Bessborough survivor: ‘The shame belongs with them’

Bessborough survivor: ‘The shame belongs with them’

Sun, 30 May, 2021 – 06:35
Maresa Fagan

Survivors of mother and baby homes and other State institutions have been let down and only an international investigation can shed light on the “human rights violations” of the past, according to Bessborough survivor Terri Harrison.  The 66-year-old Dublin campaigner is one of 13 women from Ireland and the North who have requested that the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigate the ‘violent legacy’ of mother and baby homes, Bessborough survivor: ‘The shame belongs with them’e laundries, and industrial schools.  The recent ICC request made by Belfast-based legal firm KRW Law is seeking a preliminary examination into whether the institutional abuse exposed in recent reports and inquiries amounted to “crimes against humanity”.  Earlier this year, the Mother and Baby Home Commission of Investigation found that around 56,000 unmarried mothers and 57,000 children passed through 18 State-funded and church-run institutions examined and that around 9,000 babies and children died.  The legacy of the institutions, which operated for more than seven decades, has left deep scars across society, from the mothers whose babies were taken away to the children who were adopted or who died and were buried in pits.  The commission findings were met with widespread criticism from survivors and have led to several legal challenges against the State.  For Terri, the final report was a “whitewash” as it failed to acknowledge or atone for the abduction and forced disappearances of thousands of young girls and women pregnant out of wedlock, their “stolen” babies, or for the children who died.  “There wasn’t a whisper of humanity in the report,” Terri says, adding that it failed to address the issue of neglect and starvation or the 922 unaccounted for babies in the Bessborough facility in Cork.

‘Pregnant from Ireland’

Terri is one of more than 2,500 PFIs Irish women or girls who were officially recorded as ‘pregnant from Ireland’ and brought back from the UK to a mother and baby home.  It was 1973 when the Crusade and Rescue Society, an English-based Catholic charity, “abducted” the expectant 18-year-old from London and a nun and priest escorted her by car to the airport and onwards to the Bessborough mother and baby home in Cork.  It was a day forever etched in Terri’s mind. “I will never forget the door and the click of the door when it closed. I was just left there in the hallway. I have never felt as alone in my life as I did in that moment,” she says.

“When I stood in that hallway I lost me. I was given a house number and house name and was shown to a bed and locker. I just sat there and cried and cried and said to myself ‘this is the bowels of hell’.”

While Terri managed to escape from Bessborough and return to Dublin, she was tracked down and sent to St Patrick’s mother and baby home on the Navan Rd, where she gave birth to a baby boy, Niall, who was later “taken” for adoption.  There was a cry, a primal scream, that you would hear regularly when a mother discovered that their baby was gone.  “It was wrenching, like a cry from an animal,” she says.

Forty-eight years on, the pain and sense of loss remains, but Terri continues to hold out hope that she may someday reconnect with Niall, who she describes as her “shadow child”.  “No matter where we were or what we were doing I always pictured him at the age he should be. I visualised him everywhere and at Christmas time there was always a present under the tree for him,” she says.

Terri is only too aware that her experience is not unique and last year got involved in setting up a support group, Society of Survivors, to enable women to share their experiences.

Carrying the secrets

Some women, she says, still carry the loss, silence, shame, and secrets today: “I know women in their eighties to this day who have not told anyone, including their husbands or families.”

Survivors, she explains, have endured ‘living bereavement’ even though there was no loss of life. “No death occurred but each stage of your life presents a new bereavement that amplifies all those years of loss.  The loss of freedom and liberty, the loss of motherhood, the loss of the right to breastfeed your own child, it just goes on and on and it never stops until you die.”

Women and girls, some as young as 12, were “dehumanised” in the institutions, which could not be called a home, Terri says: “We weren’t residents. We were interned.   We were incarcerated. We were recorded by our offence. I was down as my first offence. The only difference is we didn’t get a court of law or a trial to find us guilty of anything.”

An independent international investigation, she believes, is the only way to uncover the true scale of the “human rights violations” and “inhumane” treatment that occurred.  “There is a huge correlation between us and those who were incarcerated in war camps. You were 100% at the mercy of your captives. You could do nothing without their approval,” she says.

Any attempts to attribute what happened to the social norms of the time was a “cop-out”, Terri says, adding that it amounted to human trafficking, involving several sectors of the State and society, and that women and young girls were denied access to information and their rights, such as the right to see their child under the 1952 Adoption Act.  “Who gave anybody the right to lock me away and take my child? Nobody will answer that,” she says.

The long-time campaigner, who has penned a play, No More Secrets, No More Lies, based on her own experiences, says the Government needs to acknowledge what happened and support survivors.  An enhanced medical card, she says, does not compare to the Health Amendment Act (HAA) card provided to victims of the contaminated blood products scandal, which is what survivors are looking for as a “gesture of kindness”.  Any shame around these institutions today, Terri adds, lies firmly with the State and Government,  and not survivors.  “We are just a pain in their side or a toothache they want to get rid of. They don’t know what to do with us because we’re an embarrassment; we’re bringing embarrassment to the whole culture of this country,” Terri says.

“But I’ll keep saying this until I die; I like the word shame now because I know exactly where it belongs; the shame belongs with them.”

Society of Survivors support line: 085 8069925/26