IRELAND
The Guardian
[This World: Ireland’s Lost Babies]
Lucy Mangan
The Guardian, Wednesday 17 September 2014
There’s no point, really, in even trying to prepare yourself mentally or emotionally for a programme entitled This World: Ireland’s Lost Babies (BBC2). The bald facts, laid out by presenter Martin Sixsmith as he made his way between the emerald isle and the US, were bad enough. Between 40,000 and 60,000 babies were – by legal standards today and moral standards any time – involuntarily given up for adoption in the 1950s and 60s by Roman Catholic Irishwomen who became pregnant outside marriage. The treatment of the “fallen women” at the mother and baby homes run by fiercely unforgiving nuns was appalling. The vetting procedures for potential adoptive parents were worse. Catholic? Moneyed? You’re in. Take your pick.
It didn’t matter, as Mike Hawkes and his twin sister found out, if you were the brother of a paedophile priest who would rule your family with a rod of iron. “Going against his will was not healthy. Not healthy at all.” It didn’t matter, Mary Monaghan soon knew, if your new father was a sadistic paedophile himself. “My memories,” she says, “are terrible.” Nor if you had been rejected as adopters in your own country, as Kathy Deasey discovered. She was sent to the US at the age of five to a couple who wanted her as a companion to their biological daughter. When that daughter, years later, went to college in California, they turfed Kathy out, spent her college fund, sold their home and followed what suddenly stood revealed as their only beloved child to California. “It was horrible to say goodbye,” said Kathy, trying not to cry 40 years later, “because they’re the ones who said hello to me!” Her voice rose slightly, still in disbelief, as well it might.
Lily Boyce’s mother threw her out when Lily – so ignorant about sex that she didn’t realise she could be pregnant until she was nearly full term – went into labour. She walked her to the Castlepollard mother and baby home and left her on the steps. “Now you can do your own dirty work,” she said, and left. She gave birth to a boy called Joseph. “I would have loved to have kept him,” she says. “The longer I had him, the harder it was.” She had him for 17 months. You wonder how anyone bears the pain. And, rightly, you were largely left to wonder as Sixsmith’s admirably restrained and unsensationalist film continued wisely without attempting to resolve any of the ineffable mysteries suffusing it – faith, conscience, our capacity for endurance, grief, evil and forgiveness – into words.
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