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

by Mike Milotte

  When Maureen was ten years old her school called her parents in and told them they didn’t consider Maureen a suitable pupil. She was taken out of the school and put into the public school system. ‘When I left Catholic school and went public, they were very, very angry about that. In fact they were furious, especially my mother. She was very upset that I wasn’t going to get a Catholic education. I remember they even tried to bribe me to stay in Catholic school by telling me I’d get a car when I was old enough if I went to a Catholic University. I was just a child. You don’t think that far ahead when you are a child, so promises like that really didn’t have any impact. But looking back I can see now how important the whole Catholic education thing was to them.’ Only in later life, when Maureen looked more closely at the box of papers she had found as a child in her parents’ bottom drawer did she see the copy of the affidavit Jim and Dorothy Rowe had signed all those years ago. They had sworn a solemn oath that if the nuns in Ireland gave them a child they would educate her in Catholic schools, all the way through to university. ‘When I saw that affidavit and read it, I understood why they had reacted as they did when I left the Catholic school system. I had made them break their word. My mother especially was obsessed about it. It really had a huge impact on her and on the way she treated me. I can now see it was around then she really got to be very harsh towards me. She had wanted to make me turn out like her, and it wasn’t happening.’

  It was around this time that Mrs Rowe added a new dimension to the story about Maureen’s adoption. ‘She started telling me I had been an unwanted baby, that my real mother didn’t love me, that she had abandoned me, and that I should show more gratitude to her for taking me in. It was all this stuff about how awful and terrible my natural mother had been and how wonderful she was to have given me a home. I suppose it was to make me feel guilty as much as grateful, you know, because I wasn’t turning out to be such a good Catholic after all.’ Harsh words were followed by harsh treatment, but Maureen doesn’t like to dwell on that side of the story.

  For the next 25 years of her life, Maureen lived with this image of herself as an unwanted, unloved, abandoned baby. ‘All my life I carried that, because of the way it was presented to me. She never missed an opportunity to tell me I owed her a great debt of gratitude. And living with the thought that your natural mother just abandoned you – that was baggage you carry all your life.’

  And there were other negative factors too. Despite the fact that both Jim and Dorothy Rowe had met Archbishop McQuaid’s health requirements, by supplying a doctor’s certificate stating they were both ‘in very good health’, Mrs Rowe, in fact, had suffered from rheumatoid arthritis since she was 20 years old, 20 years before she adopted Maureen. She was in a wheelchair for much of Maureen’s adolescence, which added to the difficulties that already existed between mother and daughter. It was clear that no independent check had been carried out on the state of Mrs Rowe’s health. Someone in her condition would have had difficulty adopting a child in Ireland.

  At the same time, curiosity about her natural mother continued to grow in Maureen. ‘Just who was this woman, and did she really abandon me? You fantasise about her being a wonderful and famous person, beautiful, rich, all that sort of stuff, and you imagine a terrible mistake was made, or a wicked person took you away, anything so you weren’t just dumped.’

  In childhood little can be done to satisfy the urge to know, but at 18, newly independent, with a job and a flat of her own, Maureen decided to have a go. It was the beginning of a painful search that was to take another 18 years to complete. She described it as ‘18 years of frustration, like banging my head off a brick wall, knowing someone had this information and they just weren’t going to give it to me.’ As a first step she wrote to the nuns at Castlepollard, saying she had lost her original birth certificate and could she please have a replacement. This was a document she had never seen before. Within weeks she had in her hands the official record of her birth, her mother’s name included.

  That’s when I had to make my mind up – did I want to find her or not? Was I going to get into something here that might end in tears for everyone? I mean, I’d been told she didn’t want me, so why should it be any different now, and why should I go looking for someone who abandoned me in the first place? But then I’d say to myself, well that’s someone else’s opinion, that she didn’t want me. She hasn’t told me that herself. I haven’t heard it from her. “I don’t want you, please don’t bother me, you’re being a pain”. If I heard that from her then I could let this thing rest. I have to know was I wanted, what was the situation, was it difficult, did she ever think about me, did she just walk away and say “okay, bye now, that’s it, and don’t ever come looking for me”?

  Maureen’s first efforts to find her mother were dispiriting. ‘When I knew her name I got in touch with Father Regan at Castlepollard. It was amazing, because he knew me, he called me by my birth name, Marion. He got me to write her a letter and said he’d forward it. Then I’d get back to him and he’d say he had no reply and maybe I should just accept that she wasn’t interested. That kind of made me think well maybe she doesn’t want to know, maybe I should just let things lie. And so I backed off for two or three years and did nothing.’

  In the meantime Maureen had married. Her husband was in the hotel business and they were comfortably well- off. To anyone who didn’t know her well, Maureen seemed to have everything and certainly no reason for discontentment. But she was still carrying this burden of uncertainty about her own origins. It just nagged at her all the time. Then she got pregnant. ‘Suddenly I started thinking again about her in a concentrated way, you know, that she was pregnant with me once, what was it like for her? What happened that made it all work out this way? And where is she now? What is she doing? Has she any other grandchildren?

  Have I any brothers or sisters? All these things go on in your head. So one day I just picked up the phone and rang Father Regan again at Castlepollard and a secretary answered. She said, “Oh are you one of those children from the United States?” When she said that I had the weirdest feeling, I wasn’t alone, there were others like me, other people who must have been doing what I was doing, trying to find out who they were, what had happened in their lives. It was funny knowing other people out there were feeling the same way as me.’

  Maureen was put through to Father Regan, and even though a few years had passed since they last spoke, he still remembered who she was and called her Marion. ‘I knew he was just putting me off, distracting me, giving me little bits of information. He’d tell me a little bit about her, like the colour of her hair, her height, her background, but never enough to help me find her, and that would be it. And I found out afterwards that not everything I was told had been true. I was told my mother’s father was a clock- maker and had a shop. In fact he worked for the post-office. I had been told my mother was a nurse when she was really a teacher. So for years I was looking for the wrong person.’

  Maureen wrote several letters to her mother, care of Father Regan. ‘Of course as I was to find out later my mother never received any of my letters. I don’t think they wanted me to find her, they didn’t want it to come to a conclusion. It was a control thing. They had separated us and they were going to keep us apart. They probably thought it was for the best, you know, put all that behind you and get on with your life. But what right did they have to make such decisions?’

  Father Regan, of course, was a traditionalist. He had come into the adoption business when the prevailing theory favoured closed adoptions, a system in which, once separated, mother and child were never to see one another again. Father Cecil Barrett spelled it out in his definitive guide to adoption practice. “The child will never know his own parent... he will never know his mother,’ Barrett wrote, and ‘she knows that she will never see her child again, that she will never know him.’2 Helping reunite adopted people with their natural mothers was not part of the Church’s agenda.

  In her
frustration Maureen considered coming to Ireland to confront Father Regan face to face. ‘One time I said to him, “am I going to have to come over there to get this information out of you? There’s no problem with me getting on a plane and coming over.” I was thinking, put the heat on a bit, he doesn’t want to look me in the eye and tell me his lies. So he told me then she wasn’t in Ireland any more, that she had actually lived in America and then the Bahamas, and she had married. But he wouldn’t tell me her husband’s name and of course he wouldn’t give me her address. After a while it finally dawned on me that he just couldn’t care less. I wasn’t so much resentful as frustrated. I felt I was being treated like a child and that was difficult. I wasn’t a kid, I was 36, not three or four.’

  Then in 1992 Maureen made contact with a social worker at a Dublin adoption advice agency. The social worker wrote to Father Regan on Maureen’s behalf, but he didn’t reply. The advice agency next wrote to Sister Sarto Harney, senior social worker with the Sacred Heart Adoption Society in Cork. The Sacred Heart nuns had run Castlepollard where Maureen had been born. When Castle- pollard ceased to function as an ‘orphanage’ the records had gone to Sister Sarto. When Sister Sarto wrote back to the social worker in Dublin she gave some useful information: Maureen’s mother had originally been from North Dublin.

  In February 1994 the adoption advice agency wrote again to Maureen to say they had contacted Father Regan by phone and he had given them some startling news. It was something that gave Maureen great hope: her mother had actually contacted Father Regan at Castlepollard back in 1963 looking for information about her child’s whereabouts. Amazingly, through all their correspondence and telephone conversations over a period of a dozen years or more, the priest had never once divulged this information to Maureen. Father Regan also told the social workers that ‘due to confidentiality’ he was not prepared to pass on the last address he had on file for Maureen’s mother, an address in the Bahamas. This infuriated Maureen as she felt that if she had the address she could start to trace her mother. What was more, the address had now been on the priest’s files for more than 30 years. Maureen feared the trail could have gone cold. ‘If I’d had that address when I contacted Father Regan the very first time, look how much closer I would have been to her – fifteen years instead of thirty.’ By the summer of 1995 the social workers were reporting ‘deadlock’ as far as Castlepollard was concerned. Father Regan was ‘out sick’ and no one was handling his work. Father Regan died a few months later without casting any further light on the whereabouts of Maureen’s mother.

  In the meantime Maureen had written to the Angel Guardian Home in Brooklyn, the people who had helped organise her adoption back in 1960. They replied with a lot of standard information based on a review of her file: her date of birth and weight at birth; the fact that she cut her first tooth at five months, had arrived in the United States in August 1960 and was adopted in December 1961. The file said there was no ‘serious mental or physical illness in the family’, and that her mother was ‘a pleasant, friendly girl of average weight and height with blue eyes and brown wavy hair.’

  For the first time since she had started to look for her mother, Maureen found a reference to her father. According to the Angel Guardian Home: ‘There isn’t any information on the putative father. He did not acknowledge paternity or contribute to your support.’

  ‘My response to that was, what a creep,’ Maureen said. ‘And then you would wonder, was it rape? You know, you hardly every think about the father. I suppose it’s the way our society is in these situations. You don’t really expect the father to stick around. You look for your mother because you would have expected to have been with her even if she wasn’t married. So when you learn something about your father, and it’s negative, I suppose it just reinforces something that was there already. I mean you wouldn’t have expected anything different.’

  But if there was nothing in the response from the Angel Guardian Home that would help her find her mother, the Dublin social workers at least had one final suggestion as to where Maureen might turn for help: a woman called Anne who specialised in tracing and reuniting, and who didn’t charge for her help. Anne knew how the system worked, where the public records were and how to access them and cross-reference them.

  ‘So I got in touch with Anne. She asked me to send all my papers and she would do her best. It was amazing, within six months she had found my mother. I’d been looking for 18 years.’ Anne had worked independently of the Church. She had traced Maureen’s mother’s family in north Dublin and through them, without divulging anything about the reasons for her search, had discovered a current address for Maureen’s mother. She was living with her husband in the United States.

  When Maureen found out how close she now was to making the contact she had craved for so long she became nervous. ‘You know I was still thinking all this stuff I’d been told as a child, that my mother didn’t want anything to do with me. But Anne helped me think positively about a reunion. She was able to explain what it had been like for single mothers in Ireland in the 1950s, the pressures on them, the lack of support. I began to understand a little bit better that there was a lot more to this than rejection. I began to feel compassion towards my mother. This would be important for her as well as for me. She would be able to know that I was well, that I had a family, that she was a grandmother to six smashing kids. And that I had no resentment towards her. Making contact now would bring a sort of closure to what was a painful experience for both of us.’ Maureen didn’t rush the contact. ‘I prepared myself. I got all these books and articles about adoption from the birth mother’s point of view. I read and read, especially about the worst scenarios. I suppose I prepared myself for the worst and hoped for the best. I didn’t know what I was going to find. Did she want to be contacted? Did she care? Anne made the first approach, discreetly, to see if Maureen’s mother wanted to be contacted by her daughter. The answer was yes, she did. ‘So Anne gave me her phone number and I called. It was difficult on the phone, you know, emotional, but still sort of anonymous. She was in Florida, I was in Virginia. We agreed to meet, so I flew down to her. Meeting your own mother face to face after 36 years – that’s some experience. There was no resentment on my part at what she had done and no anger from her that I had suddenly burst into her life. She was wonderful.’

  In the course of the first meeting with her mother and in subsequent conversations, Maureen was to make some startling discoveries. ‘My mother told me that a few years after my birth she had written to Castlepollard and left her address and said if ever Marion comes looking for me this is where I am. And she wrote to the nuns: “any news of Marion?” And she looked in the States, but every avenue was just shut in her face. They’d just tell her, “look, forget about it.” Maureen’s mother confirmed this. ‘I visited Castlepollard on occasion and met with Father Regan,’ she said. ‘He knew where I was in the Bahamas and the States, but I never got any letters from him at any time. And I used to correspond with the Mother Superior at the orphanage and would get replies from her six months later. But she never indicated she knew anything about Marion.’

  Maureen is convinced it was a deliberate policy not to help reunite them. ‘They knew she was looking for me and they knew I was looking for her but still they wouldn’t give either of us the information. They just weren’t going to do it. There was still that control, being treated like a child when you’re not a child: we’ll make your decisions for you, and we decide you’re not going to find her.’

  Maureen also learned of the circumstances which led to her being born in Castlepollard. Her mother had been seeing a man quite a few years older than herself, Jan, who was a 36-year-old Dutchman working in Dublin. When her mother got pregnant, far from denying paternity Jan had found a flat for them both to live in. But in the meantime Maureen’s mother had turned to a priest she knew for advice and he forbade her from ‘living in sin’ with her child’s father. As Jan was a Protestant who had been married
once before and divorced, marriage in Ireland to a Catholic girl was out of the question.

  Partly to get her away from Jan and the ‘occasion of sin’, and partly to avoid scandalising her family, the priest arranged for Maureen’s mother to have her baby in Castle- pollard. Maureen was told by her mother that Jan had contributed financially while she was at Castlepollard, information that flatly contradicted the dispiriting news Maureen had been given by the Angel Guardian Home about her father denying paternity and contributing nothing towards her support. Maureen also learned that Jan had come to see them both after the birth but had been turned away by the nuns. Nor had he simply abandoned his daughter. In fact he had proposed taking baby Marion back to Holland, but Maureen’s mother didn’t want to give her up: she was determined to keep her and look after her herself.

  The unconventional relationship between Maureen’s mother and father had little chance of success in the Ireland of 1960. They would have to go their separate ways. Maureen’s mother stayed on with her baby at Castlepollard for a few months. She had no complaints at all about her treatment. As a private, paying client – unlike most girls who were there at public expense – Maureen’s mother was not required to do any manual work, and was treated with common decency if not respect. Money, as always, talked to the nuns. But the Sisters at Castlepollard put pressure on her to agree to give her baby up for adoption. She resisted. They then informed her that her baby was sickly and would require greater care and attention than she could hope to provide as an unmarried mother. This was untrue. The child had had a stomach disorder in early infancy, but at the time of going to America she had been given a completely clean bill of health.