Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business (21 page)

A couple of days after her last signing, Pat recalled, the child was taken up to Dublin for passport photographs. Official records show that the passport itself was issued by the Department of External Affairs on 8 April 1964, and on the 24 April Trevor was ‘discharged’ for adoption in America.

‘He was 20 months old. That’s how long we had been together,’ Pat said. ‘I was just called over by one of the nuns and told he was going the next day. Up till then I had imagined it wouldn’t really happen. But it was happening. I only had a few more hours. I was given a bundle of clothes and told to get him up early next morning, to give him a bath and get him dressed for the journey. I did everything I’d been told. I washed him and dressed him. I remember so clearly, bringing him down to the side door, hugging him, cuddling him and kissing him, and he was just swiped out of my arms by a nun. All I could think to do was run as fast as I could up to the top of the house to look out this small window to try and get one last look at my child. I saw him getting into the car with a nun. The maintenance man, Mr Murray, was driving. That was the last I saw of him.’

At such a traumatic moment there wasn’t a single word of comfort for Pat. No one seemed to care that she was in bits. And as someone who felt rejected all her life by her own mother and knew the pain that rejection caused she felt doubly guilty that she was now rejecting her own child, even though that was not something she would have wished. ‘I was left numb, just numb. No one offered any counselling or anything like that. I was told I had an hour to pull myself together and get down to the dining room. A nun just stood over me in silence. Then it was back to work, as if nothing had happened. That was it. No cuddles, no sign of any feelings, nothing. You were just left raw.’ This was how it was, not just for Pat Eyres, but for the thousands of young women consigned to the religious-run mother and baby homes: heartless, vengeful and cruel – and unimaginably damaging psychologically.

A few weeks later Father Michael Cleary reappeared, this time with news of a job for Pat. He had found her a post in South Dublin looking after a six-month-old baby girl recently adopted by a well-known TV personality. ‘I came out of Castlepollard completely raw. I hadn’t had my hair done in two years. I was wearing the same clothes I’d worn going in two years earlier. I was so conspicuous. I remember walking down O’Connell Street thinking everyone was looking at me. It was awful. I was trying to pick up the pieces, trying to meet up with old friends who didn’t know where I’d been for the past two years.’

Within a few months Pat had met the man who was to become her husband, but she never told him about the baby. She feared that if he knew he too would reject her. After their marriage, carrying such a dark secret took its toll on her health. She suffered from depression and was in and out of hospital. Medical professionals knew of her secret and encouraged her to at least tell her husband, but she couldn’t do it. ‘I didn’t want him to think of me the way I’d been made to think of myself, as bad and shameful, just a step away from being a prostitute.’

When her children were born she never seemed happy with them, but exhibited a great deal of anger towards them. ‘You’d have had to live with it to know how bad it was,’ said one of her daughters. ‘We always used to ask ourselves, why is she like this? Why is she always angry with us? And when we were old enough to have our own lives, she wouldn’t let go. She’d go ballistic at the thought of us leaving home. Now we know she was going through mental torture all those years.’

In 1983, on 28 August - the day before Trevor’s 21st birthday – Pat’s mother committed suicide. The combination of her estranged mother’s death and her lost son’s 21st birthday sent her health into another tailspin. Almost 13 more years were to pass before she finally managed to break the cycle.

Pat began her search for Trevor in the summer of 1996, after finally telling her husband about her secret in the wake of the American adoption story breaking. Like many natural mothers she was gently encouraged by remarks made by Dick Spring, Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs. Speaking in Waterford in March that year, Mr Spring had referred to children who had been ‘exported to the United States’ as having been ‘removed from their young and frightened mothers at the most vulnerable possible time in the lives of those mothers.’ The ‘cost in human suffering,’ Spring said, ‘may never be known.’ In referring to the declarations signed by young women like Pat he said he ‘could only imagine the pain that must have been involved.’

While still very far from an apology for the role the State played in exiling thousands of its infant citizens, here for the first time in 34 years was what appeared to be official recognition of the unspoken and unacknowledged trauma that women like Pat had suffered in secret and in silence. And when Mr Spring declared his fervent wish that they could ‘quickly arrive at a point where it will be possible to make information available to people who want help in being reconciled and reunited,’ Pat had every reason to hope that she would be given every assistance in finding Trevor.

On 7 May Pat wrote to Dick Spring seeking his help. Critically, what she needed to know was Trevor’s adopted name and last known address. With that information she could at least start her search. Five weeks later, on 10 June, Mr Spring replied. There was a file on Trevor, his letter confirmed. It was number 345/96/1681. But either the file, or Mr Spring, got the surname wrong: he spelled it ‘Ayres’ instead of ‘Eyres’. A small detail, perhaps, but a mistake that should not have been made in such a personally sensitive matter. What the file showed, the Tanaiste said, was that Trevor’s adoption had been arranged through the Catholic Home Bureau for Dependent Children in New York (a branch of Catholic Charities), and that his adoptive mother was a native of New York State while his adoptive father was Irish-born. The adoption itself, Mr Spring said, had taken place on 3 March 1965. (Another incorrect detail: it had taken place on 4 February.) This was all no doubt very interesting, but what was Trevor’s name now and where in New York had he gone?

Well, said Mr Spring, ‘the National Archive Act 1986 restricts access to information on files in the National Archives relating to individuals in order to protect information supplied in confidence or which might cause distress to living persons. I am advised,’ he went on, ‘that disclosure of information of a personal or private kind without the consent of those to whom it relates could constitute an invasion of their constitutional right to privacy.’ Consequently, his letter concluded, ‘I may not let you have the specific details.’ It was a dreadful blow. The promise of help to those seeking reunification with their kin was a puff of smoke. And Pat wasn’t the only one to get this response: all those seeking assistance from the Department of Foreign Affairs were given the same message.

Pat spoke to an official in the consular section of the Department. ‘I begged him, please don’t leave it too late for mothers like me. We’re not getting any younger. Please give me some information. You’re sitting there in a privileged position with my file in front of you. Tell me something that will help me. Tell mothers like me something that will help them. But he just kept saying he couldn’t. It was confidential.’

Pat didn’t give up. She turned to the Catholic Home Bureau in New York, writing a three page letter to Sister Una McCormack, detailing her ‘dreadful existence’ as a ‘poor young frightened mother’ in Castlepollard in the early 1960s, who was ‘never allowed to leave the building,’ and all of whose ‘mail was vetted by the nuns.’ She complained to Sister Una that ‘this issue is bottom of Mr Dick Spring’s agenda’ and said the ‘lack of urgency is contributing to the anguish of birth mothers and adoptees waiting to obtain the vital information they require.’ Ireland in the 1960s, she said, ‘was very unfair to unmarried mothers, and indeed is not much better now.’ What was needed was ‘someone to have enough courage to address this issue, not only for me but for hundreds of women like me who had to give up their babies against their will in 1960s Ireland.’ Pat also let Sister Una know that she and her family were ‘involving the media in our search.’ Her daughters had written letters to the press and they were meeting with an American television programme called “20/20” who were interested in her story and in her search.

On 28 August she got her reply from the ‘legal department’ of the Catholic Home Bureau. ‘New York State law,’ Sister Margaret Carey wrote, ‘protects agency case record confidentiality and prohibits the release of information by an agency without a court order. Social Service Law Section 372. We wish you well and hope you and your family are enjoying good health.’ Sister Carey enclosed a copy of the surrender document Pat had purportedly signed on 19 February 1964, and which formed the legal basis of Trevor’s adoption in the United States a year later. On the same day, Sister Sarto Harney, social worker with the only remaining branch of the Sacred Heart Adoption Society at Bessboro in Cork, wrote to Pat confirming the name Eyres was on their records, but advising her to contact the North Eastern Health Board in Drogheda where ‘many of the Castlepol- lard USA files’ were held.

Like so many before her and many more since, Pat ended up going from pillar to post. She had identified and contacted the three leading agencies who held detailed information on her son’s adoption – the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Catholic Home Bureau in New York, and the Sacred Heart Adoption Society – but to no avail.

In desperation, she wrote again to Dick Spring in September 1996, complaining that information about herself and her son was being withheld from her. The Department responded by again quoting the National Archive Act and pointing out, with unintended irony, that ‘the only item of any importance’ they were withholding was her son’s adopted name and his address. Like the legal department of the Catholic Home Bureau, the Department of Foreign Affairs enclosed a copy of the notarised surrender document Pat was supposed to have signed on 19 February 1964. The point of sending this, presumably, was to remind her that she had not only agreed to her son’s removal from the country for adoption, but had relinquished him ‘forever’.

But with the two surrender documents fortuitously in her possession, Pat now had startling evidence: the signatures on the two pieces of paper, both bearing the same date, and both witnessed by the same Notary Public, were totally and undeniably different. On one document the signature ‘Patricia Eyres’ is written in a neat, even hand, the small clear letters sloping backwards. On the other the signature is different in every respect, with larger and more uneven letters, differently formed and falling somewhere between upright and forward-sloping. The difference was blatant and undisguised. One of the documents was used to legitimise the removal of Pat’s child from the country, the other to legitimise his adoption in the States. The fact that one was clearly not signed by her may have nullified the entire adoption procedure – had anyone cared to look.

But in the short term Pat was more interested in finding her son than in making a fuss about forged signatures. By various routes – many of them pursued by the American television programme, “20/20” – Pat had finally come up with a name and an address, and contact was made with a 34-year-old male in the States. Excitement in Pat’s house was at an all time high. She and her daughters were talking to the Irish papers about the imminent happy outcome of their quest. But it turned out to be a false trail. The final breakthrough came only by subterfuge when a woman who was helping Pat in her search gained unexpected and unassisted access to records that had previously been denied her. What she found was Trevor’s adopted name: John Patrick Campbell. Further searches in New York State by “20/20” turned up old school friends and, eventually, the woman who had adopted Pat’s child in 1965. When contacted by the people from the television programme, Mrs Campbell revealed the awful news – John was dead.

The programme-makers passed on the tragic news to Sister Una McCormack at the Catholic Home Bureau and asked her to tell Pat. And so it was, one night at the end of October 1996, Pat got a call from Sister Una. She knew almost at once that the news was bad. Sister Una herself broke down in the telling of it. John had died 13 years earlier and the circumstances of his death were themselves tragic. His adoptive parents had given him a car for his 21st birthday. He had been arrested soon after for speeding and detained overnight by the police. The next morning he was found dead in his cell. Pat found that after her son’s death three local policemen, including the police chief, were removed from their posts. Suicide was suspected, which would have been remarkable given that her own mother had committed suicide just days beforehand – on the very day John Patrick Campbell celebrated his 21st birthday.

‘He had so much to live for,’ said Pat, gently fingering three small photographs of her son, sent to her by Mrs Campbell. John was a tall, good-looking young man with fiery red hair and a winning smile. ‘I know he got a fantastic home in America,’ Pat said. ‘His parents loved him dearly.’ She had spoken to Mrs Campbell by telephone.

John was in college and he had been accepted by the American Space Agency, NASA. He had a girlfriend, a student nurse, and they were planning on getting engaged. He had a sister in the States who was also adopted from Ireland and she had found her natural mother. ‘That fascinated him,’ Pat said, ‘and he had told his adoptive mother he was going to look for me once he had finished college. He never got the chance. I had hoped for a happy reunion. I never thought I would outlive my child.’

The one small consolation Pat had was that John’s adoptive parents had told him from the earliest time that he was adopted, ‘and they told him I gave him up because I loved him so much, that I wanted him to have a better life than I could have given him in Ireland. So maybe he didn’t think too badly of me.’

Castlepollard ceased to function as a mother and baby home in 1969. It is now a home for people with mental disability. While she was looking for her son, Pat went back on a visit. Although she hadn’t been there for 32 years she found her way instinctively to the room at the top of the house from which she had caught the last glimpse of Trevor. ‘It’s just as it was then,’ she said. ‘The radiator under the window still bears the marks of where hundreds of girls like me climbed up to see their babies for the very last time. If nothing else, I hope my story will help some of them find the courage to do something about this wall of silence and all this dreadful secrecy.’