Free Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business by Mike Milotte Page A

help adoptees and birth mothers in any way we can, within our very limited resources,’ Sister Gabriel said. But ‘until funding is put in place it is inevitable that there will be long delays in satisfying people’s requests.’
    ‘There seems to be a lot of holding back or putting off, and what’s that going to do for all these mothers and adopted children?’ asked Mary. ‘It’s the adopted children really who are attempting to get to their roots and they are being prevented from doing it. But we’ve moved into a different age. Surely now is the time to let everything come out into the open and not be coming back in 30 years time and saying yes, it should have come out.’

13. Maureen - Seek and Ye Shall Find (But Don’t Hold Your Breath)
    ‘When you know that the church has all the information, they have your file sitting right there in front of them, and they won’t tell you anything, that’s very frustrating, and very hard. It’s a control thing. They separated you from your mother in the first place. So they are going to try and keep you apart now. They might think it’s for the best, but they have no right to make those decisions on behalf of adults’.
    Maureen, 1996

    Maureen Rowe found out she was adopted when she was about seven years old. 1 ‘I was playing in my parents’ room one day and I remember opening the bottom drawer in their dresser looking for something and there was this silver box. Of course being a child I opened it and it was full of paper. What caught my eye – I’ll never forget it – was a newspaper clipping, pictures of babies, with a headline like “these babies need homes.” The children looked really desperate. And there were other papers, letters, documents, more pictures, photographs of a baby girl. There was an Irish passport – although of course I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time – and an airline ticket. I saw my name on some of the papers and I knew this had all something to do with me, but I didn’t know what.’
    Maureen took the box downstairs and asked her mum and dad, Dorothy and Jim. That was the first time they acknowledged she was adopted. They told her a shocking story about a car crash in Ireland in which her real mother and father had been killed. ‘They told me I had been thrown clear and landed on some grass and I had no one to love me so they had brought me to America and had become my mum and dad.’ My first reaction was confusion then grief, like my real mum and dad were both dead and I’d never known that before. It was terrible, just terrible.’ But the Rowes must have decided their invented story could cause problems in later years, for shortly afterwards they told Maureen a different story: that her natural mother wasn’t dead but just hadn’t been able to look after her. ‘I thought, great. I was so glad she was alive. I suppose it was then a seed was sown, you know, that I’ll find her one day. But of course as a kid that’s just fantasy.’
    Maureen’s early childhood was full of conflicting images and impressions. ‘When you’re adopted it’s like you’re there but you’re not fitting in. I was blonde and blue-eyed and all my family were dark. I didn’t look like anybody. And I was very outward going, quite extrovert and carefree really, but my parents were the exact opposite, quiet and reserved and very strict and proper. Well, her more than him really. There was a basic clash of personalities, certainly between me and my adoptive mother. We were so totally different.’
    The whole thing about being Irish was also a source of confusion. ‘Well, from what they told me about Ireland I had this vision of a desperately poor third world country where children were left to starve. But from the Irish in New York, and especially from St Patrick’s Day, I had this image of people who just got drunk. It was awful because no one explained anything to me. I suppose my parents didn’t know. They didn’t know about