https://www.independent.ie/news/richard-mulligans-story-my-mum-held-me-for-an-hour-at-sean-ross-before-i-was-taken-39962393.htmlRichard Mulligan’s story: ‘My mum held me for an hour at Séan Ross before I was taken’
Melanie Finn
January 12 2021 09:32 PM
Richard Mulligan’s mother Mary got to hold her newborn son for just over an hour at Sean Ross Abbey near Roscrea before he was taken away from her in 1961. She was never told what happened to him, and she spent four more years effectively incarcerated in the Tipperary Mother and Baby home. However, when asked by the nuns to sign over for her baby for adoption mostly likely to a family in America she staunchly dug in her heels and refused. As her son Richard recalled, she would have suffered for her decision and “was beaten because of it”. “She was virtually in prison for four years there. She never knew where I was, had I left or was I still there. They told her nothing,” he said.
Previously married to a man who left her to go to England, she went on to have a relationship with a married man living locally and got pregnant when she was 35. She had every intention of keeping her baby, who would have been a sibling to her other son Joseph, before the authorities suddenly intervened. “A few days before she was due, a local garda and the priest and the doctor took her forcefully away from her house, down to Sean Ross Abbey,” he told RTÉ’s Ray D’Arcy Show.
She would spend nearly 30 years wondering what had happened to her infant son who was taken away from her. But a determined Richard managed to track her down to her cottage near Clifden, Co Galway in 1990, much to her shock. He had been adopted when he was nearly three-years-old by John and Mary Mulligan, a loving family who he said “saved me” and had an idyllic childhood growing up on their farm in east Galway. It wasn’t until the birth of his first son Richard in 1988 that he first decided to try and track down his biological mother. In 1990, he had an emotional reunion with Mary Flaherty at her cottage in Galway, after finding her through a death notice that she posted when she lost her first son Joseph. “I just remember opening the gate to her house and the door was open in her cottage and I saw the movement inside the house. My heart nearly stopped because this is the first glimpse of your mother and you have all these images in your head of what she’s going to look like,” he said.
“She just stood at the door and was totally stunned. I said to her, my name is Richard and I hope you don’t mind me calling. She just went totally numb at that moment. She didn’t say a word. I kept saying, ‘I just want you to know that I’m alive and I’m OK and I won’t ever come back if you don’t want me to’. And she stopped me at that point and she said, ‘No I want you to come back’.”
The pair slowly built up a relationship from that point until her death in 2015 but Richard said that she rarely talked about her time in Sean Ross. Today’s publication of the report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes has “unsettled” him. He said he had always felt slightly apart from other children. “It brought up a lot of things, the cruelty of it all. It’s my mother I feel for and the guilt of what she went through for me…She was very damaged by the whole thing,” he said.
Richard, who was once a champion long-distance runner, believes he inherited his love of music from her and has released a track entitled ‘I Never Met You’ inspired by his biological father. Today has seen a huge outpouring of reaction from survivors of the mother and baby homes, with testimonials detailing unbelievable cruelty, abuse and infant mortality. However, the woman whose investigative work first helped expose the mass grave with the bodies of nearly 800 babies at the site of the Tuam Mother and Baby home said she was disappointed by the report. Historian Catherine Corless said she got no further enlightenment after listening to the Taoiseach and the Children’s Minister, after they made a presentation to survivors earlier today. She hoped that survivors would get some idea of what would follow after the publication of the report. “We have waited three years after the babies were discovered (at Tuam), and then another year. Why on earth is it taking until the end of the year, when the Oireachtas can do it within a few weeks if they wanted?”
She described the Government's webinar with survivors today as a "whitewash, full of political jargon". Ms Corless said survivors felt "deflated" after the session, and that there was "utter confusion" among them.
