Clodagh Finn: Gulf between findings and evidence must be clarified

Witnesses gave evidence to Mother and Baby Homes Commission report but their words failed to make any impact on its findings

Children's toys and flowers sit at the 'Little Angels' memorial plot in the grounds of Bessborough House in Blackrock, Cork.  Picture: Laura Hutton/RollingNews.ie

I’d like to dedicate this space to some of the witnesses who gave evidence to the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes but whose words failed to make any impact on its findings.

We are still no closer to understanding why that happened, but their experiences and their testimony deserve an airing, alongside the findings that so clearly ignore them.

These examples have been highlighted by human rights lawyer Dr Maeve O’Rourke, co-director of the Clann Project. As Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman considers seeking an international expert to review the Commission’s report through a “human rights lens”, it provides timely reading.

Finding: “It must be acknowledged that the institutions under investigation provided a refuge — a harsh refuge in some cases — when the families provided no refuge at all.”

Witness: “[My son was kept] in a closed off area called the dying room. I begged the nuns to bring my son to a hospital but they only did so after two weeks had passed. My son died in hospital. I do not even know whether he was buried in a coffin… There was never even a kind or sympathetic [word] spoken to me. My time in Bessborough was a horrible, horrific experience… I think I will die with the pain and trauma that was caused during this time.”

Finding: “Responsibility for that harsh treatment rests mainly with the fathers of their children and their own immediate families.”

Witness: “Rev [name omitted] told me that my child, who at that time was yet to be born, would be taken for adoption and that there was absolutely nothing that I could do about it because I wasn’t married to my girlfriend. He told me to forget about it and to get on with my life. Even now, 39 years later, when I recall those words I get an overwhelming feeling of sadness.”

Finding: “There is no evidence that women were forced to enter mother and baby homes by the Church or State authorities.”

Witness: The mother of a woman who became pregnant a second time reported this to the gardaí, who put her in front of a judge. “The judge ‘demanded’ to know who the father was, saying, the witness told the committee: ‘You’d better answer me now or I’ll put you away where nobody will see you again.’ The witness said she was transferred from the court to another home and then to yet another: back to where she had stayed during her first pregnancy.”

Finding: “There can be no doubt that legal adoption was a vastly better outcome than the alternatives previously available.”

Witness: “My childhood was not a happy one and I do not view adoption as a guarantee of a ‘better life’. My upbringing was dysfunctional primarily involving my adoptive mother’s alcoholism and sexual abuse by my brother.”

Finding: “There are a small number of complaints of physical abuse. The women worked but they were generally doing the sort of work they would have done at home.”

Witness: “I arrived at Bessborough … and during the summer months my job was cutting the lawn with scissors. I did this every day in a line with a group of other women. We were not allowed to stop when we felt tired. In the winter months I had to polish and scrub the corridors… I worked seven days a week every week until I went into labour.”

Finding: “Until the 1960s and 1970s, the quality of maternity care in mother and baby homes was probably superior to that available to the majority of Irish women at the time.”

Witness: I was never once examined by a doctor… as the pain progressed, I was locked in what I can only describe as a cell. I was left there all night with no attention.

Finding: “There was no evidence of discrimination in relation to decisions made about fostering or adoption of mixed race children or children with disabilities.”

Witness: “Others told of nurseries in some mother and baby homes, where damaged, feeble, ill, sometimes those of mixed race — and ‘the handicapped’ babies (as the terminology of the time had it) were all housed together since the nuns believed they had little prospect of being chosen as adoptees.”

Finding: “They were not ‘incarcerated’ in the strict meaning of the word but, in the earlier years at least, with some justification, they thought they were.”

Witness: “We were locked in and there was absolutely no way of getting out.”

Finding: “Some… women are of the opinion that their consent was not full, free and informed. However, with the exception of a small number of legal cases, there is no evidence that this was their view at the time of the adoption.”

Witness: “[I was] brought to a room with a chair and a desk where I was told to sign the piece of paper put in front of me.” This woman, who wanted to keep her baby, refused to comply. She was then “dragged down the corridor by the nun to an office where I was made to sign the paper”. Many years later, the woman received documents relating to her child’s document including letters in her name. “I did not write those letters and did not get anyone else to write them for me.”

Finding: “The commission found very little evidence that children were forcibly taken from their mothers; it accepts that the mothers did not have much choice but that is not the same as ‘forced adoption’.”

Witness: “Having been raised in an orphanage, this next witness was raped, became pregnant, and went into a home. Two supportive sisters living and working in the UK, had finally saved enough to pay her fare to come to the UK, with her baby, to live with them. They came to visit her in the home to give her the good news. ‘But the nuns overheard this conversation’, the witness told the committee, and one morning, shortly afterwards, she was ordered to dress her baby and was brought, with the baby, to an adoption agency.

“The baby was separated from her and she was locked into a room, from where she could hear her child was being given to a couple. She could hear the child crying and in distress but she couldn’t get out of the room to go to him. 

She told the committee that she ‘hadn’t consented in any way’ to her child being taken away from her.

In a strong defence of the final report last Friday, commission chair Judge Yvonne Murphy said testimonies given to the confidential committee had been considered in the report’s final finding.

“They were relied upon to the extent that the commission considered appropriate, having regard to the totality of the evidence gathered by the commission and before making its findings,” she said.

That statement does little to cast light on any of the anomalies above. The witnesses to the commission deserve a more comprehensive explanation.