Paul recalls birth mother as 'childhood shadow’

Almost two years after it was originally published, The Adoption Machine, a history of Ireland's Mother and Baby Homes went to the top of the Amazon book chart in the days following the publication of the report by the The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes.

In April 2018, the Westmeath Examiner's Rodney Farry spoke to the author of The Adoption Machine, Paul Redmond, who was born in the Mother and Baby Home in Castlepollard.

AFTER spending almost five decades yearning to speak to his birth mother, St Peter’s Mother and Baby Home “survivor” Paul Redmond’s wish came true in 2011.

The phone call to his mother in the US marked the end of a 33-year quest by Paul, now the chairperson of the Coalition of Mother and Baby Home Survivors, that began when he was only 15. In 1988, he had his first breakthrough in his search for his birth mother when a social worker based in St James’s Hospital revealed that her name was Adeline and she was from the north side of Dublin.

He later found out that she was from a wealthy family and had been a private patient at the mother and baby home in Castlepollard. Through his research, he also discovered that they spent 13 days in Castlepollard before he was transferred to St Patrick’s Mother and Baby Home in Dublin.

He believes that he travelled in the same car as his mother, who was returning to Dublin. Four days after being transferred to St Patrick’s, Paul was collected by his adopted parents, Dublin couple John and Anita Redmond.

Although he has no memory of being told that he was adopted, he says that he grew up “always knowing it”. Despite the loving and stable home environment the Redmonds provided, Paul describes Adeline as his “childhood shadow”, “a mysterious lady who haunted my life”.

In his book, The Adoption Machine, Paul says that after he found out his mother’s name in 1988, he felt like he had struck gold.

“I truly believed that I had enough to find my mother on my own without my social worker. I was on a high for weeks.”

Paul’s elation wouldn’t last long. His own attempts to find his mother proved fruitless, as did his efforts through the social services. After years of searching, in 2004 he finally tracked down Adeline with the help of a US-based people tracer. He says that his “initial ecstasy was followed by a horrible sense of anti-climax”.

“I now had the necessary information to contact my natural mother myself and even had her picture from a Facebook page, but with that came a huge risk of being ejected,” he said.

After becoming involved in the survivor community in 2011 and helping many adoptees trace their parents, Paul forced himself to contact his birth mother and members of her family in the hope of arriving “at some sort of final resolution”.

Thanks to an intervention from Adeline’s brother, Paul’s uncle, mother and son spoke for the first, and so far, only time. Paul quickly realised that Adeline had little or no memory of what he now knows was an unimaginably traumatic period for her.

“She had a full memory blackout, from the time of my birth to the time her father collected her at St Patrick’s on the Navan Road, 13 days later. She was adamant that the Sacred Heart nuns had whipped me out of the delivery room as soon as I was born and that she never saw me... There were two weeks of her life missing.”

At the end of their conversation Paul writes that he knew “that was it”.

“I was told more by a sound she made than words never to call again. She simply could not handle it.”

Six years on from his only conversation with his birth mother, Paul has made peace with the fact that he may never speak to her again. He says that through talking to other birth mothers he can “empathise” with what Adeline and thousands of others went through.

“I had a great deal of sympathy for her. Losing a baby is always a traumatic event. She certainly suffered from some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder, which is common among women who lose children through adoption. In her case, the particular symptom that seems to have been prevalent is memory loss. She blocked a lot out.”

Like himself and his “crib mates” in Castlepollard and the other Mother and Baby Homes, Paul says that the women who gave birth to them should be viewed as survivors of a draconian system that put a false sense of propriety ahead of the wellbeing of its patients.

“Anyone who was in a Mother and Baby Home is a survivor, both of a traumatic experience and also the general regime of the homes where so many died.”

Paul’s story is just one part of the The Adoption Machine, which provides an in-depth history of the Mother and Baby Home system from the opening of the first Magdalene Laundry in 1765 through to the closure of the last home in 1996.

It also tells the story of how Paul and other adoptees came together to campaign for a public inquiry and how after reports of the mass grave at the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam shocked the world, the government finally established a Commission of Investigation.

Much to the frustration of Paul and the other members of the Coalition of Mother and Baby Home Survivors, the publication of the commission’s final report was delayed first to February 2019, more than a year after the original publication date, and then to January 2020.

While the previous Minister for Children Catherine Zappone said the commission needed more time to complete its report due to the extensive amount of information available, Paul thought the delay was down to more cynical concerns.

At the time he said: “We are deeply unhappy with the one-year delay to the inquiry. The fact of the matter is, for the active community we are literally watching our friends die. And several high profile members have died recently.

“What gets to me is that for every person I see dying in the active community, I am well aware that there are hundreds dying silently and alone; dying without receiving any sort of acknowledgement or justice. Every person who dies lowers the final redress bill for the government and that is exactly what they want. The longer they drag it out, the lower the final redress bill.”

He says that he has “often been unsure” about whether adoptees should be included in any redress programme, but is convinced that the mothers who went through the mother and baby home system should get compensation.

“Some adoptees went through hell in the homes. Some didn’t get out of the homes until they were four or five and had their health destroyed by the homes, they are certainly entitled to redress.

“The mothers who worked as slaves in the mother and baby homes six days a week for 10 or 12 hours a day, they are certainly entitled to, if nothing else, their wages for the work they did.

“The fact is the government were paying the nuns for their care on a weekly basis and paying relatively generously, more than enough to look after them and provide medical attention and food. “The nuns simply didn’t do that. They pocketed the cash and punished the mothers. The babies were indirectly punished because if you punish a pregnant woman, then obviously their baby will be punished inside of her. Then when the babies were born, the fact that they wouldn’t allow mothers proper time with their babies to look after them obviously had a detrimental affect on the babies as well.”

While he believes that the commission’s inquiry is incomplete because it investigated only a representative sample of the 27 county homes which served a similar function as Mother and Baby Homes, from his thousands of hours of research, Paul knew that its findings would “shock the world”.

“It won’t just be 800 deaths in Tuam, it will be over 6,000 deaths in nine Mother and Baby Homes. I also hope that there are some details about the still births because a lot of those babies should have lived. A lot women gave birth to dead babies because of the treatment they received and that has not been acknowledged or publicised.

“I personally estimate that there were up to 3,000 still births. Certainly in Castlepollard, the figures conclusively prove that there were 50% stillbirths compared to the number of registered deaths.”

Paul says that he wrote the book out of a sense of obligation to the hundreds of children buried in the Angels Plot in Castlepollard. He first visited the site in 2011 and says that it “changed his life”.

“I walked into the Angels Plot at Castlepollard an adoptee but I left it as a survivor. There’s is no question something happened to me in that plot and I was never the same person afterwards.”

He said at the time this interview was conducted that he would carry on his work with the Coalition of Mother and Baby Home Survivors.

“This will continue for the rest of my life in some way or another. I will certainly continue the research. I will never stop being an activist until there is some sort of justice for every single mother who lost their baby through forced separation,” he said.