‘You had the enormous trauma and sorrow of loss’

IRELAND
Irish Independent

Cormac McQuinn
March 7 2017

A woman who had to give up her child for adoption after being sent to a mother and baby home has spoken of the trauma she went through as a teenager.

Deirdre Wadding said coverage of the horror at Tuam – where it’s believed that hundreds of babies died – “stirred up my own experiences”.

Now a People Before Profit councillor, Ms Wadding was sent to the Bessboro Home in Cork in 1981 when she became pregnant at the age of 18.

Run by a different religious order to Tuam, Ms Wadding said she didn’t experience “brutality”.
But she said: “You had the trauma of guilt and shame that was imposed by the very fact of being there.

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