Ireland
Mother and baby homes: NI-born survivor ‘abandoned again’
Mother and baby homes: NI-born survivor ‘abandoned again’
Published 18 March
By Eimear Flanagan BBC News NI
A woman from Dublin, born into a mother and baby home in Northern Ireland, has said she feels “abandoned again” because she is excluded from a new compensation scheme. Sinead Buckley was born in 1972 to an unmarried woman from the Republic of Ireland. At that time her mother, Eileen, was living in Marianvale in Newry. A midwife in Dublin, Eileen came north because of the fear and stigma associated with being a single mother. Marianvale was one of a network of institutions across the island of Ireland which housed unmarried women and their babies at a time when pregnancy outside marriage was viewed as scandalous. After the birth in Newry’s Daisy Hill Hospital, an adoption agency in the Republic arranged for Eileen’s baby to be adopted by a family in Dublin. Ms Buckley grew up and still lives in Dublin, but never got to meet her birth mother. Eileen died during a Covid lockdown which meant she endured the heartbreak of watching her mother’s funeral over the internet. This week, the Republic of Ireland will open an €800m (£684m) redress scheme, external for survivors of its own mother and baby homes. Ms Buckley is one of thousands of Irish adoptees who will not qualify, despite her decades-long battle with the Irish state to access her birth identity and family medical history. “I grew up with a sense of rejection and abandonment and I feel like I’ve just been completely abandoned again,” she told BBC News NI.
“I used to be proud to be Irish, I’m not anymore. I’m not Irish what I am?”
Ireland’s Department of Children said that Marianvale was outside the Republic’s jurisdiction, adding there were “processes ongoing in Northern Ireland to respond to these legacy issues”.
But as a Dubliner, born to parents from the Republic, Ms Buckley said she cannot understand why she is excluded from the Irish redress scheme “because I was born a few miles over the border and adopted back here”.
Who qualifies for compensation?
Under the rules, mothers who spent even one night in an eligible institution in the Republic will receive compensation. Payments start at €5,000 (£4,275) and rise incrementally based on length of stay, external. But former child residents only qualify if they spent six months or more in homes. Marianvale is not on the list of eligible institutions, but even if it was, Ms Buckley would still not be entitled to compensation because it appears she was resident for less than six months. “I wish someone would explain the six-month thing to me because we’ve suffered through life,” she said.
“There’s absolutely no humanity in this decision.”
She added she paid Irish taxes all her life and now the Irish state “isn’t recognising me”. “For me it’s not about the money, it’s about the principle,” she said. “I want to be vindicated.”
‘Where do I belong?’
Adoption records show her mother was engaged to a Tipperary man when she became pregnant, but Eileen’s family opposed her relationship. When she entered Marianvale, her fiancé was not even told he was about to become a father. The adoption was arranged by Cunamh, formerly known as the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society of Ireland. “If the adoption was arranged from counties in the south and agencies in the south run by convents and nuns in the south and women from the south were in there and the children were adopted back into the south it’s just a loophole to get out of paying anybody money,” Ms Buckley said.
Border babies
Her cross-border journey was not unique. A recent report into Northern Ireland’s mother and baby homes, external calculated that more than 550 babies were moved to the Republic between 1930 and 1990. “Here in the north, the campaigners have been calling for their public inquiry and redress for more than a decade,” said solicitor Claire McKeegan, who acts on behalf of survivors of institutional abuse in Northern Ireland.
In 2021, Stormont’s leaders agreed to hold a public inquiry into mother and baby homes, Magdalene laundries and workhouses north of the border. But two and a half years on, that inquiry is still to be legally established. “Obviously with the collapse of Stormont, the legislation hasn’t happened for them and many survivors and victims are no longer with us,” Ms McKeegan said.
The solicitor is due to meet First Minister Michelle O’Neill about the issue next month and said the message from survivors will be: “It must be done and it must be done now.”
For Ms Buckley though, it was the Republic’s secretive adoption system which she had to fight all her life. As a teenager she suffered serious health issues and baffled doctors ran lots of tests because they could not access her family medical records. “My mother told me that at one stage they thought it was leukaemia and that the doctors had been trying to ring the adoption agency just to try and get some history. They were like: ‘This girl is really sick, we need to know.’ And they were just met with closed doors.”
Aged 43, Ms Buckley was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), a condition she later found out runs in her birth family. She believes she missed out on earlier diagnosis and treatment due to her lack of rights to birth information when she was a teenager. A new Irish law came into force in 2022 which gave all adoptees rights to access their original birth certificate and family medical history, but adoptees complain of long delays with the new system. How many survivors get compensation?
It has been estimated there are about 58,200 people still alive who spent time in the Republic’s mother and baby homes and county homes (institutions which succeeded workhouses). The Department of Children confirmed its redress scheme will “provide financial payments to an estimated 34,000 people”.
But that means just over 40% of survivors some 24,000 people cannot apply because of the six-month rule. Awarding payments and medical benefits to all surviving residents would have doubled the cost of the scheme. “The exclusions are vast and it really is extremely unfair,” said Dr Maeve O’Rourke.
The human rights lecturer recently helped design the framework for investigating homes in Northern Ireland. Dr O’Rourke argued the Republic’s 2015-2021 mother and baby homes investigation, external was too narrowly focused and has resulted in a restricted redress scheme. She said there should have been a wider investigation into adoption across all of society, including the role of adoption agencies, maternity hospitals, “forced family separations” and illegal birth registrations. “Unfortunately, and perhaps to limit its ultimate financial liability, the Irish government insisted that it would be limited to mother and baby institutions and a sample of county homes,” she added.
Ms Buckley took part in a 2021 public consultation, external in which survivors and interested parties gave views on the design of the redress scheme. Most survivors stressed loss of the mother/child bond was the most important factor that required redress, not the time spent in homes. Ms Buckley shared her own experience during the consultation but was shocked when she realised Marianvale residents would not be part of the settlement. “I couldn’t stop crying. We bared our souls at that thing, you know? We told them how this has affected us mentally,” she said.
“For saving a few quid, we’re just collateral damage.”
Mother and baby home survivors’ stories published: ‘I was told I was going’
Mother and baby home survivors’ stories published: ‘I was told I was going’
27 September 2022
“I became pregnant and when my mother found out I was taken immediately to a doctor and within a very short period of time I found myself in a Good Shepherd mother-and-baby home.”
This is part of one woman’s personal testimony about her experience of mother-and-baby homes in Northern Ireland. Her account has been published along with a number of others, running to hundreds of pages and made available on the Quote oral history website run by Queen’s University Belfast, external (QUB).
Those who experienced life in workhouses and Magdalene laundries have told their stories and the transcripts also include evidence from children born in the homes. The testimonies have been anonymised but have been published with the full permission of those who gave them. One woman, referred to as LC, was sent to a Good Shepherd mother-and-baby home when she became pregnant, aged 17. “I was just told I was going and that was it,” she added.
“I was put in a car with the local parish priest and my mother and off I went.”
LC’s baby was adopted against her wishes but later in life she was able to reunite with her adopted child. A mother referred to as HS also entered a Good Shepherd home when she was pregnant, aged 19. She said that she was made to feel “isolated and sinful” there. DH, meanwhile, was born in a mother-and-baby home and then adopted. The impact that it’s had on me as a person has been significant,” he said.
DH had begun a process on reuniting with his birth mother when he was in his 30s.
Stigma of pregnancy outside marriage
Mother-and-baby institutions housed women and girls who became pregnant outside marriage. There was stigma attached to pregnancy outside of marriage and women and girls were admitted by families, doctors, priests and state agencies. The laundries were Catholic-run workhouses that operated across the island of Ireland. About a third of women admitted to the homes were aged under 19 and most were aged from 20 to 29. The youngest was 12 and the oldest 44. A number were the victims of sexual crime, including rape and incest. Numbers of entrants peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before a rapid reduction in the 1980s. The oral evidence had informed a major Stormont report into mother-and-baby homes and Magdalene laundries in Northern Ireland, which was published in January 2021. It found that 10,500 women went through mother-and-baby homes in Northern Ireland and 3,000 were admitted into Magdalene laundries. The report detailed often harsh conditions and abuse suffered by some of those admitted to eight mother-and-baby homes, a number of former workhouses and four Magdalene laundries in Northern Ireland. Some women said they had been detained against their will, were used as unpaid labour and had to give up babies for adoption. The experts from QUB and Ulster University who carried out the research for the 2021 report had said they intended to make some of the transcripts of evidence “available for consultation by members of the public”. That has now been done with full transcripts of testimonies from 24 individuals about their experiences.
‘Traumatic and upsetting’
Thirteen of the testimonies are from “birth mothers” women who gave birth while living in the institutions. Five are testimonies from the children of birth mothers, one from another relative and five from “other observers” of the institutions. The “other observers” include an elderly retired priest, a woman whose father worked in a Good Shepherd convent, a retired midwife, a woman who had lived in one of the Sacred Heart homes and a woman who knew a number of residents of one of the homes. Details have been removed from the transcripts that would identify any of those who agreed that their experiences could be published. An introduction to the transcripts said that a “range of contrasting and complex testimonies” had been collected. “They ranged from testimonies that were highly critical of the mother and baby institutions and Magdalene laundries through to very different narratives from individuals who worked within them,” it said.
“Readers will no doubt be aware that the testimony they will encounter is often traumatic and upsetting. The transcripts reveal many birth mothers were pressured to give up a child for adoption. Several relate testimony about various forms of mistreatment. The latter included a range of details, spanning regimental institutional regimes that imposed cleaning chores on heavily pregnant women through to, in a very small number of cases, more serious allegations of sexual abuse.”
The interviews were carried out by Prof Sean O’Connell of QUB and Dr Olivia Dee. Prof O’Connell told BBC News NI that he wanted to pay tribute to the courage of all of those who had been involved in the process and came forward to give oral evidence. Following the publication of the research report in January 2021, a Truth Recovery Design Panel which had been established by the Stormont Executive subsequently recommended that a public inquiry be held into the institutions in Northern Ireland. The PSNI has also launched an investigation into allegations of physical and sexual abuse in the institutions.
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Listen here to BBC News NI’s podcast ‘Assume Nothing: The Last Request’ about a man who was born in a mother-and-baby home and his last wish to track down his birth mother
Anne Silke: Fostered to a Fianna Fáil TD, beaten and abused
https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-40344998.html?type=amp&__twitter_impression=true
Anne Silke: Fostered to a Fianna Fáil TD, beaten and abused
AS A CHILD, Anne Silke ate moss off the walls of the Tuam mother and baby institution. It was delicious, she would laugh, because she was starving. Before she died earlier this year, she would say with a wry smile that she would never eat batch bread, because of how the nuns threw it at her and the other “home” children, as if they were animals. That ability to crack jokes at the cruelty she experienced when young and the life she carved out for herself as a mother of eight children drew people to her, finding hope in her resilience and warmth in her company. But there was a silence Silke never managed to break before she died, about the influential political family who fostered her. Teresa Lavina, a Galway-based documentary maker, first met Silke in 2019 through another Tuam survivor, PJ Haverty, who was close friends with Silke and had always voted for the family who fostered her. The feature-length documentary, Untold Secrets, that Lavina directed and produced was shown for the first time yesterday at the Galway Film Fleadh, shedding light on Silke’s unspoken experiences and the disturbing allegations that are part of her testimony. Silke gave testimony to the commission of investigation and saw it released just before she died last February, with a few lines referencing her own testimony about eating moss. But she was deeply hurt by the result and felt she still had not been heard. “I feel angry to a certain extent that we’re not getting justice or anything,” Silke said to camera, not long before she died. “Everything is left just hanging on until we pass away.”
In the documentary, Silke described deprivation and cruelty within the Tuam institution but also speaks of her experience of being fostered out to a man who she says was a TD in the Dáil and his wife, who had six of their own children who were already reared. She alleges she was treated like a “slave” in their home. Documentation provided by the state agency Tusla shows that Silke was fostered in 1958 by a “Mr and Mrs Killealea [sic]” and the documentary draws together testimony that the man who fostered Silke was Mark Killilea Sr, a founding member of Fianna Fáil who represented Galway constituencies within the Dáil for nearly three decades, from the 1930s to 1961. In 2014, after the story about the deaths of hundreds of children in Tuam broke around the world, Silke came to Catherine Corless hoping to find more answers and speak out. Corless remembers her as a woman who had “the heartiest laugh” and got on with everyone. “Anne was one of those people who wanted to tell her story because she was born in the Home in Tuam and she had a very tough childhood,” Corless said.
“She was fostered out to a woman in the early stages but that didn’t work out and Anne was sent back to the home again, so Anne is one of the few people that remembers life in the Tuam home.”
At the burial site on the former grounds of the Bon Secours institution, grass grown over the area above the sewage system where the remains of infants and children were found during a test excavation years before, Silke stood in a black and white check coat, a black scarf around her neck, speaking of how she remembered children being brought outside, kept in pens and bottles of milk made by Bina Rabitte, a woman working for the nuns at the institution whose name is a witness on many birth certs, being thrown into them.
Silke described a child being kicked by one of the nuns and never seeing that child again. “We all tried to survive, we used to be starving,” she said.
Her mother, who she was separated from in the institution but managed to make some contact with later in life, told her they were kept separate even while inside the walls. “She wasn’t allowed to hold me, cuddle me or feed me or do nothing for me, it was other mothers,” Silke said.
Catherine Corless saw the pile of records that Anne had been able to get from the State, detailing her time in the institution and her fostering. Since she died, family members have not been able to access the cache of documents she left behind and while Tusla recently released a document to Silke’s relatives detailing a timeline of her experiences within the institutions and confirming the time she spent fostered, Silke’s family could now wait months for copies of the documents to be provided. Before she died, Anne Silke stated to Lavina and others that she was abused and exploited as a child while fostered within the Belclare household of Mark Killilea Sr, a founding member of Fianna Fáil and an influential local politician in Tuam. Silke describes in the documentary how she was exploited for labour, made to milk cows morning and evening, brought home from school early to clean and polish the house, and never allowed to eat at the same table with the family. Silke said she was beaten if she did not complete her work or if she defended herself. Silke described being physically assaulted by one of the older adult sons in the house, who she said took over after the foster father died, and that she was sexually abused by another adult son. She was a child at the time of this sexual assault. According to statements made by family members and details from Silke’s testimony, as well as multiple sources who knew Silke and saw her file, the documentary points to Mark Killilea Jr as responsible for physically assaulting Silke. The ‘Golfgate’ event last year in Galway was a dinner in honour of the late TD and MEP. The documentary points to Jarlath Killilea as having sexually abused her. He was a former head of the Department of Tourism and Catering at Cork Institute of Technology. Both men are deceased. Silke describes how Killilea Jr “gave me awful beatings with the horses whip and that, the mother was hitting me and I was protecting myself so I went to hit her and he said you’ll never do that to my mother again, that’s what it was, and he stripped me from the waist down put me across the chair and belted me, and the blood pouring out of me, [I] couldn’t sit”.
Silke says she was told to tell anyone who asked that she fell.
A mother of eight, in a family photo Silke stands with all of her adult children, four daughters and four sons, all of them head and shoulders above her. Silke told her own children about her experiences and they speak out in the documentary, confirming that their mother had told them of these accounts of abuse and exploitation within the foster household. One of her daughters, Alice Kelly, speaks about how many families like her own are still affected by the ongoing legacy of the mother and baby home institutions, making it an intergenerational trauma. The children, like Silke, were robbed of any real affection or love within the Tuam institution and Kelly speaks about how her mother’s way of showing love was making sure they were sent to school, fed, and had clothes on their back. “I heard the stories growing up and it just became normal, it’s just something I accepted that these things happened to mum,” Kelly says, remembering how she asked her mother when she was a teenager about her experience and whether she had been sexually abused. I was,” her mother had told her. It was something Kelly then almost normalised, warning “that’s the generational impact it is having on this country”.
Another of Silke’s children, her son Seán Kelly, spoke over Zoom from New York to the director, Teresa Lavina, and named Jarlath Killilea as the man who sexually abused his mother and Mark Killilea Jr as the man who had beaten her. “[Jarlath] would have assaulted her sexually, physically, he was the one mum was very angry at too, obviously because she was young and didn’t know, she wasn’t even in her teens like.”
There were other witnesses to her exploitation at the hands of the foster family, according to Silke. “This neighbour, my friend will tell you, she used to collect me after the roll was being called and I’d have to polish the house, they had seven bedrooms,” said Silke.
“I hadn’t the work done and the son came along and he battered my face against the wall and pulled my head and battered me against the wall, and all my teeth destroyed. So [as a] 12-year-old I had four dentures, 12 years old.”
A source familiar with Silke’s file says there are hospital records included. “I’d say he denied it to the guards too,” she said.
“He battered me against the wall cause I didn’t have the work done.”
As well as domestic work, she was made to milk the cows morning and evening, spending her nights sleeping on a bed that she said was rotten through with urine. “Their bedroom wasn’t the same as mine,” she said.
“I’m sorry to say I used to wet the bed and I used to sleep in that bed every night.”
Silke remembered a social worker would come every month but she was told not to tell her that was the bedroom she slept in. Many survivors who were boarded out from Tuam and other institutions as children have spoken about being used for free labour by foster families. “They were making money on us, they made money on us,” said Silke.
“Even though we were not in the home they still got money for feeding us.”
There were many attempts at escape. Silke said she ran away a lot but guards brought her back, telling her to be good. “You were put into that situation that you couldn’t get out of,” she said.
“No matter where you went and told your story, you didn’t know who you were talking to then, it was all going back to them.”
Eventually, she told one of the “sisters”, one of the women in charge at her school, that she’d harm herself before going back. The timeline of Silke’s institutionalisation and fostering provided by Tusla shows that after being “discharged” from the foster family in 1967 Silke was sent to St Teresa’s on Temple Hill, a residential institution run by the Daughters of Charity in Dublin, and a place where there are accounts of another child sent from Tuam who was made to work unpaid in a local shop. The document from Tusla states that after being fostered, Silke also worked for a time in 1968 for another member of the Killilea family.4 states in Untold Secrets that she was “put working down in Kilkenny” before being put into a Magdalene Laundry and running away after six months there.” After that, she started working in a hospital. Donagh Killilea, son of the late Mark Killilea Jr, does speak within the documentary about the exploitation of children from the institutions: “We also have to keep in mind the awful conditions in which some survivors worked, they were forced labour on farms a lot of the time, they were forced labour in industry which was big at the time there was a lot of bad but I think there was even more good but it’s just not being looked at.”
Mr Killilea was shown testimony of Anne Silke by Lavina while the documentary was still in production. In response to questions from the Irish Examiner ahead of the broadcast, he described the allegations made by Anne Silke as both “unverified” and “inaccurate” but said “we have nothing to hide”, adding that “everyone involved in this has passed away and I’m very sorry for Anne’s family”.
According to records held by Galway County Council, the minutes of a council meeting show that Mark Killilea Sr opposed the closure of the Tuam institution on the basis that as long as the institution remained in Tuam “the county has the benefit of the money spent there”.
When she was in her mid-20s, Silke says, she went to a social worker in Galway to report “the abuse I got when I was a child with them people” but she was told she was no longer in the social worker’s jurisdiction.
In recent years, people close to Silke say that gardaí from Tuam visited her at her home in Leitrim to take her statement before she passed away. Close family members of Silke say she had been preparing to take Mark Killilea Jr, the alleged perpetrator of her physical assault, to the High Court, but he died before it was possible and she was also dissuaded by fear of losing her house due to legal costs. “Mum always wanted her story out,” her son Seán said.