Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business (20 page)

It was an exciting quest, full of great expectations and foolish fantasies. The girls joked among themselves: maybe he was Hollywood heartthrob Brad Pitt or billionaire computer genius Bill Gates. For her part, Pat imagined a happy and joyful reunion with the son she had last seen at 18 months of age, when she kissed him goodbye at the side door of the Castlepollard mother and baby home.

Pat was just one of around 300 unmarried young women whose babies were sent to America for adoption by the Sacred Heart nuns from Castlepollard, County Westmeath. From their convent in the old Manor House – once the country home of Lord Pollard – the nuns ran a substantial 120 acre farm as well as a maternity hospital and home for around 120 single mothers and their babies. These mother- and-child facilities were located in a separate, more functional building dating from the 1930s known as St

Peter’s, with the nursery on the ground floor, girls’ dormitories on the first floor and delivery rooms on top. St Peter’s was maintained at public expense, but it also provided single rooms for those who could afford to pay the fees. In all, the nuns at Castlepollard placed around 2,500 ‘illegitimate’ children for adoption, most of them within Ireland.

In Pat Thuillier’s case it seems the Dublin priest, Father Michael Cleary, who himself fathered two children, was deeply involved in arranging the adoption of her son. Michael Cleary’s role in the whole affair remains somewhat shadowy, but Pat was convinced he played an important part at every turn. Pat got to know Father Cleary when she was training as a children’s nurse with the Sisters of Charity at the Temple Hill children’s home in Blackrock, County Dublin. It was not a career she had chosen for herself, but then Pat Eyres, as she was then, had few choices in her life.

‘I was actually born in a home myself, Sean Ross Abbey in Tipperary, which was also run by the Sacred Heart Sisters. My mother wasn’t married. When she got pregnant a second time I was sent to a foster mother. I had a very difficult childhood. My real mother kept my younger sister after rejecting me, and she seemed to have everything. There was always a preference for someone else over me and I wondered why I was the one who was always rejected. I wasn’t a happy child.’

In 1958 at the age of 16, Pat went off to Temple Hill to train as a nurse under the direction of the Sisters of Charity who ran the children’s home there. ‘I wasn’t given any choice, but as it happened I liked it. I was just glad to be away. We went to Mass every morning at 6.50 am. I wasn’t late once in two years. We worked 12 hour shifts for £2 a week (€200), which was a lot of money to me in those days. I loved the children in Temple Hill. I got very attached to them. Many of them were sent to America to be adopted, but it never occurred to me to ask why or what became of them. I just accepted it as something that happened.’

Temple Hill was attached to St Patrick’s Guild, also run by the Sisters of Charity, who over a period of 20 years sent almost 600 children to America for adoption. Unlike Sean Ross Abbey where Pat was born, or Castlepollard where she had her own baby, Temple Hill had no maternity hospital attached to it. It took in ‘illegitimate’ babies from other hospitals without their mothers.

It was during her training at Temple Hill that Pat first met Father Michael Cleary, who was involved in making arrangements for many unmarried mothers. In 1960 – after seeing scores of children sent to America for adoption – Pat finished her training and was sent to work as a children’s nanny with a wealthy family in Dalkey. From there she moved to another post on Carysfort Avenue.

‘I had a boyfriend, and I became pregnant. We had arranged to meet this particular night, but it never happened, we never got to see each other. They just came to the house where I was working and took me away. It was a social worker and some other people. Even though I was over 18 years old I just assumed they could do this because I had been in foster care before.’ This, Pat thought, was the first critical intervention by Michael Cleary. ‘I think it must have been him who told the social worker. He knew I was pregnant. I’d told him I was, even though I wasn’t looking for his help. The child’s father, Austin, was still talking about getting married. I can’t see any other way the social worker would have known but for Mick Cleary telling her.’

It was April 1962 and the beginning of 34 years of anguish for Pat. ‘The first night I spent in the Magdalene Home on Sean McDermott Street. That was terrible. Girls were screaming and fighting. I had no idea what was going to happen to me. The next morning the social worker reappeared and took me off to Castlepollard. That journey was the last I saw of the outside world for two years.’ On arrival at Castlepollard, Pat, like all the young women, was given a new identity, of sorts. She was no longer allowed to use her own name but would be known as Augusta. Her own clothes were taken from her and replaced by a sort of overall. ‘You couldn’t be identified or talk about your home to anyone, but there was one girl from my home town who used to give me copies of the local newspaper to read.’ This was against the rules, and getting caught would have resulted in segregation, Pat said.

While there was a strict work regime at Castlepollard, pregnant girls didn’t have to do any of the hard labour. ‘We just sat around and knitted all the time, knit, knit, knit, that’s all we did for days and weeks on end,’ said Pat. The hard graft would come later. ‘The nuns weren’t very warm or friendly towards us,’ Pat recalled. ‘They weren’t liked. There were fights and sometimes the nuns were hit and had things thrown at them. They vetted all our mail, they read letters, coming in and going out. I knew that if I wrote to my boyfriend the letter would never reach him, and I knew if he wrote to me I wouldn’t get his letter either. There was an awful lot of fire and brimstone stuff from the priest, Father Regan. He wasn’t nice either. We were preached at all the time.’

And there were severe restrictions on movement. ‘You couldn’t get out of the outside gate, you just weren’t allowed. But some girls tried to resist. Lots of them tried to run away, especially on Sundays when we got out for a walk in the grounds without our babies. Someone always made a run for it, but they were caught and dragged back or the Guards would be called and they’d go out and round them up and bring them back again. I don’t know of anyone who got away, but the Guards were always being called. I suppose it was like a prison.’ But Pat said she was always too afraid to question anything. She kept her head down and kept out of trouble. ‘We were told we were privileged being in there, that we’d been taken in by the nuns out of the kindness of their hearts. If we weren’t in there we’d end up as prostitutes. That’s what we were told the alternative was for us. We were bad girls, we’d had sex. We were shamed. That worried me. I was always timid and afraid and I suppose I believed it.’

Pat’s baby, a boy, was born on 29 August 1962. She called him Trevor Augustine Eyres. Because she was breastfeeding, Pat was allowed to stay with Trevor for longer than many new mothers. ‘I used to fantasise then about his father coming and taking us both away,’ she said, ‘but of course he never did.’ Soon they were separated, Pat going upstairs into a dormitory with six or seven other girls, Trevor to the nursery. ‘At first we were allowed to see our babies three times a day, but then it was reduced to two and finally to just once a day. That was how they tried to wean us off our babies so we wouldn’t be so upset at them being taken away for adoption. But of course it didn’t work. How could you fail to be devastated by something like that?’ Michael Cleary would visit from time to time, bringing a few sweets and toiletries, but when he went to look at her baby he would never go with Pat, only with a nun. ‘I think that was because they were discussing the adoption between themselves,’ she said. But they didn’t discuss it with her.

‘Six weeks after your baby was born they reckoned you were fit for work. Most of the girls were put out in the farm, working in the fields or the gardens or with the pigs and cattle. Or they were put to cleaning. Girls worked in the dormitories, the laundry, the kitchens, the dining room, the bakery, the nurseries. I was lucky. I was put into administration. It was my job to give the new girls their “house-names”, take their clothes, give them their house clothes, which I used to make as well, and give them their bedding.’ Her work was supervised by Sister Isabel, the only nun, she said, who ever showed her any kindness at

Castlepollard. ‘She would bring me the odd sweet or biscuit for Trevor and she would let me go to see him more than I was supposed to.’

Pat spent her 21 st birthday in Castlepollard. ‘It was just like any other day. I was polishing the floors in reception when Sister Isabel came over and gave me a quarter pound box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray, maybe six or eight chocolates, and a hanky. That was my 21st birthday. It was straight back to work polishing the floor. There was no one else offering any sort of support or friendship.’

For much of the time the girls’ entertainment consisted of imagining what might have been. ‘I remember Joe Dolan was playing in a marquee in Castlepollard and we all sat round fantasising, could we get out and see him? Of course we never did. But that was how we spent a lot of our time. We’d go up to the top of the house to see could we hear the music from the town.’

Some of the girls developed relationships with each other which the nuns never discovered. ‘There were six to eight girls to a dorm,’ said Pat, ‘and at night some girls used to get into bed with each other. There was a lot of pairing off. I was invited into bed with girls from time to time, but for some reason it didn’t appeal to me and I didn’t do it. I knew nothing about lesbianism of course, and it’s only looking back now that I understand what was going on. I’m sure it was just for closeness, a bit of human contact, a cuddle. It was so cold and impersonal there, no one ever touched you, no one held your hand or offered any sort of comfort. But when you’d hear a nun coming at night, they’d all jump out of bed and get back into their own beds.’

Pat had always known that she would have to spend a long time at Castlepollard, for although the home was maintained at public expense, the girls still had to pay for their own and their babies’ upkeep by working. Their labours, of course, also maintained the Sisters of the Sacred Heart who resided at Castlepollard. Girls were not free to leave until alternative arrangements had been made for their children, whether through adoption or a place becoming available in a home for older children. It had also been clear to Pat that her child would eventually be offered for adoption, but as the weeks turned to months, she put the thought out of her head. On Saturdays she would sit and watch visitors coming, imagining that her child’s father might appear one day and take her and the child away. He didn’t come, but a lot of American couples did. ‘They’d come and look at the babies,’ Pat said. ‘I remember this one nun who used to show them around. She was very loud: “Oh no, you can’t have that one,” she would say in her haughty voice, “that one’s gone already but come and look at this one.”’

Pat said there was a rigorous selection process for the children sent to America. ‘They had to be physically perfect, and none of the black babies that were there were ever selected. The nuns inquired into the background of the mother and the father of the child. Background seemed to be very important in making the selection.’

When Trevor was almost 18 months old, on 19 February 1964, Pat was ordered to attend a meeting in the ‘big house’ – the convent. ‘I was told to sit at one end of this long table and at the other end was a man I imagine was a solicitor. In between us were two nuns. I was given a piece of paper and told to sign. I wasn’t told what it was I was signing. Nothing was explained to me. And you daren’t ask, you just did what you were told and got on with it.’ In fact, Pat recalled, this was the third ‘signing’ she had attended, the others being when Trevor was six months old and a year old. She said that on those occasions she wasn’t even allowed to read the papers that were thrust in front of her. The final document she signed read as follows:

I, Patricia Eyres, at present residing at the Sacred Heart Convent, Castlepollard, in the County of Westmeath, Republic of Ireland, make Oath and say as follows:

(1)I hereby relinquish full claim forever to my child Trevor Augustine Eyres, born on the 29th day of August, 1962, and I hereby surrender the said Trevor Augustine Eyres to Catherine McCarthy, known in religion as Rev Mother Rosamonde McCarthy, Sacred Heart Convent, Castlepollard, and I undertake never to make any claim to the said child.

(2)I authorise the said Catherine McCarthy to send my child Trevor Ausgustine Eyres out of the Republic of Ireland for the purpose of legal adoption.

Sworn by the said PATRICIA EYRES at Castlepollard in the County of Westmeath, this 19th day of February 1964 before a Notary Public for the county of Westmeath, and I certify that the Deponent is personally known to me.

Pat, however, said she certainly did not know the Notary Public, the man at the far end of the big table who confirmed her signature, and who certified that he knew her personally. And, as we shall see, at least one of the signatures he said he witnessed was not hers at all.

At no point in any of these proceedings was Pat told what her rights were – or even that she had rights – or advised as to what rights she was signing away, although the Adoption Act required that her right to withdraw her child from adoption at any time before the legal process was completed had to be explained fully to her. But her sense of being shabbily treated was tinged with resignation. ‘What alternative did I have? Absolutely none! I could never have got my child out of there – never – they wouldn’t have let me leave that home with him. I’d nowhere to go. I had nothing, no money, no job, no home of my own. No one ever discussed adoption with me. I was just told that’s what was going to happen. I was too scared to question it. I just accepted it. What else could I do?’

After each of the three signings, Pat said, Father Michael Cleary would mysteriously appear. ‘I’d come out of the room where I had just signed whatever was put in front of me and there would be Mick Cleary. He would just appear from nowhere. I know he had an interest in me and my baby. And I know he was very involved in America at the time too, back and forth all the time.’ Pat was firmly convinced that Cleary was involved in arranging Trevor’s adoption in America.