Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business (24 page)

And it was no thanks to St Patrick’s Guild that Mary, Michael and Kevin turned out to be among ‘the lucky ones’. Yet in a statement issued in response to questions, Sister Gabriel pointed out that St Patrick’s operates a professional tracing service which aims to help reunite adopted children with their natural mothers. She quoted figures. St Patrick’s Guild had placed over 4,000 children with adoptive parents, 572 of them children who were sent to America between 1947 and 1967. Since it began offering a tracing service in 1981, Sister Gabriel said 1,513 of the adoption files had been opened, 113 of them relating to American adoptions. But just 12 of these had resulted in reunions – half the rate of domestic reunions.
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‘It is the policy of St Patrick’s Guild to help adoptees and birth mothers in any way we can, within our very limited resources,’ Sister Gabriel said. But ‘until funding is put in place it is inevitable that there will be long delays in satisfying people’s requests.’

‘There seems to be a lot of holding back or putting off, and what’s that going to do for all these mothers and adopted children?’ asked Mary. ‘It’s the adopted children really who are attempting to get to their roots and they are being prevented from doing it. But we’ve moved into a different age. Surely now is the time to let everything come out into the open and not be coming back in 30 years time and saying yes, it should have come out.’

13. Maureen - Seek and Ye Shall Find (But Don’t Hold Your Breath)

‘When you know that the church has all the information, they have your file sitting right there in front of them, and they won’t tell you anything, that’s very frustrating, and very hard. It’s a control thing. They separated you from your mother in the first place. So they are going to try and keep you apart now. They might think it’s for the best, but they have no right to make those decisions on behalf of adults’.

Maureen, 1996

Maureen Rowe found out she was adopted when she was about seven years old.
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‘I was playing in my parents’ room one day and I remember opening the bottom drawer in their dresser looking for something and there was this silver box. Of course being a child I opened it and it was full of paper. What caught my eye – I’ll never forget it – was a newspaper clipping, pictures of babies, with a headline like “these babies need homes.” The children looked really desperate. And there were other papers, letters, documents, more pictures, photographs of a baby girl. There was an Irish passport – although of course I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time – and an airline ticket. I saw my name on some of the papers and I knew this had all something to do with me, but I didn’t know what.’

Maureen took the box downstairs and asked her mum and dad, Dorothy and Jim. That was the first time they acknowledged she was adopted. They told her a shocking story about a car crash in Ireland in which her real mother and father had been killed. ‘They told me I had been thrown clear and landed on some grass and I had no one to love me so they had brought me to America and had become my mum and dad.’ My first reaction was confusion then grief, like my real mum and dad were both dead and I’d never known that before. It was terrible, just terrible.’ But the Rowes must have decided their invented story could cause problems in later years, for shortly afterwards they told Maureen a different story: that her natural mother wasn’t dead but just hadn’t been able to look after her. ‘I thought, great. I was so glad she was alive. I suppose it was then a seed was sown, you know, that I’ll find her one day. But of course as a kid that’s just fantasy.’

Maureen’s early childhood was full of conflicting images and impressions. ‘When you’re adopted it’s like you’re there but you’re not fitting in. I was blonde and blue-eyed and all my family were dark. I didn’t look like anybody. And I was very outward going, quite extrovert and carefree really, but my parents were the exact opposite, quiet and reserved and very strict and proper. Well, her more than him really. There was a basic clash of personalities, certainly between me and my adoptive mother. We were so totally different.’

The whole thing about being Irish was also a source of confusion. ‘Well, from what they told me about Ireland I had this vision of a desperately poor third world country where children were left to starve. But from the Irish in New York, and especially from St Patrick’s Day, I had this image of people who just got drunk. It was awful because no one explained anything to me. I suppose my parents didn’t know. They didn’t know about Irish history and culture, they had no Irish background at all. So I was left with this picture, from St Patrick’s Day really, of the Irish as people who dyed their hair green and drank green beer and ate green cakes. It was weird. I was kind of repulsed by it and yet I knew this was where I was from.’

But if her Irish identity remained a source of anguish for Maureen, Catholicism served her no better. ‘Church was the big deal. I knew a lot more about the whole Catholic tradition than I knew about Ireland, that was for sure. My parents were very Catholic, very, very Catholic. It was church, church, church. And of course I went to a Catholic school. You could say I was steeped in Catholicism.’ But Maureen never found the doctrine easy to accept. ‘In school, I was always raising questions, like about the wealth of the church and how that fitted with Jesus overturning the money changers. And about priests drinking. And just why this and why that. I never accepted anything without asking why, and of course they didn’t like that. I was made sit in the corner and told I was a sinner and to stop asking questions. I’d get banged about a bit as well. I remember before confession once, saying I didn’t have any sins to confess and being told to make a few up. Of course when I said that would be telling a lie and a lie was a sin, I was in big trouble. You couldn’t question anything. It was all very controlled, very strict. Every area of your life they tried to control. I just couldn’t take it.’

When Maureen was ten years old her school called her parents in and told them they didn’t consider Maureen a suitable pupil. She was taken out of the school and put into the public school system. ‘When I left Catholic school and went public, they were very, very angry about that. In fact they were furious, especially my mother. She was very upset that I wasn’t going to get a Catholic education. I remember they even tried to bribe me to stay in Catholic school by telling me I’d get a car when I was old enough if I went to a Catholic University. I was just a child. You don’t think that far ahead when you are a child, so promises like that really didn’t have any impact. But looking back I can see now how important the whole Catholic education thing was to them.’ Only in later life, when Maureen looked more closely at the box of papers she had found as a child in her parents’ bottom drawer did she see the copy of the affidavit Jim and Dorothy Rowe had signed all those years ago. They had sworn a solemn oath that if the nuns in Ireland gave them a child they would educate her in Catholic schools, all the way through to university. ‘When I saw that affidavit and read it, I understood why they had reacted as they did when I left the Catholic school system. I had made them break their word. My mother especially was obsessed about it. It really had a huge impact on her and on the way she treated me. I can now see it was around then she really got to be very harsh towards me. She had wanted to make me turn out like her, and it wasn’t happening.’

It was around this time that Mrs Rowe added a new dimension to the story about Maureen’s adoption. ‘She started telling me I had been an unwanted baby, that my real mother didn’t love me, that she had abandoned me, and that I should show more gratitude to her for taking me in. It was all this stuff about how awful and terrible my natural mother had been and how wonderful she was to have given me a home. I suppose it was to make me feel guilty as much as grateful, you know, because I wasn’t turning out to be such a good Catholic after all.’ Harsh words were followed by harsh treatment, but Maureen doesn’t like to dwell on that side of the story.

For the next 25 years of her life, Maureen lived with this image of herself as an unwanted, unloved, abandoned baby. ‘All my life I carried that, because of the way it was presented to me. She never missed an opportunity to tell me I owed her a great debt of gratitude. And living with the thought that your natural mother just abandoned you – that was baggage you carry all your life.’

And there were other negative factors too. Despite the fact that both Jim and Dorothy Rowe had met Archbishop McQuaid’s health requirements, by supplying a doctor’s certificate stating they were both ‘in very good health’, Mrs Rowe, in fact, had suffered from rheumatoid arthritis since she was 20 years old, 20 years before she adopted Maureen. She was in a wheelchair for much of Maureen’s adolescence, which added to the difficulties that already existed between mother and daughter. It was clear that no independent check had been carried out on the state of Mrs Rowe’s health. Someone in her condition would have had difficulty adopting a child in Ireland.

At the same time, curiosity about her natural mother continued to grow in Maureen. ‘Just who was this woman, and did she really abandon me? You fantasise about her being a wonderful and famous person, beautiful, rich, all that sort of stuff, and you imagine a terrible mistake was made, or a wicked person took you away, anything so you weren’t just dumped.’

In childhood little can be done to satisfy the urge to know, but at 18, newly independent, with a job and a flat of her own, Maureen decided to have a go. It was the beginning of a painful search that was to take another 18 years to complete. She described it as ‘18 years of frustration, like banging my head off a brick wall, knowing someone had this information and they just weren’t going to give it to me.’ As a first step she wrote to the nuns at Castlepollard, saying she had lost her original birth certificate and could she please have a replacement. This was a document she had never seen before. Within weeks she had in her hands the official record of her birth, her mother’s name included.

That’s when I had to make my mind up – did I want to find her or not? Was I going to get into something here that might end in tears for everyone? I mean, I’d been told she didn’t want me, so why should it be any different now, and why should I go looking for someone who abandoned me in the first place? But then I’d say to myself, well that’s someone else’s opinion, that she didn’t want me. She hasn’t told me that herself. I haven’t heard it from her. “I don’t want you, please don’t bother me, you’re being a pain”. If I heard that from her then I could let this thing rest. I have to know was I wanted, what was the situation, was it difficult, did she ever think about me, did she just walk away and say “okay, bye now, that’s it, and don’t ever come looking for me”?

Maureen’s first efforts to find her mother were dispiriting. ‘When I knew her name I got in touch with Father Regan at Castlepollard. It was amazing, because he knew me, he called me by my birth name, Marion. He got me to write her a letter and said he’d forward it. Then I’d get back to him and he’d say he had no reply and maybe I should just accept that she wasn’t interested. That kind of made me think well maybe she doesn’t want to know, maybe I should just let things lie. And so I backed off for two or three years and did nothing.’

In the meantime Maureen had married. Her husband was in the hotel business and they were comfortably well- off. To anyone who didn’t know her well, Maureen seemed to have everything and certainly no reason for discontentment. But she was still carrying this burden of uncertainty about her own origins. It just nagged at her all the time. Then she got pregnant. ‘Suddenly I started thinking again about her in a concentrated way, you know, that she was pregnant with me once, what was it like for her? What happened that made it all work out this way? And where is she now? What is she doing? Has she any other grandchildren?

Have I any brothers or sisters? All these things go on in your head. So one day I just picked up the phone and rang Father Regan again at Castlepollard and a secretary answered. She said, “Oh are you one of those children from the United States?” When she said that I had the weirdest feeling, I wasn’t alone, there were others like me, other people who must have been doing what I was doing, trying to find out who they were, what had happened in their lives. It was funny knowing other people out there were feeling the same way as me.’

Maureen was put through to Father Regan, and even though a few years had passed since they last spoke, he still remembered who she was and called her Marion. ‘I knew he was just putting me off, distracting me, giving me little bits of information. He’d tell me a little bit about her, like the colour of her hair, her height, her background, but never enough to help me find her, and that would be it. And I found out afterwards that not everything I was told had been true. I was told my mother’s father was a clock- maker and had a shop. In fact he worked for the post-office. I had been told my mother was a nurse when she was really a teacher. So for years I was looking for the wrong person.’

Maureen wrote several letters to her mother, care of Father Regan. ‘Of course as I was to find out later my mother never received any of my letters. I don’t think they wanted me to find her, they didn’t want it to come to a conclusion. It was a control thing. They had separated us and they were going to keep us apart. They probably thought it was for the best, you know, put all that behind you and get on with your life. But what right did they have to make such decisions?’

Father Regan, of course, was a traditionalist. He had come into the adoption business when the prevailing theory favoured closed adoptions, a system in which, once separated, mother and child were never to see one another again. Father Cecil Barrett spelled it out in his definitive guide to adoption practice. “The child will never know his own parent... he will never know his mother,’ Barrett wrote, and ‘she knows that she will never see her child again, that she will never know him.’
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Helping reunite adopted people with their natural mothers was not part of the Church’s agenda.