Ireland's Lost Babies, review: 'a heartbreaking, unholy mess', by Michael Hogan, Telegraph (UK) (September 17, 2014)

I’m probably the wrong person to review This World: Ireland’s Lost Babies (BBC Two). As a new-ish father, I’ve become enormously soppy, especially when it comes to emotional stories about parents and children – welling up during the news, dabbing my eyes at adverts, snivelling in an undignified manner during episodes of ITV’s Long Lost Family. Must be hormones or something. I’m also half-Irish (full name: the none-more-Irish Michael Joseph Hogan), just to throw some extra emotion into the equation. So it was with some trepidation that I sat down to watch journalist Martin Sixsmith’s companion documentary to last year’s feature film Philomena.

That Bafta-winning, Oscar-nominated Hollywood production, starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, dramatised Sixsmith’s efforts to to help Philomena Lee find her long-lost son Anthony, taken from her as a baby in the Fifties by the Catholic church and sent off to America for adoption. Naturally, that had me in floods too.

This follow-up saw the silvery, sincere Sixsmith meeting other Philomena figures and illuminating the wider story. He travelled across Ireland and America to hear touching stories of lives irrevocably changed, while investigating the Catholic Church’s role in a huge, horrible adoption racket which saw thousands of “illegitimate” children taken from their “fallen” mothers and packed off abroad, often with generous donations to the Church flowing in the other direction. Buying and selling babies by another name.

It was affecting enough already before the sucker punch: prospective parents, some of whom had chosen their new charges from a primitive, pictorial mail order catalogue, weren’t properly vetted. This meant children were taken from their mothers, flown to a foreign land and placed in the care of brutal bullies or paedophiles – one of whom was a priest, using and abusing his clerical connections. The powerful testimonies of children whose lives had been wrecked were anger-inducing but also humbling. They showed heroic forgiveness and resilience.

An even more macabre coda was to come, with the deeply disturbing discovery of 800 children’s bodies in an unmarked mass grave at a Galway mother-and-baby home, run by nuns. The Church didn’t come out of this programme well, with self-appointed representatives of God deeming women unfit to raise their own infants, separating them, putting the children in far more perilous situations, then covering it up when people came knocking to ask questions. They split up mother and baby in the first place, then kept them apart again decades later.

We were left with hope, however, that the Galway tragedy might finally force the Irish authorities to confront this scandal and give some of the surviving victims, if you’ll forgive the therapy-speak, closure. As with the children tracking down their mothers here, there were no easy answers or happy endings. Just a heartbreaking, unholy mess.