IRELAND
Washington Post
BY TERRENCE MCCOY
Peter Ferris Cochran is a tall, tanned North Carolina man who likes his blazers colorful, his trucks big and, if conditions are to his liking, his head shielded by a baseball hat. He speaks in a slow drawl that immediately identifies him as a Southerner, and once owned a successful business called Cochran & Associates in the North Carolina beach town of Emerald Isle.
Nothing about Cochran would alert those around him of the unusual circumstances under which he came into this world. That his name was once Andrew Michael Gallagher. That, by birth, he’s not a Southerner or even an American. That he’s Irish, born in 1957 in the now-infamous Tuam center for unwed mothers in western Ireland, where the remains of nearly 800 babies–796 according to one historian’s estimates– may have been discarded in a massive septic tank. The full extent of what happened is now the subject of investigation, with authorities using ground sensor equipment to explore the tank.
“This was the information I’ve grown with over the last 50 years, and of every bit I knew was that this was a very evil orphanage,” he said Sunday afternoon in a phone interview. “It was evil for the orphans and it was evil for the unwed mothers. My mother was persecuted for out-of-wedlock sex, and the Catholic Church was just adamant about celibacy before marriage.”
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