Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business (25 page)

In her frustration Maureen considered coming to Ireland to confront Father Regan face to face. ‘One time I said to him, “am I going to have to come over there to get this information out of you? There’s no problem with me getting on a plane and coming over.” I was thinking, put the heat on a bit, he doesn’t want to look me in the eye and tell me his lies. So he told me then she wasn’t in Ireland any more, that she had actually lived in America and then the Bahamas, and she had married. But he wouldn’t tell me her husband’s name and of course he wouldn’t give me her address. After a while it finally dawned on me that he just couldn’t care less. I wasn’t so much resentful as frustrated. I felt I was being treated like a child and that was difficult. I wasn’t a kid, I was 36, not three or four.’

Then in 1992 Maureen made contact with a social worker at a Dublin adoption advice agency. The social worker wrote to Father Regan on Maureen’s behalf, but he didn’t reply. The advice agency next wrote to Sister Sarto Harney, senior social worker with the Sacred Heart Adoption Society in Cork. The Sacred Heart nuns had run Castlepollard where Maureen had been born. When Castle- pollard ceased to function as an ‘orphanage’ the records had gone to Sister Sarto. When Sister Sarto wrote back to the social worker in Dublin she gave some useful information: Maureen’s mother had originally been from North Dublin.

In February 1994 the adoption advice agency wrote again to Maureen to say they had contacted Father Regan by phone and he had given them some startling news. It was something that gave Maureen great hope: her mother had actually contacted Father Regan at Castlepollard back in 1963 looking for information about her child’s whereabouts. Amazingly, through all their correspondence and telephone conversations over a period of a dozen years or more, the priest had never once divulged this information to Maureen. Father Regan also told the social workers that ‘due to confidentiality’ he was not prepared to pass on the last address he had on file for Maureen’s mother, an address in the Bahamas. This infuriated Maureen as she felt that if she had the address she could start to trace her mother. What was more, the address had now been on the priest’s files for more than 30 years. Maureen feared the trail could have gone cold. ‘If I’d had that address when I contacted Father Regan the very first time, look how much closer I would have been to her – fifteen years instead of thirty.’ By the summer of 1995 the social workers were reporting ‘deadlock’ as far as Castlepollard was concerned. Father Regan was ‘out sick’ and no one was handling his work. Father Regan died a few months later without casting any further light on the whereabouts of Maureen’s mother.

In the meantime Maureen had written to the Angel Guardian Home in Brooklyn, the people who had helped organise her adoption back in 1960. They replied with a lot of standard information based on a review of her file: her date of birth and weight at birth; the fact that she cut her first tooth at five months, had arrived in the United States in August 1960 and was adopted in December 1961. The file said there was no ‘serious mental or physical illness in the family’, and that her mother was ‘a pleasant, friendly girl of average weight and height with blue eyes and brown wavy hair.’

For the first time since she had started to look for her mother, Maureen found a reference to her father. According to the Angel Guardian Home: ‘There isn’t any information on the putative father. He did not acknowledge paternity or contribute to your support.’

‘My response to that was, what a creep,’ Maureen said. ‘And then you would wonder, was it rape? You know, you hardly every think about the father. I suppose it’s the way our society is in these situations. You don’t really expect the father to stick around. You look for your mother because you would have expected to have been with her even if she wasn’t married. So when you learn something about your father, and it’s negative, I suppose it just reinforces something that was there already. I mean you wouldn’t have expected anything different.’

But if there was nothing in the response from the Angel Guardian Home that would help her find her mother, the Dublin social workers at least had one final suggestion as to where Maureen might turn for help: a woman called Anne who specialised in tracing and reuniting, and who didn’t charge for her help. Anne knew how the system worked, where the public records were and how to access them and cross-reference them.

‘So I got in touch with Anne. She asked me to send all my papers and she would do her best. It was amazing, within six months she had found my mother. I’d been looking for 18 years.’ Anne had worked independently of the Church. She had traced Maureen’s mother’s family in north Dublin and through them, without divulging anything about the reasons for her search, had discovered a current address for Maureen’s mother. She was living with her husband in the United States.

When Maureen found out how close she now was to making the contact she had craved for so long she became nervous. ‘You know I was still thinking all this stuff I’d been told as a child, that my mother didn’t want anything to do with me. But Anne helped me think positively about a reunion. She was able to explain what it had been like for single mothers in Ireland in the 1950s, the pressures on them, the lack of support. I began to understand a little bit better that there was a lot more to this than rejection. I began to feel compassion towards my mother. This would be important for her as well as for me. She would be able to know that I was well, that I had a family, that she was a grandmother to six smashing kids. And that I had no resentment towards her. Making contact now would bring a sort of closure to what was a painful experience for both of us.’ Maureen didn’t rush the contact. ‘I prepared myself. I got all these books and articles about adoption from the birth mother’s point of view. I read and read, especially about the worst scenarios. I suppose I prepared myself for the worst and hoped for the best. I didn’t know what I was going to find. Did she want to be contacted? Did she care? Anne made the first approach, discreetly, to see if Maureen’s mother wanted to be contacted by her daughter. The answer was yes, she did. ‘So Anne gave me her phone number and I called. It was difficult on the phone, you know, emotional, but still sort of anonymous. She was in Florida, I was in Virginia. We agreed to meet, so I flew down to her. Meeting your own mother face to face after 36 years – that’s some experience. There was no resentment on my part at what she had done and no anger from her that I had suddenly burst into her life. She was wonderful.’

In the course of the first meeting with her mother and in subsequent conversations, Maureen was to make some startling discoveries. ‘My mother told me that a few years after my birth she had written to Castlepollard and left her address and said if ever Marion comes looking for me this is where I am. And she wrote to the nuns: “any news of Marion?” And she looked in the States, but every avenue was just shut in her face. They’d just tell her, “look, forget about it.” Maureen’s mother confirmed this. ‘I visited Castlepollard on occasion and met with Father Regan,’ she said. ‘He knew where I was in the Bahamas and the States, but I never got any letters from him at any time. And I used to correspond with the Mother Superior at the orphanage and would get replies from her six months later. But she never indicated she knew anything about Marion.’

Maureen is convinced it was a deliberate policy not to help reunite them. ‘They knew she was looking for me and they knew I was looking for her but still they wouldn’t give either of us the information. They just weren’t going to do it. There was still that control, being treated like a child when you’re not a child: we’ll make your decisions for you, and we decide you’re not going to find her.’

Maureen also learned of the circumstances which led to her being born in Castlepollard. Her mother had been seeing a man quite a few years older than herself, Jan, who was a 36-year-old Dutchman working in Dublin. When her mother got pregnant, far from denying paternity Jan had found a flat for them both to live in. But in the meantime Maureen’s mother had turned to a priest she knew for advice and he forbade her from ‘living in sin’ with her child’s father. As Jan was a Protestant who had been married once before and divorced, marriage in Ireland to a Catholic girl was out of the question.

Partly to get her away from Jan and the ‘occasion of sin’, and partly to avoid scandalising her family, the priest arranged for Maureen’s mother to have her baby in Castle- pollard. Maureen was told by her mother that Jan had contributed financially while she was at Castlepollard, information that flatly contradicted the dispiriting news Maureen had been given by the Angel Guardian Home about her father denying paternity and contributing nothing towards her support. Maureen also learned that Jan had come to see them both after the birth but had been turned away by the nuns. Nor had he simply abandoned his daughter. In fact he had proposed taking baby Marion back to Holland, but Maureen’s mother didn’t want to give her up: she was determined to keep her and look after her herself.

The unconventional relationship between Maureen’s mother and father had little chance of success in the Ireland of 1960. They would have to go their separate ways. Maureen’s mother stayed on with her baby at Castlepollard for a few months. She had no complaints at all about her treatment. As a private, paying client – unlike most girls who were there at public expense – Maureen’s mother was not required to do any manual work, and was treated with common decency if not respect. Money, as always, talked to the nuns. But the Sisters at Castlepollard put pressure on her to agree to give her baby up for adoption. She resisted. They then informed her that her baby was sickly and would require greater care and attention than she could hope to provide as an unmarried mother. This was untrue. The child had had a stomach disorder in early infancy, but at the time of going to America she had been given a completely clean bill of health.

Finally, sometime before the baby’s first birthday, the nuns got their way. Maureen’s mother admitted defeat and agreed to let her baby be offered for adoption. ‘But only on condition,’ she said, ‘that they send me news of how she was doing from time to time, and the occasional photograph.’ None of these were ever sent to her despite the fact that Jim and Dorothy Rowe wrote regular letters to the nuns, full of news about the baby’s progress along with lots of photographs.

Learning so much about her origins was a life-changing experience for Maureen. ‘To find out the truth, to discover that you were wanted, that you were loved and that your mother only parted with you under awful circumstances, that was a life-changing experience for me. It was such a boost to my self-esteem. And to see that I look like her, this is a wonderful experience because when you are adopted you don’t look like anyone. Suddenly you know you came from somewhere, that you belonged somewhere, that you have a real past, you didn’t just appear from nowhere. That’s all so important for adopted people, that if you’re not adopted you just can’t understand it. But no one should have the right to keep it from you.’

There was a final piece of the jigsaw missing: Jan, Maureen’s birth father. She discussed with her mother whether or not she should look for him, and her mother encouraged her to do so. But where would she begin? Telephone directories are a useful starting point, but even though his surname would have been uncommon in America it was probably quite ordinary in Holland. By chance Maureen just happened to have computer access to all listed telephone numbers in Canada and she just keyed in her father’s name one day to see what turned up. There were a couple of entries for the same surname, but none had ‘J’ as a first initial. She tried one anyway and after a convoluted conversation about family trees with the man on the other end of the line, she discovered that she was talking to Jan’s brother. It was a staggering coincidence, a chance in a million. She told him why she wanted to contact Jan, and he promised to come back to her soon with information. A couple of days later he called with a telephone number. Jan was in Cape Town, South Africa.

‘I called him straight away and he answered the phone. I just came out and said it: “You had a baby in Ireland.” Well, he said straight back, “yes I did have a baby, is it you? Are you Marion?” He said the same name, he remembered the name. He was so excited, he seemed so happy. “I’ve thought about you all these years,” he said. “Where have you been? What have you been doing?” He just couldn’t believe that I had done the search and I had found him. He was so accepting and so excited.’

Next time Maureen called Jan it was on his birthday. ‘He told me then he had tried to get in to see me but the nuns just slammed the door in his face. He said he was so sorry now that he had accepted their right to do that, he hadn’t fought them, just turned round and went away again. He explained that being divorced there was no way things could have worked out in Ireland. He had no rights. He wasn’t allowed to see me. He wasn’t asked about my future. Now, he’s old and he never had that opportunity.’ Jan finally visited Maureen in America in late 1996, spending five weeks with her and her family. ‘He was so open about it all,’ Maureen said, ‘but also so angry about the way we had all been treated by the Church.’

Maureen may be one of the lucky ones. Not only has she found her mother and her father, but she has come through her experiences remarkably intact and the reunions have proved amicable. But she has strong feelings about the obstacles that were put in the way of her tracing her mother. ‘I don’t think any priest or any nun has the right to keep records secret that could help reunite people. If mothers – or fathers for that matter – don’t want the contact, let them say so themselves: “sorry, I just can’t cope with you in my life right now”, not have someone else say it for them. And it’s even worse when the people telling you, “no, we can’t put you together” are the same people who pulled you apart in the first place.’

14. Deny Till They Die

‘It must be borne in mind that no official records exist of Irish children who were sent abroad for adoption in the past... No information is kept on Irish children who were adopted under the laws of foreign countries.’