More than 60,000 people went through the religious-run institutions in this country up until the final one closed its doors in the 1980s. When their time came to leave, many fled to the UK and beyond, in the hope of building a new life.
But their pain didn’t end there.
Women like Philomena Lee and Maggie O’Connor broke their silence in their later years to reveal the trauma they endured over losing their children to forced adoptions.
In recent weeks, a bill was introduced in the UK designed to help survivors of Ireland’s mother and baby homes and who now live there to receive compensation.
Labour MP Liam Conlon and chair of the Labour Party’s Irish Society, moved ‘Philomena’s Law’, named after survivor and campaigner Philomena Lee.
He said survivors living in Britain have been deterred from making an application to the compensation scheme operated by the Irish Government out of fears they could “lose means-tested benefits and financial support for social care”.
Mr Conlon told Britain’s House of Commons: “Philomena is one of tens of thousands of women and their infant children who spent time in mother and baby homes across Ireland for the perceived sin of becoming pregnant outside of marriage.
“The women were regularly used as unpaid labour and infant mortality was alarmingly high.”
He said the women experienced “harsh conditions and mistreatment”.
The mother and baby home redress scheme was introduced by the last government to compensate survivors who spent time in such institutions. It finally opened for applications on March 20, 2024, and it was estimated that 34,000 survivors were entitled to compensation.
However, uptake on the €600m scheme has been nowhere near what was anticipated. The latest figures from the Department of Children show that up to Monday, March 10, some 6,250 applications have been received.
Almost 5,400 notices of determination have been issued to applicants – 82% of which contain an offer of benefits. Applicants have six months to consider their offer before they need to respond, and to date 4,000 payments have been made or are in the process of being made.
While ‘Philomena’s Law’ has been welcomed, survivors in Ireland want to see the terms of reference of the redress scheme extended to include those people who spent less than six months in a home, those who were hospitalised or ‘boarded out’ to families, and all of the homes included in the package.
The spoke to three survivors who have been denied redress, and the families of those who died without ever being compensated.
Michael Byrne was born in the Tuam mother and baby home on July 22, 1957. He was transferred to Temple Hill in Dublin within weeks because of a disability in his leg.
Temple Hill, however, is not included in the redress scheme. Michael was adopted to a family in Boston in 1961 and said he is “lost for words” over the fact he is not entitled to compensation.
“The institution didn’t qualify, it’s a government decision, there is a list of homes that are getting compensation, so basically, we can ‘f’ off” he said.
“It’s not a financial point to make for me, it’s more that it is emotional.
Michael Byrne as a child. He was transferred from Tuam mother and baby home to Temple Hill in Dublin within weeks because of a disability in his leg.
“I was in two different hospitals, the first was for three years and the other for eight months and there are no records for me, but I was in a home for years and not adopted until 1961, but yet it doesn’t qualify.
“I didn’t apply for the scheme. What is the point, we were told it doesn’t qualify.
“It’s tough to find the right words to say exactly how it makes you feel. But it is insulting. I’ll be turning 68 this year, I’ve enough problems with my own government right now, the compensation would have been helpful along with my pension”.
Anastasia Fogarty was named after her mother when she was born in Bessborough in 1951.
“I was born in the January and stayed there until the following New Year’s Eve with my mother,” she said. “Then she was sent with me to Dublin.” At that stage, mother and daughter were forcibly separated.
“She told me, when I met her once years later, two nuns met her and brought her into a sitting room in a building and said, ‘say goodbye to your baby you’ll never see her again’ and took me out of her arms.”
“She told me her life ended that day. From there I went through St. Patrick’s Guild, and my father paid money every month for me. My mother’s sisters paid for me too and my adoptive mother.
Anatasia Fogarty is only entitled to compensation for one mother and baby home, even though Anastasia spent time in two different
“I was a year when I went to them, I was waiting two years before I was adopted.”
Even though Anastasia spent time in two different homes, she is only entitled to compensation for one.
“I applied for redress, and I got money for being in Bessborough. I was refused money for St. Rita’s [which is not included in the list of institutions covered] which is really unfair.”
Clodagh Malone was born in St Patrick’s Navan Road in 1970. She told the how “my birth mother presented herself in London to the Catholic Rescue Protection centre”.
“They had the police escort her and another girl (pregnant by a priest) onto the boat to Ireland.
“My mother was incarcerated for four days at St. Patrick’s mother and baby home before my birth. I didn’t apply for redress as it has been stated, in bold, we don’t matter.
“As a survivor from a religious-run institution, such institutions were supported and subsided by the State.”
She said you cannot “quantify or weigh the burden of trauma that was imposed upon vulnerable women and children”.
“Throughout our lives, we have been treated like an island cut off from the mainland. Yet again we’re being rejected by our peers”.
Christina ‘Chrissy’ Tully is a survivor of the Tuam mother and baby home. File photo: Gofundme
This sense of injustice in how elderly survivors are being treated was echoed earlier this month when the published 94-year-old Christina ‘Chrissie’ Tully’s plea to buy her council home in case her missing son returns to look for her after she dies.
Her story about facing death without ever getting answers about her son, who she believes was taken from her, brings into stark focus the age profile of those people who were terribly wronged and are still campaigning for justice – and the families of those who have died without it ever being served.
Margaret ‘Maggie’ O’Connor was 92 years old when she died in a care home in Manchester on April 8, 2016 – one year after the Commission of Inquiry into mother and baby homes was launched.
She had kept a secret from her family for more than five decades about her ‘bonnie baby’ girl. Maggie had been raped by a caretaker in the industrial school where she had lived since she was a child.
The nuns sent Maggie to the Tuam home where the infant was delivered, but sadly she died on June 6, 1943, from whooping cough.
“She never told anyone,” said her daughter Annette McKay who has campaigned for justice on behalf of her mother and sister for the past 11 years and is on the advisory board for the Director of the Tuam intervention.
“It wasn’t until she was 70 when she met her great grandchild, my grandson Jack, that she broke down in front of us. I went to her house the next day as I knew something was wrong and she was sobbing and sobbing.
Maggie had dementia for 12 years and had spent her adult life on medication because of the trauma of her broken childhood.
Her own mother had died from sepsis on her ninth pregnancy and Maggie and her siblings were marched to Galway Courthouse and sent to Lenaboy Industrial School in Taylor’s Hill. The boys were sent to the Christian Brothers.
Once inside, Maggie worked like a slave for many years and at 16 she was raped by a man who worked in the home.
A year later she was sent to the Tuam mother and baby home where her baby Mary Margaret was born.
“Mum suffered all her life,” continued Annette. “If she saw nuns she would freak out.
Maggie O’Connor died a year after the Commission of Inquiry into mother and baby homes was launched.
“She was a beautiful woman, the best dressed woman in Galway, but she died never seeing any justice whatsoever, and I believe her dementia was a blessing in many ways because she suffered so much and was always crying”.
When the Redress Scheme for Industrial Survivors was rolled out in the mid-2000s the board did not accept that Maggie was raped, and later claimed it was a consensual relationship.
“We knew she was raped by a married man with kids who lived on the grounds of Lenaboy, we never knew about baby Mary,” said Annette.
“Her barrister said she hit every milestone for damages but in the end, she received €38,000 for spending all her childhood and teenage years in an industrial home which ended in a pregnancy. The rape was not accepted.
“She wanted to find her baby, but she became so unwell, I was glad in a way because she could have lived for another 20 years with that trauma, but instead, she didn’t remember.”
Former Tuam baby Desmond Lally died in the US in 2021 aged 75 years. He was born in Tuam on July 13, 1946, where he remained for five years and died a day before the final report from the Commission of Inquiry into mother and baby homes was published in January 2021.
He had suffered with poor health and trauma in the run-up to the end of his life.
Mr Lally had spent that later part of his life in the US and had little information about his identity but never gave up looking for his family as well as keeping up to speed with the progress of the commission’s work here.
He later discovered, with the help of friends and distant relatives in Galway, he had four siblings in Ireland whom he was reunited with.
He recalled his first conversation with his brother on the phone from Ireland after he tracked them down.
At the time Des said: ‘He just answered the phone and said, ‘Dessie how are you?’ before he went on to tell me I had three half-sisters.
Des left the Tuam mother and baby home to be fostered out to a family where he worked on a farm.
“I was abused so badly,” he said before he died. “It was a horrible experience. I was fostered, and I was moved from one home to another.
“When I did try to find my identity, I never got my records. I wish I had answers. It bugs me a lot.
“I don’t understand what happened in the home or who my mother was.”
Des was a member of the Tuam Babies Family Group and had been trying to move home to Ireland where “his heart belonged”.
Anna Corrigan whose mother had two babies in the Tuam home said he was “delighted” to be in touch with fellow survivors but wanted desperately to move home.
“He had set up a GoFundMe Page called ‘Yearning for Home’ to help him return to live in Galway.
Desmond Lally was a former Tuam baby Desmond Lally died in the US in 2021 aged 75.
“He had suffered terrible abuse in the foster home and in Tuam. He said it was unbearable. He went into foster care and was beaten so badly, until he walked out at 16 years old and went to the UK.
“Then he went to the US and stayed there for years and years. But his heart was always in Ireland.
“He didn’t have the money to come home, and his Facebook page was flooded with heartbreaking messages after he died.
“Des was a special person; he was very much loved by his friends and community and is missed.
“It was so bitter sweet that he died the day after the commission’s final report. He dreaded the idea of not getting home to see out his final days.”
Anna said he missed out on the State apology, the commissions’ final report and the redress scheme.
“But most of all, he never got to come home to die, and that’s what he wanted most,” she explained.
“These survivors are aging and justice delayed is justice denied, Des was denied his justice and that was very unfair on him.”
In 2018, the Founder of Voice of Irish First Mothers, Kathy McMahon, 63, died at the gates of the UN, where she was going to speak about her life in the mother and baby homes.
She had set up the group in 2014, to support women who had their children taken by the nuns and she tried to have their voices heard.
While Kathy had fought for the mothers who lost their babies in the homes, she herself never got all her answers.
Her late partner Fintan Dunne said at the time: “She had a child taken from her and was able to stop her second child being taken.
“Kathy was a force to be reckoned with, she had fought so hard for truth and justice but never saw the State apology.”
Kathy was just 18 years old when she was pregnant with her first daughter in 1974 in Dublin.
But she said that it was all ‘hush hush’ and she was sent to the Good Shepherd Convent in Dunboyne, Co Meath.
When she went into labour, she was taken to Holles Street hospital where she had her baby but when it came to her discharge, she was told her baby was gone.
Kathy McMahon founded Voice of Irish First Mothers.
Six weeks later Kathy was brought to a solicitor’s office in O’Connell Street to sign adoption papers. She said she was sick at the thought of it but had “no concept of what I was doing”.
The second time she was pregnant when she was told by the nuns to give up her child she replied, “no way”.
Her friend Sheila O’Byrne, whose only child was adopted from St. Patricks’ mother and baby home, said: “She had the strength the second time to say no, so she was strong, but she didn’t see the end to this journey, which is still going on. There are still so many things not resolved for the mothers and many have died before getting their justice.”
