AN ALL-ISLA
THE CHURCH DID NOT REC OGNISE THE BOR DER SO NEITHER SHOULD AN INQUI RY INTO ILLEGAL ADOPTIO NS, SURVIVOR SAYS
ANY State inquiry into illegal adoptions must extend to Northern Ireland to investigate how babies were trafficked across the border, according to a campaigner and mother and baby home survivor. Eunan Duffy, who was 47 before he discovered he had been born at a mother and baby home in Newry, says babies were moved back and forth across the border as well as internationally by religious orders.
Mr Duffy spoke out after a report presented to the Government last week called for the establishment of a State inquiry or truth commission, having found the authorities had effectively enabled illegal adoptions in the Republic for decades.
Professor Conor O’Mahony, the special rapporteur for child protection who compiled the report, said records were deliberately falsified to obscure the truth of a person’s birth and early life, preventing the reunification of birth mothers and adopted children.
Mostly birth certificates were falsified to register a child as having been born to his or her adoptive parents.
The report found the practice, which has been a criminal offence since 1874, was used in several former mother and baby homes in the Republic. However, Mr
‘If you think this only happened in the South, you’re mistaken’
Duffy, who is now 53, says that the practice ‘extends far wider than that’.
He told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘Any inquiry needs to extend to all Ireland as the religious orders who ran these homes, both Catholic and Protestant, didn’t recognise a border.
‘Children were moved up and down and then often abroad – it didn’t matter. They went wherever there was a demand for babies. We know about children being shipped out to the US, Australia, Canada and the UK, but children were moved around Ireland too.
‘I welcome the call for an inquiry but it needs to be an all-Ireland one. I know so many people who were born in the North and then were adopted in the South and vice versa.
‘They go looking for their records and they’re sent back and forth between the two jurisdictions.
‘You can’t separate what happened in the South from what happened in the North.
‘I spoke to members of the Northern Ireland Assembly recently and I warned them that this report would be coming across their table soon.
‘If you think that this stuff only happened in the South, you’re mistaken – it happened right across the island.’
Mr Duffy said infants from mother and baby homes in Northern Ireland were frequently sent to a baby home in the Co. Donegal village of Fahan.
An independent investigation commissioned by the Stormont Executive last year found that hundreds of babies were moved across the border.
Nazareth House in Fahan, run by the Sisters of Nazareth, often took in children born to unmarried mothers in Northern Ireland.
The report also noted that more than 200 women and girls from Donegal were sent to St Mary’s Home, a Magdalene laundry run by the Good Shepherd Sisters in Derry.
‘The Church didn’t recognise borders. Investigations into what happened in these homes shouldn’t recognise them now,’ said Mr Duffy.
The home Mr Duffy was born in, Marian Vale in Newry, also sent children for adoption to the Republic.
He was raised in Northern Ireland and says that although his adoption wasn’t officially illegal, the circumstances in which he was adopted were ‘far from ideal’.
Mr Duffy was taken from his birth mother against her will as a newborn baby and placed for adoption. He maintains illegal adoption wasn’t just about falsifying records, it was also about taking babies from reluctant mothers.
‘There were plenty of adoptions where “consent” was given, but was it informed consent? I would dispute that.
‘I was born in 1968 in the former Marian Vale home. I only discovered I was adopted in February 2016 when I applied to get married.
‘My mother was 22. She never wanted to give me up. She told me that when I eventually met her.
‘After I was born, I was placed on my mother’s chest for a matter of minutes and then taken away.
‘She can’t remember anything else that happened. She can’t even remember the inside of the place. I showed her a picture of it and she’d no recollection.
‘I found out that I was kept in a separate part of the home without my
mother’s knowledge before I was adopted.
‘My mother can’t remember anything because she was so traumatised. She was young and vulnerable. I believe she was taken advantage of, and there are thousands like her.
‘Children were put into orphanages across the country. But they weren’t orphans were they? They had living parents.
‘These orphanages and mother and baby homes were like adoption agencies. Many of the nuns who worked in them also worked as social workers, don’t forget. They knew everything about these young mothers and they had a power over them.
‘In the modern day what was done back then would be categorised as human trafficking.’
Mr Duffy’s remarks are echoed by Tipperary man Pat Williams, who was separated from his mother, Rosemary Whitely, at birth. She died by suicide one year later in Mullingar, Co. Westmeath.
Mr Williams, 44, from Clonmel, was placed first in the notorious St Joseph’s orphanage in Kilkenny before being moved to Bessborough mother and baby home in Cork.
He was boarded out when he was six months old and discovered he had been adopted only when his adoptive mother died when he was 16.
‘I was put in an orphanage even though I wasn’t an orphan,’ he told the MoS. ‘My mother screamed the place down when they took me from her. I’ve spoken to someone who was there at the time and they said five people were needed to restrain her.
‘I have struggled to find out about my past. I’ve been told by the Department of Children here that I don’t exist in records and yet Tusla have records of me.
‘It’s a terrible way to treat people who’ve been through so much already.’
The report to the Government this week makes 17 recommendations, including the obligation on the State to correct the birth register and to provide unqualified access to birth certificates.
It recommends that all adoption records in private hands be acquired by the State and held in a central archive. It also calls for the Status of Children Act 1987 to be amended to allow for mandatory DNA testing of relatives other than potential parents in appropriate cases.
‘Was it informed consent? I would dispute that’