Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business

by Mike Milotte

  The programme-makers passed on the tragic news to Sister Una McCormack at the Catholic Home Bureau and asked her to tell Pat. And so it was, one night at the end of October 1996, Pat got a call from Sister Una. She knew almost at once that the news was bad. Sister Una herself broke down in the telling of it. John had died 13 years earlier and the circumstances of his death were themselves tragic. His adoptive parents had given him a car for his 21st birthday. He had been arrested soon after for speeding and detained overnight by the police. The next morning he was found dead in his cell. Pat found that after her son’s death three local policemen, including the police chief, were removed from their posts. Suicide was suspected, which would have been remarkable given that her own mother had committed suicide just days beforehand – on the very day John Patrick Campbell celebrated his 21st birthday.

  ‘He had so much to live for,’ said Pat, gently fingering three small photographs of her son, sent to her by Mrs Campbell. John was a tall, good-looking young man with fiery red hair and a winning smile. ‘I know he got a fantastic home in America,’ Pat said. ‘His parents loved him dearly.’ She had spoken to Mrs Campbell by telephone.

  John was in college and he had been accepted by the American Space Agency, NASA. He had a girlfriend, a student nurse, and they were planning on getting engaged. He had a sister in the States who was also adopted from Ireland and she had found her natural mother. ‘That fascinated him,’ Pat said, ‘and he had told his adoptive mother he was going to look for me once he had finished college. He never got the chance. I had hoped for a happy reunion. I never thought I would outlive my child.’

  The one small consolation Pat had was that John’s adoptive parents had told him from the earliest time that he was adopted, ‘and they told him I gave him up because I loved him so much, that I wanted him to have a better life than I could have given him in Ireland. So maybe he didn’t think too badly of me.’

  Castlepollard ceased to function as a mother and baby home in 1969. It is now a home for people with mental disability. While she was looking for her son, Pat went back on a visit. Although she hadn’t been there for 32 years she found her way instinctively to the room at the top of the house from which she had caught the last glimpse of Trevor. ‘It’s just as it was then,’ she said. ‘The radiator under the window still bears the marks of where hundreds of girls like me climbed up to see their babies for the very last time. If nothing else, I hope my story will help some of them find the courage to do something about this wall of silence and all this dreadful secrecy.’

  Pat Thuillier died suddenly at home in Dublin in October 2010.

  *****

  In March 1998 I received a moving letter from PJ. Murray whose father, Mickey Murray, was the maintenance man at Castlepollard, the man identified by Pat Thuillier as the driver of the car in which Trevor departed the home in 1964. P.J. had read Banished Babies and wanted to let me know that Mickey was ‘a good man, honest and hard working’. But, PJ. said, he never spoke at home of what happened at the ‘orphanage’. PJ. mentioned the small cemetery attached to Castlepollard where an unknown number of infants lay buried in unmarked graves. ‘There was no attempt at equality,’ PJ. wrote. The single monument in the cemetery ‘asked only for prayers for the Sisters of the Sacred Heart.’ And PJ. ended by saying there was ‘a strong case for the State to answer to the girls who suffered in these convents. They and their children were wrongfully separated, and someone must be accountable.’ A decade and a half later, that accountability is still sorely lacking.

  12. Mary, Michael and Kevin:

  Legitimate Error?

  ‘I arrived in Dublin on the train from Cork, got a taxi to Abbey Street to the office of St Patrick’s Guilds, and I handed over my child to a nun. I don’t remember signing any documents and I don’t remember seeing anyone else in the room other than a nun taking the child out of my arms. I just walked out of there onto the street. It was dreadful, parting with your child is so traumatic. If I was in my right mind and had support of some kind it wouldn’t have happened that way. But I was alone. That was life at the time and I just had to face it.’

  Mary, 1996

  It was in August 1961 when Mary Cunningham, a young nurse at Tullamore hospital, realised she was pregnant.1 She wasn’t married. ‘I couldn’t have told my mother,’ said Mary, ‘no way could I have told her. My mother was very religious, very Catholic.’ Mary was the only girl of four children and her mother had been very protective of her all her life. ‘So if she found out that I was pregnant it would have destroyed her. I made up my mind that I would never tell her.’

  A doctor friend at the hospital where she worked told Mary about the Sacred Heart Convent at Bessboro in Cork. It had been the first maternity home in Ireland for single pregnant women and girls. Mary decided ‘there and then’ that she would have her baby secretly with the nuns in Cork. ‘The question of keeping the baby afterwards didn’t even arise,’ she said. ‘I had no choice in the matter. My mind was made up for me – wherever or however – it was made up for me.’

  At the Cork convent Mary was put to work in the nursery, looking after other women’s children. ‘I was fairly privileged because I was a nurse and they had me minding the babies,’ she recalled, ‘but the other girls were out working the fields, milking the cows, bringing in the potatoes, working in the kitchens, cleaning and scrubbing. It wasn’t an easy life. We didn’t have comfortable facilities, all very basic. But we did have some kind of fun among ourselves to lighten our burden.’

  Sister Mary was one of the nuns at the Sacred Heart Convent in those days, working in one of the three nurseries. ‘Many people speak of how hard done by the girls were, working in fields, in the laundry, and so on,’ she said, ‘ but no pregnant girl ever worked in the fields.’2

  They farmed to feed themselves, growing all of their own fruit and vegetables, making jam and pickles, operating a bakery, keeping hens, pigs, sheep and cattle, and producing milk, butter, eggs and meat. ‘No girl,’ Sister Mary said, ‘was put out in the fields against her wishes. Most did not object as they came from farming backgrounds and loved being out in the fresh air. The girls had great fun during the thrashing and hay-making.’ Girls who didn’t want to work outside ‘helped’ with indoor tasks like stoking the boiler and sluicing the dirty nappies.

  ‘In the evening,’ Sister Mary recalled, ‘we listened to the radio, danced to the music, played records and games of cards and draughts. Sometimes we had concerts. The girls used to impersonate the nuns. They had great fun dressing up.’ Mr Crowley from Cork fire brigade used to bring boxes of sweets for the girls and their children – of whom there were around 100 at any one time. Santa came at Christmas while at Easter the Cork Junior Chamber of Commerce brought Easter eggs.

  Sister Sarto, the senior social worker at Bessboro, described life at the home in these terms: ‘No girl was compelled to go out and work. She was asked would she mind. But of course society in Ireland was harsh, but we didn’t complain. That’s the way it was. Everyone lived that way. The girls that came here, of course, had been rejected by society as well. And yes, it was a harsh regime.’3

  In the eyes of the nuns at that time, they were dealing with ‘fallen women’, sinners who had to see the error of their ways and repent. They were engaged in saving souls as well as delivering and disposing of babies. There was nothing joyous about giving birth in a convent. And the harshness Sister Sarto acknowledged seemed to extend into the labour wards. Certainly Mary Cunningham’s experience of giving birth was traumatic. It was on the night of 26 March 1962. She was in a locked room, alone, when she went into labour. ‘I’ll never forget when the morning came, after being in pain all night, I was so thrilled to hear the rattle of keys,’ Mary said. ‘The door opened and a nun brushed in, pegging her veil across her face. She just glanced at me lying there and said, “Oh there’s not a sign of you having your baby yet,” and off she went to 6 o’clock Mass leaving me alone again. Kenneth, my baby, was born at 8.00 am. That w
as very, very traumatic.’

  But what followed was even more devastating for Mary. ‘It was just three weeks after Kenneth’s birth. I was happily minding him and the other babies in the nursery when one of the nuns just walked up to me and said, “There’s two bottles of milk and here’s a bundle of clothes. Put them on your baby straight away. We’ve got adoptive parents in America who match up with your background and he’s going to America for adoption.” I was so shocked and numbed. It was all done so suddenly and without any feeling or sympathy.’

  Mary had been told by the nuns that because she was still involved in a serious relationship with Kenneth’s father, Michael, it would be unsafe to place Kenneth with an Irish couple here as there was a possibility she and Michael would try to get him back. Adoption in America would rule out this ‘danger’. ‘I have no doubt whatever that it was a deliberate policy to put the Atlantic Ocean between me and the child,’ said Mary. ‘The nuns said as much. And they said I would have to relinquish all rights to see him again.’ Mary’s recollection contrasts with the explanation given by Sister Mary of the Sacred Heart Convent of how it came about that some children rather than others were sent to the United States. ‘It was the girls themselves decided,’ she said. ‘They chose to let their children go to America. Nobody made them. It was their own free choice.’4 The Sacred Heart Convent in Cork sent just 100 babies to America, a relatively small number compared with the other Sacred Heart homes in Roscrea and Castlepollard, which sent 750 between them.

  At the time when she first learned Kenneth was going to America, Mary assumed because of the suddenness of it all that he was going more or less immediately, a belief that was strengthened by the fact that she was put on a train that very day and sent up to Dublin to hand her baby over to St Patrick’s Guild who, she was told, had arranged the adoption.

  ‘Well, I got on the Dublin train, but I was absolutely in bits. I’ll never forget it. I had my little baby in my arms wrapped in a shawl. I had two bottles of milk. I sat down opposite two old ladies, and I was crying. These two ladies helped me change the child because I just couldn’t cope. It seemed such a long journey, and I cried all the way to Dublin. When I got there I got a taxi to Abbey Street where I handed my child over to a nun. That was the last time I saw him for 33 years.’

  Mary, of course, was just one of hundreds of girls and young women who passed through St Patrick’s Guild every year. Sister Frances Elizabeth, one-time Superior, wrote of them: ‘These unfortunate girls are of good class with, usually, excellent backgrounds. In most cases it is imperative that they return to their employment within a fortnight, or less, after the birth. Many of them are working in such places as government offices, solicitors’ offices and commercial offices, schools or hospitals.’5 Sister Elizabeth also emphasised the need for secrecy: ‘In such circumstances the greatest secrecy is not merely desirable but essential. Should there be a shadow of suspicion or scandal the girl’s whole future might be in jeopardy.’

  Mary Cunningham, of course, felt the need for secrecy, especially from her ‘very religious, very Catholic’ mother, and, ironically perhaps, she was to find the most willing accomplices in the nuns of St Patrick’s Guild who prided themselves in cultivating attitudes of concealment. It was religion that demanded such concealment and it was the religious who provided it, like some self-fulfilling prophecy. No one, it seems, had any idea about the possible longterm psychological problems that could arise from feeling compelled to keep secret something as traumatic as the birth and relinquishment of a child.

  Michael, who worked in a bank, also felt he could not openly admit to having fathered an ‘illegitimate’ child. To do so could have jeopardised his job. ‘My family would have been a big concern, of course,’ said Michael, ‘but also my peers, people in the bank. I couldn’t have told them. The consequences could have been serious.’ Under the circumstances, Michael said, he tried to take a positive view of having his son adopted in America. ‘The way I felt at the time was, well, going to America was good for the child.It was a developed society and he was going to get a good home. It was very easy to convince oneself that he was going to get a home better than the one we could give him. But I regret not having had the moral courage to face down society and do the decent thing and get married and hold on to our baby, but I just wasn’t able to do it.’

  The need for secrecy also meant that frightened women like Mary Cunningham weren’t in any position to insist that their rights be upheld in the course of having their children adopted. It is, of course, probable that Mary Cunningham signed whatever documents were necessary to make Kenneth’s adoption in America possible, but she has no recollection of doing so because of the state she was in – a factor that might have called into question the legality of the entire procedure. ‘I blanked out everything,’ she said, ‘except handing my child over to a nun. That image is firmly in my mind, but I remember nothing at all of who else was there or whether I signed anything, or what I signed if I signed.’

  The Department of External Affairs insisted that a mother like Mary give her consent before it would issue a passport enabling her child to travel abroad for adoption. But all that the officials in the Department saw was the piece of signed paper. They could not even begin to imagine the circumstances in which women like Mary signed these ‘legal’ documents. The chances are that when she handed over Kenneth, Mary Cunningham signed a document, much like the one signed by Pat Thuillier, that would have included phrases to the effect that she ‘relinquished full claim forever’ to her child, that she ‘surrendered the said child to Sister... of St Patrick’s Guild’ to enable her to make the child ‘available for adoption to any person she considers fit and proper inside or outside the State.’6

  The precise form in which a mother’s consent was obtained varied from institution to institution and also changed over time, and although the legal status of such documents has never been tested it must be seriously in doubt. A document like this would certainly not be adequate in legalising an adoption within Ireland because the mother could not delegate her consent to others. But in Mary Cunningham’s case it wasn’t just the nature of her ‘consent’ that was in question. Something else happened that was clearly and seriously improper. But she was only to find out about it more than thirty years later. In effect, Kenneth was sent illegally to the United States.

  In October 1962, when Kenneth was almost seven months old, Mary and Michael got married. Michael takes up the story: ‘When we got married we assumed that Kenneth was already in America. That’s what we’d been told. “He’s going straight to the US within days,” so we assumed we had no access. It was only afterwards, when we found him again thirty-odd years later that we realised he was still in Dublin long after we married. St Patrick’s Guild knew Mary and I were still together. Now with the baby still being in Dublin, I’d have expected contact to have been made with us. It came as a great shock to learn he was in Dublin for 20 months before he was sent to the United States and we were married for more than twelve of those months.’

  By marrying, Mary and Michael had ‘legitimised’ Kenneth’s birth, and under the 1952 Adoption Act it was a criminal offence to send a ‘legitimate’ child out of the country for adoption abroad. The nuns probably knew nothing of their marriage, but it is not clear if they tried to find out. (Ironically, a Supreme Court decision in the late 1970s – that the distinction between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ children in the Adoption Act was unconstitutional – had the effect of retrospectively legalising Kenneth’s removal from the country in 1963). At the time of Mary and Michael’s marriage, Kenneth was in the care of the Sisters of Charity at Temple Hill ‘orphanage’, home to most of the children sent for adoption by St Patrick’s Guild. Kenneth – or Kevin as he now is – often wonders how he was treated during those 20 months of institutional life: was he picked up and talked to? Was he cuddled and shown real affection? Or was he just left lying in a cot?

  The process that was to culminate
in Kenneth’s dispatch to the States began in November 1962, the month following Michael and Mary’s marriage. On the 5th of November, Sister Xaveria, the nun in charge of St Patrick’s Guild, wrote to a Mr and Mrs Bates of New York who had applied to her for a baby to adopt. She sent them a copy of Archbishop McQuaid’s requirements for the adoption of children outside the country and told them when these were met to the satisfaction of His Grace ‘we will select a nice little baby for you.’ The required documents were duly procured by Mr and Mrs Bates, sent to Sister Xaveria and approved by Archbishop McQuaid. All that was left to be done was for the nuns to select a baby boy, and the one selected was Kenneth Cunningham.

  ‘If we had known that our child was still in Dublin when we married,’ said Michael, ‘an obvious choice would have been to go and take our baby back. We were in a predicament of course, because we had told no one about the baby before we married and Mary still couldn’t tell her mother. So we couldn’t suddenly produce this baby out of the blue and say it was ours. But we could have overcome that by adopting our own baby, telling everyone we had adopted a baby. But we didn’t get that choice. We didn’t know it was there for us.’

  All together it was a shoddy business, but one founded on the notion that neither Mary nor her baby had any rights worth considering. None of this became apparent until 1995 when Mary and Michael finally found their (by now) 33-year-old son, Kevin Bates. Kevin was able to tell them that he had arrived in America in November 1963 –at precisely the time of President Kennedy’s assassination, and some 13 months after Mary and Michael had married, and 20 months after Mary had handed him over to the nuns at St Patrick’s Guild. If this came as a shock for Mary and Michael, Kevin, too, was astonished to learn that not only had his natural parents married but they had gone on to have six more children. He had six full brothers and sisters in Ireland. It was all the more poignant since Kevin had grown up in America as the only child of a couple who, although devout Catholics, had divorced when he was in his teens.