IIRELAND
Sunday Independent
Maeve Sheehan
Published 15/06/2014
Labour leadership candidate shares her story with Maeve Sheehan and tells of tracing her family and the journey |to find her birth mother
THERE are thousands of photographs of Joan Burton, but only one of when she was a baby. The sole pictorial record of her infancy is on a very old passport which is stamped with entry visas, one for Newfoundland and one for the United States. She was probably just months old when the Sisters of Charity applied for it, expecting to ship her across the Atlantic to be adopted by a Canadian or an American family.
She was a thin child and it was thought she wasn’t strong enough for the journey. The nuns arranged for her to be “boarded out” with three different families until, at the age of two, her adoptive mother, Bridie Burton, came to the convent in Blackrock, gathered her in her arms with joy and took her home to Rialto Cottages in Dublin 8.
From that one bedroom artisan dwelling, Joan Burton prospered. She won a scholarship to UCD; had a career in accountancy. After 25 years in politics she is Minister for Social Protection and is in a contest with her government colleague, Alex White, to be the next leader of the Labour Party.
Despite her political connections, her journey to find her birth mother was no different than thousands of others born to unmarried mothers or parents too poor to feed them. It was a road littered with bureaucracy, secrecy and long and frustrating delays. Now 65, she saw her passport for the first time more than a decade ago, around the time she also finally found out who her mother was.
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