Archbishop calls for Tuam probe to be widened
Anne Silke endured a life of hardship and servitude. Now she knows it could have been so very different, writes Maeve Sheehan
THE Archbishop of Tuam has called for the probe into the scandal of mother and baby homes to be widened beyond religious orders.
Archbishop Michael Neary also apologised for the role of the Catholic church “as part of that time and society” when “particular children and their mothers were not welcomed, they were not wanted and they were not loved”.
The Archbishop delivered a homily at the Cathedral of the Assumption in Tuam yesterday, near where children’s remains were discovered on the site of what was St Mary’s mother and baby home run by the Bon Secours sisters.
Speaking yesterday, he said there is “an urgent need for an enquiry to examine all aspects of life at the time, broadening the focus from one particular religious congregation, and instead addressing the roles and interrelationships between church, State, local authorities and society generally.”
The Minister for Children, Katherine Zappone, has already promised to look at broadening the Commission of Investigation into mother and baby homes to cover all institutions, agencies and individuals who were involved with Ireland’s unmarried mothers and their children.
The Commission was launched after research by local historian, Catherine Corless, who believed that 796 babies were buried at the site of the home. The Commission announced 10 days ago that children’s remains had been found in an underground structure on the site.
The Archbishop of Tuam said yesterday that reports of high levels of mortality and malnutrition at the Tuam mother and baby home were “particularly harrowing”.
He said: “It was an era when unmarried mothers, as our society at the time labelled women who were pregnant and not married, were often judged, stigmatised and ostracised by their own community and the church, and this all happened in a harsh and unforgiving climate.
“Compassion, understanding and mercy were sorely lacking.”
He said it was timely “that this dimension of our social history be addressed and thoroughly examined”, adding: “To do so would begin the process of attempting to explain, but not to excuse, what happened in our not-too-distant collective past.
“How could the culture of Irish society, which purported to be defined by Christian values, have allowed itself to behave in such a manner towards our most vulnerable?”
IN 1951, two infants born months apart ended up at St Mary’s mother and baby home in Tuam. One was a baby girl called Anne who was born in February of that year to a 16-year-old red-haired Galway girl. The other was a boy, Michael, born in July in a Galway hospital to an unwed mother, and afterwards hurried off in secrecy to the Tuam home.
Both babies remained there, long after their mothers had departed, surviving the illnesses and infectious diseases that swept across their cots. Ten babies died at the Tuam home that year and seven the following year, of illnesses like whooping cough, pneumonia and bronchitis. Having survived all that, their options were stark; if they were lucky, they would be adopted, otherwise, they would remain in Tuam until after their Holy Communion when they would be ‘boarded out’ to families.
By the early 1950s, hundreds of babies were being sent abroad for adoption through Catholic organisations. Many in officialdom saw it as a way of offering “illegitimate babies” a chance in life. A Church of Ireland synod was told in 1951 that Ireland, “well-known for the export of cattle, sheep and horses, had added a new dollar export, and that is babies” – 500 of whom had been “exported” in the previous year, according to a newspaper report. In 1952, the new adoption law banned foreign adoptions, except for “illegitimate” children over one year of age.
Around this time an American couple called Mr and Mrs Greene signed up with a Catholic adoption agency in Long Island and travelled from the US to Tuam to meet the baby boy they would adopt. Michael was the boy they chose and in 1954, he boarded a KLM flight from Shannon, accompanied by a nurse, to start his new life on the other side of the Atlantic.
But Mr and Mrs Greene could not forget the baby girl they saw when they met Michael. They wrote from the US to inquire about adopting her too.
“This is to introduce you to Anne Silke and I hope you like her. She is a lovely child in every way and has beautiful brown eyes. So I hope all goes well with the adoption,” a Bon Secours sister wrote to the Greenes in January 1956.
A second letter, dated two months earlier, assured Mrs Greene that she need have “no worries about the child’s background”. She was “a lovely child” and her mother “was a lovely girl” and, although the family was in a bad way when she was “in trouble”, they “forgave her and had her back home and then a brother took her to England where she married in a very short time.” The child’s grandfather was “very anxious that the child should have a good home”.
A third letter advised the Greenes to apply to Galway County Council directly, warning that adoptions “are very slow” and requesting “a few dollars” for the postage “as our resources are very small here”.
Anne’s adoption did not go through for various reasons, including the length of time the process was taking and the substantial travel costs involved.
Her “almost brother”, Michael Greene, grew up in a loving home, got a good education, and is today retired and living in Florida. Anne Silke was ‘boarded out’ to a succession of foster families and endured a life of cruelty and servitude, and was made to feel ashamed that she was a Tuam baby.
She is now 66 and lives in Leitrim. She is divorced, has her own house, a car and her eight children are reared. She says she is “independent” and “free to speak my mind”.
She had no idea of the life that could have been until the summer of 2015. Then, under the protective wing of the tireless Tuam historian Catherine Corless, she and other Tuam survivors crawled out from under the cloak of shame thrust upon them in childhood, many searching for their identities or finding solace in talking about shared experiences of hardship. It was through Catherine that Michael Greene found Anne, and through another Tuam survivor, Peter Mulryan, that they met.
“Peter Mulryan rang me and said could I come down to Galway. He said: ‘There is somebody I would like you to meet,’” says Anne.
At the hotel in Galway, Peter introduced her to an American.
“He was saying how he was adopted from Tuam,” she says. “He had a good upbringing, a good education, they were very nice to him and he got a good home, under circumstances where there were others that didn’t.
“He then said, the interesting part was they were going to adopt another little girl from the home. He said they thought about it and when they realised how much it was going to cost them, they couldn’t afford it.
“He said: ‘Here’s the name — Anne Silke.’
“‘Me?’ I said. ‘It’s me you’re talking about?’” “‘Yes,’ he said. “Moneywise they had to pay for everything. It was £150 for me. Michael has that in writing and it was near £600 for the two of them to collect me then,” she says.
It must have been like glimpsing the feast before the door swings shut.
Anne felt mixed emotions. “I felt great. I felt great for him, that he had a good turnout. And if I had been there, I probably would have been well-educated today. Some were lucky and some weren’t, you know? I felt happy for him, really and truly I did, despite what I missed out on.”
But later, she says, it made her sad “because of the life he had. It just made me a bit sad that I could have been there and had a great chance — not been a domestic all my life. I could have made myself more.
“I’d say I would have been a much happier person today and I would be educated too. But as I said, some people are lucky and some aren’t.”
How different life could have been.
Anne Kelly Silke’s earliest memories are of the babies in cots lined up outside the home in the “scorching” sunshine; the ubiquitous Bina Rabbitte — the woman whose name appears on almost every birth and death certificate for the Tuam home — preparing bottles; and of the nuns tearing lumps off large batch loaves to throw at the children, who would fight over it, like pigeons; and of hunger.
“I remember eating the moss off the walls,” she says. “We were hungry. Not just me. We were all hungry.”
They were not allowed to play and were sent to the local school, either the Mercy or the Presentation convent, she can’t remember, where the ‘home girls’ were kept at the back of the class. “You wouldn’t put up your hand, even if you knew anything,” she says.
She was boarded out at age five to an older couple and then sent back to the home when that didn’t work out. When she was nine, she and two other girls were called into the nuns’ parlour to be paraded before a potential foster family. She was given “a nice dress” to wear and was “all dressed up”.
“They picked me,” she says, and without a word of explanation they took her with them when they left.
The farming family was “well-got”, she says. “They had seven bedrooms in the house.” Anne slept in her own room with a broken window and potatoes spread all over the bedroom floor to sprout. She was foster-child-cum-servant. The family who took her in would have received a monthly fee of £2 and 10 shillings until she was age 10, £3 a month up to the age of 16, plus an annual allowance of £9 to £11.
She milked 14 cows in the morning and 14 in the evening and was responsible for feeding the sows, ducks, hens and turkeys. Sometimes she was taken out of school to clean the house.
Her foster father was kind to her, and she says she was treated well enough to begin with. She says one particular son, then a young man, caused her most hardship. He beat her regularly — savage assaults that she “will never forget”.
“The worst beating I ever got was the horse’s whip. His mother went to him over something I’d done. I think it was over a tin of fruit that I took, or over the apples that I took. I did open the tins of fruit and I’d eat them,” she says. She thinks she was 11 or 12 at the time. Her foster mother went for Anne, and when she retaliated, her son stepped in.
“He stripped me half-naked, waist down, and put me across the chair — and the wallop. The blood was pouring down my legs. I couldn’t sit,” she says.
She kept running away “because of the beatings”. But she said the son “went around the whole village telling everyone they were not to take me in”.
“The horse’s whip. I don’t know what I was, I would say around 11 or 12. I couldn’t sit. The blood was pouring down. My backside was skinned, that was the truth.”
On another occasion, she says he caught her by the hair and smashed her face against the wall. She lost her two front teeth.
She says the family also took in a teenage boy from Letterfrack. “He had a bedroom beside me but we were not to talk to each other. He was helping out on the farm. He didn’t last too long,” she says. The son found he had not finished a task. “He put the spade right through his foot. I can see it to this day. He went off roaring and I never saw him from that day to this.”
Anne speaks lightly about her regular attempts to run away and of getting into trouble. “I was a stubborn child, wasn’t I?” she chuckles.
The file of her childhood records sitting on her living room table is a chronicle of a troubled and traumatised girl clearly in need of help. When she was 12, a local authority doctor recommended that she be given Stelazine, a sedative, twice a day. “Apparently her behaviour disorder is more severe than admitted,” he wrote.
A social welfare report — written when she was 13 — says she has an “emotional disturbance characterised by stealing”, has poor concentration in class and at school relapses into “manneristic types of behaviours” such as “repeatedly rubbing her nose”. Her teacher wrote a letter saying she failed to understand how a child of her intelligence — for she has some — was so “backward” and “uncontrollable” in class. But her foster mother was anxious to hold on to her, according to her file.
Anne was briefly sent to St Teresa’s, a special school in Dublin, and from there ended up in the Good Shepherd Convent in Limerick — a Magdalene Laundry. But she ran away to Dublin when she was 16 and got a job as a domestic in Richmond hospital.
When she was a child, Julia Devaney, a domestic at Tuam who later spoke about carrying the swaddled bodies of children to an underground vault, told Anne about her mother. “She told me: ‘Your mother is a good-looking woman. She’s a redhead. I hope one day you’ll find her.’ Every red-haired woman was my mother. No matter who they were they were my mother.”
She traced her when she was 19 — her home address was on Anne’s birth certificate. She paid for Anne to fly over that Christmas to England, where she lived with her new family. They spent Christmas together. They still write to each other regularly.
Like other Tuam survivors, Anne Kelly Silke was both saddened and relieved when the Commission of Investigation identified the remains of children aged up to three placed in chambers in an underground structure that may have been part of the home’s sewerage system.
The children’s remains are an unassailable reminder to the world of the harsh and unforgiving environment the Tuam survivors endured — so harsh that when children died their bodies were hidden away without acknowledgement or ceremony, nothing to mark the fact that they had existed at all.
“I could have been in that plot,” says Anne. So, for that matter, could Michael.
On Friday evening, on the phone from Florida, Mike Greene recalls how his adoptive parents, who are now dead, never forgot the beautiful brown-eyed baby girl. It wasn’t only the cost of her adoption, but the long, drawnout process that his parents found emotionally draining.
“They often wondered what became of that girl, Anne,” he says. Especially his mother.
“Gradually, as they got older, and as life goes on, she wondered. She just always had a funny feeling. She had a feeling that there was something going on — a mother’s intuition or whatever. But how right she was.”
‘I remember eating moss off the walls. We were hungry’