IRELAND
Irish Central
Cahir O’Doherty @randomirish June 08,2014
Reporting from Tuam, County Galway
“You would not talk to them,” the locals told me in Tuam near Galway City this weekend, “they were outcasts.”
They were speaking to IrishCentral about the mothers and babies secreted away to The Home, an 1840’s institution run by the Bon Secours sisters in the town from 1925 to 1961, but this week locals insisted that more and more people want to remember them now.
One of them is Paul Kanahan, 46. Yesterday he took the long drive to Tuam from his home in County Sligo to visit the site that in the last fortnight has become one of the most controversial in the world.
Inspired by news reports, Kanahan told IrishCentral he made the trip to the unmarked grave site to pay his respects to the Home Babies and reflect on his own experience as a Home Baby from another notorious mother and baby home called Castlepollard in County Westmeath.
An adoptee and now a father himself, Kanahan found his birth mother and sister in 2010 through a series of lucky breaks and with the health of a priest and a Facebook page for adoptees from the Castlepollard Mothers and Babies home.
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