Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business

by Mike Milotte

  Marion’s passport application was submitted to the Department of External Affairs by the nuns in Stamullen, and consisted by and large of the documents prescribed by Archbishop McQuaid – essential proofs of the Rowes’ Catholicism such as their marriage and baptismal certificates, references from priests, a Catholic Charities home report, and sworn undertakings from the Rowes to bring baby Marion up, and to educate her, in the faith. Without this last document the Department of External Affairs would refuse a passport, even though no such condition applied to adoptions within Ireland. There was also a statement signed by Marion’s mother in the presence of a Notary Public in which she ‘relinquished all claims to the child for ever’ and consented to her removal from the State for adoption abroad by anyone ‘deemed suitable’ by St Clare’s. To the consular officials in the Department of External Affairs, this was a routine application. Everything appeared to be in order, and on the 15 July 1960 baby Marion got her passport, issued in the name of the Minister for External Affairs, Frank Aiken.

  By comparison with the Irish passport requirements, the demands of the American embassy for an immigrant visa were distinctly secular.

  The Rowes had to guarantee that the ‘alien’ they were sponsoring for entry to the States – i.e. Marion – would not become a ‘public charge’. The ‘alien’ had to answer such questions as: ‘Are you a drug dealer?’ ‘Do you have leprosy?’ ‘Are you going to the United States to engage in an immoral sexual act?’ ‘Are you a psychopath or otherwise mentally insane?’ and ‘Are you a member of the Communist Party?’ On Marion’s behalf St Clare’s answered ‘no’ to each question, and on 28 July 1960 her immigrant visa was issued.

  Under international air-traffic law, minors under eight years of age had to be accompanied on all flights, so baby Marion needed an escort. There were several options. She could be entrusted to any one of a number of young Irish women who had made themselves known to the nuns as willing volunteers. For the girls it meant a free flight to New York and a few days in America, all at the adopters’ expense. Or a children’s nurse could be hired for the job, at extra expense. There was even an American company called Shannon Travel Services which specialised in bringing Irish ‘orphans’ to the States, collecting them by taxi from the orphanage, driving them to Shannon, and engaging escorts for the flight. But in the end the Rowes decided to send a female escort of their own choice from New York. The escort arrived at Stamullen on Monday 8 August 1960 and took custody of baby Marion, all dressed in her best clothes. Next day, baby and escort were aboard the Pan American Airlines afternoon flight from London to New York’s Idlewild airport. The total bill from the airline company was a staggering $455, equivalent to €16,000 today. The Rowes were at the airport to meet their little ‘alien’.

  Just that morning the Rowes had received their first detailed description of their new daughter from St Clare’s. Her height, weight, colouring, eating habits and diet were described in minute detail. She had been passed by the doctor as ‘perfectly healthy and normal both physically and mentally,’ but ‘does not walk yet, in fact is not quite standing’. Though Marion was already 14 months old, St Clare’s advised the Rowes that her lack of mobility was ‘nothing to worry about as children in an institution are slower at all these things than a child in its own home’. There were, after all, 60 children at a time in the nursery, so they weren’t getting much personal attention. Marion had no ‘particular little habits,’ the nuns reported, ‘but she can do with a lot of love and affection.’

  The Rowes were overjoyed with their new daughter – whose name they changed to Maureen. They wrote fervent thank you letters to the nuns at St Clare’s. But they were also worried that Maureen was still not walking and asked the nuns if there were such things as ‘walkie pens’ in Ireland. Yes, replied St Clare’s, ‘we have walkie pens over here, but they are expensive, so are more or less beyond us, but we do have one. They are grand for teaching babies to walk’. Next time they wrote, the Rowes enclosed $20 – with the purchasing power of almost €700 in today’s money – enough to buy any number of ‘walkie pens’.

  Although subsequent letters rarely mentioned money, Maureen was to learn from her father Jim in the years ahead that he and Dorothy sent fairly regular donations to the nuns in Ireland. He mentioned sums of $50 and more – not vast amounts to the Rowes, but a fortune to the nuns and equivalent to €1,725 today. Maureen believed her adoptive parents had been made aware of the nuns’ expectations in this regard before she arrived in the United States. Certainly someone had told the Rowes that the nuns’ account was at the Munster and Leinster Bank, a detail that was never mentioned once in any of the letters from St Clare’s. ‘Well basically,’ Maureen said, ‘from talking to my father, they had given donations up to a certain amount a year. I think it was an unspoken understanding. They would always give money. He sent it to the nuns, mailed cheques to them as a gift. He said it wasn’t that much but it was over many years. You know he had a good job as an engineer, they had a nice home. Money wasn’t a problem.’

  As late as September 1966, by which time Maureen was over six years old, St Clare’s Adoption Society was writing to the Rowes asking for money, from them or any of their friends, to help ‘build a new wing for all our little darlings’. The sisters told them ‘we pray for our benefactors every day’. This was the sort of request Mr Rowe would have responded to with generosity. ‘He’s that kind of person,’ Maureen said, ‘very generous financially’. Her adoptive parents, she said, imagined that Ireland was an impoverished third-world country and that by sending money they were helping keep babies alive who might otherwise not survive. What was more, she said, ‘they were both over 40 years of age. If they hadn’t got a child from outside America, adoption would have been closed to them, so they were very, very grateful.’

  And there were further expenses in America too, including Maureen’s legal adoption and naturalisation. After a compulsory probationary adoption period, the application for full adoption was drawn up in the summer of 1961, a service for which the Rowes’ lawyers sent a $150 bill (€5,175 in today’s money). Another bill followed – equivalent to €480 today – from an Irish lawyer who had obtained the consent of Maureen’s natural mother to the adoption. Finally, on 13 December 1961, Judge Maximillian Moss, presiding over the Surrogate’s Court in the Civic Centre of King’s County, Brooklyn, approved the adoption and officially sanctioned the change of name.

  The only outstanding legal matter was to have Maureen made an American citizen through an application for naturalisation. The Rowes had to appear before a naturalisation examiner (cost $10, equivalent today to €350), and then a judge to answer another series of questions. ‘Had they recently divorced or committed adultery?’ ‘Committed crimes?’ ‘Become prostitutes, drug addicts, communists or pacifists?’ One can only wonder at Maureen’s fate had the answer to any of these questions been yes. As it was, their petition was granted. Maureen Rowe, blonde, blue-eyed, three feet seven and a half inches tall, weighing 40 pounds and very nearly five years old, was ‘admitted as a citizen of the United States of America’.

  The Rowes’ adoption experience differed in no significant way from that of most American couples adopting from Ireland in those years. The key factor, common to all, was that children were being adopted sight unseen while the motives of the adopters were barely interrogated. It was strictly adoption by mail-order, the system that had been sharply criticised in 1958 – just two years before Maureen was dispatched to the US – by two of America’s leading child-protection bodies: International Social Service and the Child Welfare League of America. But their calls for a change in the law to prevent what they called ‘proxy’ adoptions had fallen on deaf ears. Maureen Rowe may have escaped the worst consequences of such a system as described by the ISS and CWLA, but, as we shall see, her life as an adopted child was far from the idyll imagined by the nuns back in Ireland.

  11. Pat: Against My Will

  ‘Someone always made a run for it,
but they were caught and dragged back... I suppose it was like a prison.’

  Patricia Thuillier, 1996

  When the story of Ireland’s baby-export business first emerged in 1996, Patricia Thuillier was in her 50s. With her family grown, she lived with her husband in a well-presented terraced house in one of Dublin’s post-war suburban estates, and worked as a nurse with children with intellectual disability. To anyone who didn’t know her, Pat would have appeared unexceptional, outwardly busy and confident. But for 34 years Pat’s life revolved around a pitiful and destructive lie.1

  In 1962 Pat had become a single mother. In 1964 her baby boy had been sent to America for adoption. Shortly afterwards Pat married and had four more children. But she never told her husband or any of their children about the first baby. It remained a secret, buried deep inside her. Only when the story of the American adoptions began to unfold, almost three and a half decades after she had had her first child, did Pat tell her husband. ‘We were watching a programme on television about those babies when my husband said how awful it was for the poor women. I don’t know where it came from, I just said it: “I’m one of those women. I had a baby.” It was very emotional. He asked why I hadn’t told him all the years we were married, but I just couldn’t. I was so ashamed and so afraid of what people would think of me, what sort of a person was I at all? I dreaded rejection.’

  Pat’s fears of contempt and rebuff had governed her life for 34 years, and her anxieties were well-grounded in experience – not with her husband but with the nuns. In fact, Pat’s husband was totally supportive. He told her that any son of hers was his son too. He couldn’t agree to her request not to tell their (adult) children, and when he did tell them they all rallied round as well. But they weren’t just considerate and understanding. They were angry. Angry at the way their mother had been treated all those years ago; angry at the awful hurt and damage she had suffered as a result of 34 years of suppression and denial. Together, as a family, they set out to find their long-lost son and brother.

  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 o
ur 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.