by Mike Milotte
‘Six weeks after your baby was born they reckoned you were fit for work. Most of the girls were put out in the farm, working in the fields or the gardens or with the pigs and cattle. Or they were put to cleaning. Girls worked in the dormitories, the laundry, the kitchens, the dining room, the bakery, the nurseries. I was lucky. I was put into administration. It was my job to give the new girls their “house-names”, take their clothes, give them their house clothes, which I used to make as well, and give them their bedding.’ Her work was supervised by Sister Isabel, the only nun, she said, who ever showed her any kindness at
Castlepollard. ‘She would bring me the odd sweet or biscuit for Trevor and she would let me go to see him more than I was supposed to.’
Pat spent her 21 st birthday in Castlepollard. ‘It was just like any other day. I was polishing the floors in reception when Sister Isabel came over and gave me a quarter pound box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray, maybe six or eight chocolates, and a hanky. That was my 21st birthday. It was straight back to work polishing the floor. There was no one else offering any sort of support or friendship.’
For much of the time the girls’ entertainment consisted of imagining what might have been. ‘I remember Joe Dolan was playing in a marquee in Castlepollard and we all sat round fantasising, could we get out and see him? Of course we never did. But that was how we spent a lot of our time. We’d go up to the top of the house to see could we hear the music from the town.’
Some of the girls developed relationships with each other which the nuns never discovered. ‘There were six to eight girls to a dorm,’ said Pat, ‘and at night some girls used to get into bed with each other. There was a lot of pairing off. I was invited into bed with girls from time to time, but for some reason it didn’t appeal to me and I didn’t do it. I knew nothing about lesbianism of course, and it’s only looking back now that I understand what was going on. I’m sure it was just for closeness, a bit of human contact, a cuddle. It was so cold and impersonal there, no one ever touched you, no one held your hand or offered any sort of comfort. But when you’d hear a nun coming at night, they’d all jump out of bed and get back into their own beds.’
Pat had always known that she would have to spend a long time at Castlepollard, for although the home was maintained at public expense, the girls still had to pay for their own and their babies’ upkeep by working. Their labours, of course, also maintained the Sisters of the Sacred Heart who resided at Castlepollard. Girls were not free to leave until alternative arrangements had been made for their children, whether through adoption or a place becoming available in a home for older children. It had also been clear to Pat that her child would eventually be offered for adoption, but as the weeks turned to months, she put the thought out of her head. On Saturdays she would sit and watch visitors coming, imagining that her child’s father might appear one day and take her and the child away. He didn’t come, but a lot of American couples did. ‘They’d come and look at the babies,’ Pat said. ‘I remember this one nun who used to show them around. She was very loud: “Oh no, you can’t have that one,” she would say in her haughty voice, “that one’s gone already but come and look at this one.”’
Pat said there was a rigorous selection process for the children sent to America. ‘They had to be physically perfect, and none of the black babies that were there were ever selected. The nuns inquired into the background of the mother and the father of the child. Background seemed to be very important in making the selection.’
When Trevor was almost 18 months old, on 19 February 1964, Pat was ordered to attend a meeting in the ‘big house’ – the convent. ‘I was told to sit at one end of this long table and at the other end was a man I imagine was a solicitor. In between us were two nuns. I was given a piece of paper and told to sign. I wasn’t told what it was I was signing. Nothing was explained to me. And you daren’t ask, you just did what you were told and got on with it.’ In fact, Pat recalled, this was the third ‘signing’ she had attended, the others being when Trevor was six months old and a year old. She said that on those occasions she wasn’t even allowed to read the papers that were thrust in front of her. The final document she signed read as follows:
I, Patricia Eyres, at present residing at the Sacred Heart Convent, Castlepollard, in the County of Westmeath, Republic of Ireland, make Oath and say as follows:
(1)I hereby relinquish full claim forever to my child Trevor Augustine Eyres, born on the 29th day of August, 1962, and I hereby surrender the said Trevor Augustine Eyres to Catherine McCarthy, known in religion as Rev Mother Rosamonde McCarthy, Sacred Heart Convent, Castlepollard, and I undertake never to make any claim to the said child.
(2)I authorise the said Catherine McCarthy to send my child Trevor Ausgustine Eyres out of the Republic of Ireland for the purpose of legal adoption.
Sworn by the said PATRICIA EYRES at Castlepollard in the County of Westmeath, this 19th day of February 1964 before a Notary Public for the county of Westmeath, and I certify that the Deponent is personally known to me.
Pat, however, said she certainly did not know the Notary Public, the man at the far end of the big table who confirmed her signature, and who certified that he knew her personally. And, as we shall see, at least one of the signatures he said he witnessed was not hers at all.
At no point in any of these proceedings was Pat told what her rights were – or even that she had rights – or advised as to what rights she was signing away, although the Adoption Act required that her right to withdraw her child from adoption at any time before the legal process was completed had to be explained fully to her. But her sense of being shabbily treated was tinged with resignation. ‘What alternative did I have? Absolutely none! I could never have got my child out of there – never – they wouldn’t have let me leave that home with him. I’d nowhere to go. I had nothing, no money, no job, no home of my own. No one ever discussed adoption with me. I was just told that’s what was going to happen. I was too scared to question it. I just accepted it. What else could I do?’
After each of the three signings, Pat said, Father Michael Cleary would mysteriously appear. ‘I’d come out of the room where I had just signed whatever was put in front of me and there would be Mick Cleary. He would just appear from nowhere. I know he had an interest in me and my baby. And I know he was very involved in America at the time too, back and forth all the time.’ Pat was firmly convinced that Cleary was involved in arranging Trevor’s adoption in America.
A couple of days after her last signing, Pat recalled, the child was taken up to Dublin for passport photographs. Official records show that the passport itself was issued by the Department of External Affairs on 8 April 1964, and on the 24 April Trevor was ‘discharged’ for adoption in America.
‘He was 20 months old. That’s how long we had been together,’ Pat said. ‘I was just called over by one of the nuns and told he was going the next day. Up till then I had imagined it wouldn’t really happen. But it was happening. I only had a few more hours. I was given a bundle of clothes and told to get him up early next morning, to give him a bath and get him dressed for the journey. I did everything I’d been told. I washed him and dressed him. I remember so clearly, bringing him down to the side door, hugging him, cuddling him and kissing him, and he was just swiped out of my arms by a nun. All I could think to do was run as fast as I could up to the top of the house to look out this small window to try and get one last look at my child. I saw him getting into the car with a nun. The maintenance man, Mr Murray, was driving. That was the last I saw of him.’
At such a traumatic moment there wasn’t a single word of comfort for Pat. No one seemed to care that she was in bits. And as someone who felt rejected all her life by her own mother and knew the pain that rejection caused she felt doubly guilty that she was now rejecting her own child, even though that was not something she would have wished. ‘I was left numb, just numb. No one offered any counselling or anything like that. I was told I had an hour to pull myself togethe
r and get down to the dining room. A nun just stood over me in silence. Then it was back to work, as if nothing had happened. That was it. No cuddles, no sign of any feelings, nothing. You were just left raw.’ This was how it was, not just for Pat Eyres, but for the thousands of young women consigned to the religious-run mother and baby homes: heartless, vengeful and cruel – and unimaginably damaging psychologically.
A few weeks later Father Michael Cleary reappeared, this time with news of a job for Pat. He had found her a post in South Dublin looking after a six-month-old baby girl recently adopted by a well-known TV personality. ‘I came out of Castlepollard completely raw. I hadn’t had my hair done in two years. I was wearing the same clothes I’d worn going in two years earlier. I was so conspicuous. I remember walking down O’Connell Street thinking everyone was looking at me. It was awful. I was trying to pick up the pieces, trying to meet up with old friends who didn’t know where I’d been for the past two years.’
Within a few months Pat had met the man who was to become her husband, but she never told him about the baby. She feared that if he knew he too would reject her. After their marriage, carrying such a dark secret took its toll on her health. She suffered from depression and was in and out of hospital. Medical professionals knew of her secret and encouraged her to at least tell her husband, but she couldn’t do it. ‘I didn’t want him to think of me the way I’d been made to think of myself, as bad and shameful, just a step away from being a prostitute.’
When her children were born she never seemed happy with them, but exhibited a great deal of anger towards them. ‘You’d have had to live with it to know how bad it was,’ said one of her daughters. ‘We always used to ask ourselves, why is she like this? Why is she always angry with us? And when we were old enough to have our own lives, she wouldn’t let go. She’d go ballistic at the thought of us leaving home. Now we know she was going through mental torture all those years.’
In 1983, on 28 August - the day before Trevor’s 21st birthday – Pat’s mother committed suicide. The combination of her estranged mother’s death and her lost son’s 21st birthday sent her health into another tailspin. Almost 13 more years were to pass before she finally managed to break the cycle.
Pat began her search for Trevor in the summer of 1996, after finally telling her husband about her secret in the wake of the American adoption story breaking. Like many natural mothers she was gently encouraged by remarks made by Dick Spring, Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs. Speaking in Waterford in March that year, Mr Spring had referred to children who had been ‘exported to the United States’ as having been ‘removed from their young and frightened mothers at the most vulnerable possible time in the lives of those mothers.’ The ‘cost in human suffering,’ Spring said, ‘may never be known.’ In referring to the declarations signed by young women like Pat he said he ‘could only imagine the pain that must have been involved.’
While still very far from an apology for the role the State played in exiling thousands of its infant citizens, here for the first time in 34 years was what appeared to be official recognition of the unspoken and unacknowledged trauma that women like Pat had suffered in secret and in silence. And when Mr Spring declared his fervent wish that they could ‘quickly arrive at a point where it will be possible to make information available to people who want help in being reconciled and reunited,’ Pat had every reason to hope that she would be given every assistance in finding Trevor.
On 7 May Pat wrote to Dick Spring seeking his help. Critically, what she needed to know was Trevor’s adopted name and last known address. With that information she could at least start her search. Five weeks later, on 10 June, Mr Spring replied. There was a file on Trevor, his letter confirmed. It was number 345/96/1681. But either the file, or Mr Spring, got the surname wrong: he spelled it ‘Ayres’ instead of ‘Eyres’. A small detail, perhaps, but a mistake that should not have been made in such a personally sensitive matter. What the file showed, the Tanaiste said, was that Trevor’s adoption had been arranged through the Catholic Home Bureau for Dependent Children in New York (a branch of Catholic Charities), and that his adoptive mother was a native of New York State while his adoptive father was Irish-born. The adoption itself, Mr Spring said, had taken place on 3 March 1965. (Another incorrect detail: it had taken place on 4 February.) This was all no doubt very interesting, but what was Trevor’s name now and where in New York had he gone?
Well, said Mr Spring, ‘the National Archive Act 1986 restricts access to information on files in the National Archives relating to individuals in order to protect information supplied in confidence or which might cause distress to living persons. I am advised,’ he went on, ‘that disclosure of information of a personal or private kind without the consent of those to whom it relates could constitute an invasion of their constitutional right to privacy.’ Consequently, his letter concluded, ‘I may not let you have the specific details.’ It was a dreadful blow. The promise of help to those seeking reunification with their kin was a puff of smoke. And Pat wasn’t the only one to get this response: all those seeking assistance from the Department of Foreign Affairs were given the same message.
Pat spoke to an official in the consular section of the Department. ‘I begged him, please don’t leave it too late for mothers like me. We’re not getting any younger. Please give me some information. You’re sitting there in a privileged position with my file in front of you. Tell me something that will help me. Tell mothers like me something that will help them. But he just kept saying he couldn’t. It was confidential.’
Pat didn’t give up. She turned to the Catholic Home Bureau in New York, writing a three page letter to Sister Una McCormack, detailing her ‘dreadful existence’ as a ‘poor young frightened mother’ in Castlepollard in the early 1960s, who was ‘never allowed to leave the building,’ and all of whose ‘mail was vetted by the nuns.’ She complained to Sister Una that ‘this issue is bottom of Mr Dick Spring’s agenda’ and said the ‘lack of urgency is contributing to the anguish of birth mothers and adoptees waiting to obtain the vital information they require.’ Ireland in the 1960s, she said, ‘was very unfair to unmarried mothers, and indeed is not much better now.’ What was needed was ‘someone to have enough courage to address this issue, not only for me but for hundreds of women like me who had to give up their babies against their will in 1960s Ireland.’ Pat also let Sister Una know that she and her family were ‘involving the media in our search.’ Her daughters had written letters to the press and they were meeting with an American television programme called “20/20” who were interested in her story and in her search.
On 28 August she got her reply from the ‘legal department’ of the Catholic Home Bureau. ‘New York State law,’ Sister Margaret Carey wrote, ‘protects agency case record confidentiality and prohibits the release of information by an agency without a court order. Social Service Law Section 372. We wish you well and hope you and your family are enjoying good health.’ Sister Carey enclosed a copy of the surrender document Pat had purportedly signed on 19 February 1964, and which formed the legal basis of Trevor’s adoption in the United States a year later. On the same day, Sister Sarto Harney, social worker with the only remaining branch of the Sacred Heart Adoption Society at Bessboro in Cork, wrote to Pat confirming the name Eyres was on their records, but advising her to contact the North Eastern Health Board in Drogheda where ‘many of the Castlepol- lard USA files’ were held.
Like so many before her and many more since, Pat ended up going from pillar to post. She had identified and contacted the three leading agencies who held detailed information on her son’s adoption – the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Catholic Home Bureau in New York, and the Sacred Heart Adoption Society – but to no avail.
In desperation, she wrote again to Dick Spring in September 1996, complaining that information about herself and her son was being withheld from her. The Department responded by again quoting the National Archive Act and pointing out, with unintende
d irony, that ‘the only item of any importance’ they were withholding was her son’s adopted name and his address. Like the legal department of the Catholic Home Bureau, the Department of Foreign Affairs enclosed a copy of the notarised surrender document Pat was supposed to have signed on 19 February 1964. The point of sending this, presumably, was to remind her that she had not only agreed to her son’s removal from the country for adoption, but had relinquished him ‘forever’.
But with the two surrender documents fortuitously in her possession, Pat now had startling evidence: the signatures on the two pieces of paper, both bearing the same date, and both witnessed by the same Notary Public, were totally and undeniably different. On one document the signature ‘Patricia Eyres’ is written in a neat, even hand, the small clear letters sloping backwards. On the other the signature is different in every respect, with larger and more uneven letters, differently formed and falling somewhere between upright and forward-sloping. The difference was blatant and undisguised. One of the documents was used to legitimise the removal of Pat’s child from the country, the other to legitimise his adoption in the States. The fact that one was clearly not signed by her may have nullified the entire adoption procedure – had anyone cared to look.
But in the short term Pat was more interested in finding her son than in making a fuss about forged signatures. By various routes – many of them pursued by the American television programme, “20/20” – Pat had finally come up with a name and an address, and contact was made with a 34-year-old male in the States. Excitement in Pat’s house was at an all time high. She and her daughters were talking to the Irish papers about the imminent happy outcome of their quest. But it turned out to be a false trail. The final breakthrough came only by subterfuge when a woman who was helping Pat in her search gained unexpected and unassisted access to records that had previously been denied her. What she found was Trevor’s adopted name: John Patrick Campbell. Further searches in New York State by “20/20” turned up old school friends and, eventually, the woman who had adopted Pat’s child in 1965. When contacted by the people from the television programme, Mrs Campbell revealed the awful news – John was dead.