It’s been my life’s wish to f ind my mother… this is my last chance
our shocking revelations about the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, one woman has broken her silence in a bid to find her birth mother.
Just a week before Mother’s Day, Mora Hughes is sharing her story in the hope of being reunited with the woman who gave birth to her 60 years ago.
‘I’m hoping that my birth mother might want to make contact,’ said Mora, who was 19 years old when she found out she was adopted.
‘I constantly think of her. I don’t know if she has ever tried to find me. If it is too painful for her to make contact, I understand.
‘It’s been my life-long wish to find my mother This is my last chance.’
Mora grew up in Dublin’s Rathfarnham on a street where everyone knew everyone. Her life was upturned in 1976. First her father died. Then two days before her mother died from cancer six weeks later, she found out she was adopted. It was only later that she discovered her adoption was illegal.
Like countless others, her adoptive parents, Jeremiah and Teresa Griffin, registered Mora’s birth as if she were their own child, listing themselves as the little girl’s natural parents.
‘I am full of tears and the revelations about the Tuam babies have caused me even greater despair. I could have been one of them.’
Mora is recorded as Mary Bernadette on her birth certificate, with February 17, 1957, listed as her date of birth. On her baptismal certificate, her date of birth is February 14, 1957.
The only other information is that her godfather Eamon Collins and Sisters of Charity nun Sr Joseph Gonzaga – believed to be from the now defunct St Mary’s Home and School for the Blind in Mount Merrion, Dublin – facilitated the adoption.
Mora said: ‘My birth cert is a complete and total phoney. My parents falsified it, probably thinking they were doing so in my best interests. They didn’t do it alone: somebody somewhere made that happen.’