"I felt like I was dead...and my life was a lie"

Eight years ago Theresa Tinggal discovered she was illegally adopted. Now aged 56, Theresa, like many others, is still fighting for information about the circumstances of her birth. She tells Conall Ó Fátharta about her quest to find her true identity and the obstacles that remain in her way.

FOR six months Theresa Tinggal lived “in a daze” as she came to terms with the fact that everything she had believed about her identity was a lie. Eight years ago she discovered she was illegally adopted. She was 48.

That day she learned the couple who raised her as their own and whom she had called ‘Mam’ and ‘Dad’ were not her real parents. They had been given Theresa in a house in Collins Avenue in north Dublin when she was two days old and had registered her as their natural child some six weeks later.