IRELAND
Telegraph (UK)
The sinister side of the Catholic Church was laid bare in Martin Sixsmith’s documentary about Irish mothers whose babies were taken from them, says Michael Hogan
4 out of 5 stars
By Michael Hogan 17 Sep 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.
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