We never met our little cousin who was abused in an orphanage in Australia

Monday, March 15, 2010

BRITISH prime minister Gordon Brown apologised in parliament recently for the deportation of more than 130,000 children from the 1920s to the 1960s, mostly without parental knowledge and consent.

Kevin Rudd apologised last November to the child migrants as prime minister of Australia, one of the receiving nations. The deportations constitute official kidnapping and child trafficking, and a possible diplomatic travesty, as Irish citizens were subjected also to this practice.

The hurt and sorrow which was visited on children and their parents is compounded by the fact that their very existence is still only being discovered by their extended families who now also experience distress not only that such monstrous policy and practice should have existed officially, but more particularly that their hidden relatives suffered so much.

My first cousin, who was one of the Irish children deported to Australia from Britain, never got to meet us before she died because of the attitude and practice of the mother and baby home here and indeed the Catholic clergy who were also approached.

Britain’s declared aspiration that the children would have a better life abroad didn’t translate well for my cousin who remained in an orphanage experiencing much of the abuse that was visited on such children here at home, even though a family wished to adopt her.

The fact that her mother was still alive and most likely hadn’t known of, or hadn’t agreed to, her deportation would have come out, and had the adoption gone through the convent would be minus one capitation grant.

Having seen my cousin’s immigration documents, I can only wonder if money changed hands in respect of her transportation as her keep and "care" had been paid for by my aunt who was training to be a nurse, an arrangement made between Irish and Welsh convents.

States and churches are equally complicit and guilty, but at least some of the states are beginning to apologise to and support those affected.

My correspondence in protest to the church in Wales has never been acknowledged, much less addressed.

Successive Irish governments over this almost 50-year timespan must have had reason to question why passports were being sought for these children, or were they still hiding under the coat-tails of Mother Church?

Michele Savage
Glendale Park
Dublin 12

This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, March 15, 2010