‘I’ve asked for a meeting with the Pope, he should be brought and shown all this’

SURVIVOR of the Tuam mother and baby home, PJ Haverty feels the Pope should be brought to the grounds in Tuam during his visit to Ireland next month.

He told the Irish Mail on Sunday that he requested a meeting with the Pope, through the organisers of the upcoming Papal visit, which has not been granted.

‘I think the only reason they are bringing the Pope over is to distract from all of this. Sweep it under the carpet.

‘He’s going to be talking about “family” in Croke Park, but what did they do with families in the past? They tore them apart.’

‘Why is he not brought into the Tuam grounds? It’s the survivors like us that he should be acknowledging.’

PJ was born in the home in 1951 and remembers very little about his time there before he was fostered out to a kind family.

He eventually found his birth mother in Brixton in London in the 1970s and learned of her heartbreak in being forced to give him up.

‘She was kicked out of the home after giving birth to me in 1951 and she got a cleaning job in the local hospital because she was so determined to get me out.

‘Every week for five and a half years, she would arrive at the home knocking on the door and she would say “I want my son”.

‘She found out I was fostered and left for Brixton after she was warned by the parish priest, as well as the nuns, not to go near him [her son] if she ever found out where he was.’

‘They robbed us of our relationship.’

PJ said he can’t understand why the issue of exhumation is such a problem in the case of the Tuam babies, given that in 2001, 12 nuns were exhumed and taken to be reinterred in Knock, Co. Mayo where the Bon Secours order had moved to.

The council had given the nuns permission to do so.

‘What I want is the remains to be taken out of there. They should be given a proper burial. The nuns were taken out with full Church blessings and everything. There was no trouble. Why can’t the same be done for those babies?

‘The Church should be made to do what they should’ve done many years ago, which is bury these children in consecrated ground.’

‘These nuns should come out and apologise and go to the graves and read an apology.

‘We’re entitled to that for what they did to us.’

‘These nuns should come and apologise’