Does anyone recognise this picture?
AS grim details of mother and baby homes unfolded this week they evoked sadness and anger in one Irish woman abroad.
‘I am full of tears and the revelations about the Tuam Home have caused me even greater despair,’ said the 60-yearold, who has released a photo of herself as a baby in a desperate bid to trace her birth mother.
She explained: ‘I could have been one of them and this is the last possible chance of me finding my mother and finding out something about her.
‘I never knew that I was adopted until five weeks after my father died and when my mother was on her death bed, relatoves told me that I had been adopted at birth, that it was all arranged in secret and that no one knew where I came from except a now dead nun, who was with the order that ran the school for the blind in Mount Merrion.’
Her birth cert says she was born at home in Rathfarnham, Dublin on February 17, 1957, yet her baptismal cert lists her date of birth as February 14, 1957.
‘My birth cert is a complete and total phoney. Initially I was grateful that I’d be given a loving home but I’ve been robbed of my birth rights and my heritage… My [adoptive] parents didn’t do it alone… someone made it happen.’