TUAM (IRELAND)
CNN
Sept. 8, 2019
By Kara Fox
The day after Michael O’Flaherty was born, his mother tried to see him. But, she told him, she was stopped by a nun who told her, “Go mind your own business, your baby is gone.”
Like other women who gave birth at the Tuam mother and baby home in Ireland, the nuns didn’t forbid O’Flaherty’s mother from seeing her newborn son again, they just didn’t tell her who her baby was, or that he was in the same building. The very same home where she was required to stay for 12 months after giving birth.
“My mother could have picked me up, but she couldn’t have necessarily known,” O’Flaherty told CNN.
The boy would stay in the home for another five and a half years. He doesn’t remember his time inside; his first memory of it was from the day that he left.
Today, at 71, O’Flaherty retraces the steps he took that day with a group that’s become like family.
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