IRELAND
Irish Independent
JOHN MEAGHER – 14 SEPTEMBER 2013
In the middle years of the 1950s, my father earned a few pennies by tending to the gardens of Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea, Co Tipperary. Run by Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, it was a place where so-called “fallen women” were kept and to this day, he recalls the unmistakable sound of sobbing that could be discerned behind the grey stone walls.
There is a chance that one of the women he heard crying was Philomena Lee. Originally from Limerick, she became pregnant in 1952 and, on telling her appalled family, she was placed in the care of the nuns at Sean Ross.
Philomena was just 18 and like many unmarried expectant mothers at the time she was considered a moral degenerate in an Irish society that was ruled with an iron fist by Archbishop John Charles McQuaid.
Sean Ross was one of numerous church-run institutions set up to keep unmarried mothers out of sight and mind, and Philomena would spend three arduous years there in what, effectively, amounted to incarceration.
But that was nothing compared with the heartache she would suffer when, in 1955, her son Anthony was removed from her care by the nuns, and put up for adoption. She was not allowed to say goodbye to him, but managed to catch a glimpse of him being bundled into a black car and driven away.
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