Cormac McConnell: Mother-and-baby fairytale amid gloom
The horrific prospect is that even more scandals will be shortly revealed, when there is a national check on all the mother and baby homes throughout the state.
It is frightening, and touches the core of Irish societal values and stigmas, right up to the present day.
I relate the following true story, to maybe blunt the edge of the shock for some of you.
This is the story of Mary Kowalski.
She was a baby who escaped an unmarked grave at the rear of a mother and baby home in the Midlands, in the 1950s.
And her story is heartwarming.
What happened was that I read in an American paper 15 years ago that Mary was coming over to Co Clare, in a bid to make contact with her birth mother, who, like thousands of other young girls, became pregnant outside marriage, and gave birth to her in the mother and baby home run by an order of nuns.
At the time, I was presenting an afternoon show on Clare FM.
I contacted Mary after she arrived over from the United States, and invited her to come on air and tell her story.
She readily agreed.
This lovely middle-aged lady arrived into the studio, very stressed and sad, clutching an old teddy bear which her mother had given her after her birth.
She was accompanied by her husband, who sat silently beside her during our chat.
It was heart-rending stuff.
She said she had tried to make contact with her mother through the official channels for years, and had always failed, but she knew she was living in Co Clare.
That was why she was making a final effort to achieve contact.
The tears ran down her face as we talked.
She said her mother had been with her in the home until she was about two years old but then, inevitably, like so many others at the time, there came the day when she was taken away from the home, by car, for adoption in the United States.
She would never forget her last sight of her weeping mother running after the car as it went away, her fingers scraping at the closed window.
And then she was gone, and Mary was joining the hundreds of babies like herself, bound for adoption in the States.
There have been subsequent allegations, have there not, that there was a price on their little heads too?
Perhaps the truth.
Time will tell.
Thankfully, because God is good, Mary’s adoptive parents were lovely people.
She had a happy childhood in the USA, created a good life for herself, married a good husband, but always had a deep-rooted wish to again meet her birth mother in Ireland.
The official channels had always been unreliable, for a host of reasons, and she was not successful, except learning her mother was living in Co Clare.
That was why she had come over.
In a deeply moving moment, she directly addressed her mother, hoping that perhaps she was listening to us.
And she held the little teddy bear tightly in her hands, at that point.
I will never forget those radio minutes and that, for sure, is the pure truth.
The couple left the Clare FM studio immediately afterwards and, frankly, I thought that was the end of it.
Was I not delighted then, a week later, when Mary phoned in high excitement to say that her mother had heard us on air, had made contact, and she had just met her family.
She came back into me the following day, wearing the widest smile in the world —and the story was magical.
Not alone had she warmly met her mother, but also her biological father, because the couple had been able to marry after her adoption.
And she was also welcomed warmly by a raft of friendly sisters and brothers.
Mary Kowalski’s trip to Ireland had been a dramatic success for all the family.
And I was over the moon myself, because of my involvement in a kind of fairytale.
Given the dark week that is in it, I think many of ye will be glad I related this totally true life story.
