frances had read in a newspaper that Collins grew up in Tharsis Street, where her mother had lived, and hoped they might be related.
Collins advised Frances they were not related and was unable to help steer her toward any living relative.
In 1994, Frances managed to get a message to her mother through the Children’s Aid Society of Ontario.
It resulted in heartache because her mother refused contact with her.
Frances said: “To establish contact with my birth mother 12 years later and to build up hope only to be rejected hurt an awful lot.”
Frances was unable to apply for UK citizenship until 2008 because of archaic laws that insisted only the line of the father counted.
In July 2008, she obtained her birth certificate and saw under “mother” the name Catherine Collins for the first time.
Frances is currently living a solitary life in Canada and wants to come home.
She said: “I’m a young, healthy 66-year-old but time isn’t on my side.
“The UK is my heart home and there I feel at peace.
“I’d just like to go home and be able to enjoy it for however long I’ve got left.”
Molly, who lives in Devon and has settled status in the UK, wants her mother back desperately.
She added: “I am bitterly disheartened by the treatment of my mother by a country I have fallen in love with and been building a life in for almost 20 years.
“Where’s the justice in excluding an innocent, law-abiding citizen, who is a Scot by birth, who was abandoned by her mother and later rejected by her, and has nowhere to call home?”
The Home Office said: “All cases are carefully considered on their individual merits, in line with the immigration rules and are based on evidence available.”
The UK is my heart home and there I feel at peace FRANCES SULLIVAN FORCED TO LEAVE UK I am bitterly disappointed by the treatment of my mother DAUGHTER MOLLY ON HER MOTHER’S PLIGHT