for his crib mates and particularly on behalf of the fallen ones, the ones that didn’t make it. He tells of himself and another man, along with five women all survivors who made the trip to Castlepollard in August 2011. ‘It was an odd situation. We shared so much and yet we were strangers walking into the unknown together ... I left the cemetery a fundamentally different person, a man with a mission, hellbent to do something. I hadn’t a clue what to do or how to do it but I knew something had to be done.’ And he did!
In fact, Paul continues to do so much. He is the author of the first serious research into mortality rates and conditions in Mother and Baby Homes, an advocate for the rights of adopted persons and their natural mothers, a serious campaigner who worked with many of the groups and key individuals who organised around these issues, Paul is a big man with a big heart, tireless energy and unrelenting patience and humanity.
Paul touches on a story of a woman who got in touch with my Dáil office after spending years going through official channels to locate her daughter, who had been taken from her, without her consent, in Castlepollard on St Patrick’s Day in 1966. Wanting her daughter to have her medical history and worried that she was running out of time, she wrote of being led up the garden path so many times by those from whom she sought help to trace her. She had spent a lifetime searching and finding nothing. In three days Paul found her and within the week successful phone contact was made. The endings are rarely so happy but there is no pain worse than that of not knowing. The struggle for your own identity is one everyone makes, but it can be a longer road with substantial barriers placed in the way when you are adopted.
This book is necessary; it’s about the history of Irish adoptions, particularly the heart-breaking illegal adoptions. It is about the struggle that Paul Redmond took up, on behalf of his crib mates. It tells of his growth as an advocate and campaigner. No doubt the experience has been a learning curve for him, but throughout it all he remains calm, reasonable and determined. It is a subject that would make any person seethe with anger. When I first met Paul in 2012, he stood out as someone who had taken control and directed his energy into a fight for justice. For those who had their identities stolen, who had subsequently been grossly mislead and ignored, they may never find closure but they have a true advocate in Paul Redmond.
Clare Daly TD
March 2018
Prologue
In August 2011, I visited my birthplace, Castlepollard Mother and Baby Home, in the company of six other people adopted from there. We had met on Facebook and another lady and I had organised the visit. Years later we realised that we were the first known group of adoptees to return to their old home as a group.
My childhood fantasy was of an old Georgian house with my young mother in an oversized chair that was covered with warm, colourful throws, by a window where golden sunshine streamed in as I lay swaddled in her arms. Gentle nuns fluttered around, cooing and happy.
The reality in 2011 was a cold, grey, ugly institution. Empty rooms and peeling paint. Our group visited the Angels’ Plot and stood on the narrow strip where unknown hundreds of babies and children had been buried just a few feet below where we walked around. We planted a tree in their memory.
That forgotten plot affected me deeply. It was life-changing. I left as a survivor determined to do ‘something’. In the days and finally years that followed, I hunted down every scrap of information I could find about Castlepollard and particularly the Angels’ Plot, and then I broadened my attention to the other Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland. More Angels’ Plots. More horrors. I became an activist by default. The ‘something’ I wanted to do, I realised afterwards, included never letting people forget. I wanted to ram hard facts and figures down Ireland’s throat.
I published all my research, nearly 100,000 words, across the various adoption groups. I did a little unpaid citizen journalism about the Homes and our campaign for truth and justice. Over the years, my family, friends and fellow activists increasingly nagged me to write a book and tell the story properly, and I finally cracked and agreed to do it in early 2017. I took four months off work over the summer and simply sat down and wrote. And I couldn’t stop. The book grew to twice its intended size before I was finished, and I still feel it is not enough.
Approximately 100,000 girls and women lost their babies to forced separation since independence in 1922. Church and State considered the illegitimate babies as barely human. At least 6,000 babies died in the nine Mother and Baby Homes where some 35,000 girls as young as 12, and women as old as 44, spent years of their lives, and almost no one cared. Even now, mothers and babies still cry out for remembrance and justice. Their cries from beyond the grave are ignored by Irish society, just as the cries of their short poignant lives were ignored in the Homes.
The Adoption Machine is not just a book. It is also an activist tactic and part of our ongoing campaign to ensure that the last, dirty secret of Holy Catholic Ireland is finally dragged into the light. It is a rage against the machine. A voice in the wilderness. A memorial to my fallen crib mates.
And, as I write from the deepest part of my heart, I still hear the voices of the angels crying for justice. And remembrance. And love.
There are many villains in this story. There are a handful of heroes too. These heroes are all too human; flawed, stubborn products of their time. Yet they all share one feature: they had good hearts. Whether they succeeded or failed is not important, they tried their best. They too should be remembered: Aneenee FitzGerald-Kenney, Alice Litster, Dr James Deeny, June Goulding, among others.
This story begins with such a hero, Captain Thomas Coram ...
PART 1
BACKGROUND AND FOUNDATIONS,
1739–1944
CHAPTER ONE
The Age of the Institutions
Captain Thomas Coram challenged eighteenth-century perceptions that babies of poor families were worthless, and believed that all babies had equal human rights. Before his Foundling Hospital opened in London in 1739, childcare for most babies from deprived backgrounds was virtually unknown in Britain and Ireland, except for charitable initiatives undertaken by people associated with local churches. Babies and young children were often considered a mixed blessing, as they placed a burden on poor families and contributed no income for the first several years of their lives. Orphans and ‘bastards’ had no value in society. It was only when children started to become useful, at around seven or eight years of age, that they became valued by society. Parents were forced through necessity and grinding poverty to be extremely practical in very hard times.
Unwanted babies were dumped in public places and on church doorsteps and generally ended up in the local workhouse. If the parish did not have its own workhouse, they were sent to the nearest available one for an agreed weekly or monthly fee. The only alternative was to employ local wet nurses for a few years and then send the children, by then aged three or four, to the workhouse. On rare occasions, the lucky ones were informally adopted by their nurse or a local family. The care available to abandoned babies was unregulated and varied hugely from parish to parish, and mortality rates were appallingly high. Not long before Captain Coram stepped in, one English workhouse received 2,000 children over a period of twenty-eight years and none survived.1
Coram decided to change the babies’ names upon entering his hospital, and the result was a loss of identity with no names to connect those children to their history or heritage. The first boy and girl to arrive in the hospital were baptised and renamed after the Captain and his wife, Thomas and Eunice Coram.2 Tens of millions of people lost their names and identities due to this practice.
Captain Coram started a revolution in childcare and, although social change was slow,
