A Northern Ireland investigation into mother and baby homes will bring the conduct of Protestant churches properly under the spotlight for the first time.
Since the early 1990s, the treatment of young women in Ireland, unmarried, pregnant, alone, has been seen through a Catholic lens – one that has been rightly unforgiving for the Catholic Church’s past sins and failings.
However, the Church of Ireland, Presbyterians and Methodists are now facing their own Via Dolorosa, as a full public inquiry into the operation of mother and baby homes in Northern Ireland is to get under way, perhaps as early as next year.
Between 1922 and 1990, some 10,000 young women were held in such homes across Northern Ireland or had their babies in private nursing homes, with their children usually adopted afterwards.
“In the North, there has been an assumption that this is a Catholic issue, something propelled by television coverage, or films such as Cillian Murphy’s film [Small Things Like These], or the one about Magdalene Laundries,” says Prof Sean O’Connell of Queen’s University Belfast.
The majority of those held in such homes across Northern Ireland came from a Protestant background, and their babies were given up for adoption to Protestant families, in Northern Ireland, the Republic, or elsewhere.
Born in Manchester to Irish parents from Galway and Westmeath, in 2021 O’Connell co-wrote the Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries in Northern Ireland 1922-1990 report, alongside Prof Leanne McCormick.
In reality, out-of-wedlock pregnancies knew no sectarian boundaries: “Getting pregnant wasn’t a Catholic issue, or a Protestant issue, and the majority then was Protestant, they were around 70 per cent of the [Northern] population,” says O’Connell.
“Protestant evangelical clergy were just as keen to call out unmarried motherhood as sinful and as immoral and as outside respectability as their Catholic counterparts,” O’Connell says.
For all the flaws of the investigations in the Republic, such inquiries have allowed people south of the Border to face up to past failings in the way that has not yet happened in Northern Ireland.
“The survivors of mother and baby institutions and Magdalene Laundries who’ve gone public in Northern Ireland – they’re all from Catholic backgrounds, they were all in Catholic institutions,” O’Connell adds.
“Protestant victims and survivors haven’t come forward to the same degree,” he says, recalling a journalist’s comment that his readers would not be interested in the issue “because it wasn’t really a Protestant story”.
[ Cillian Murphy’s view of Ireland in the 1980s as ‘the dark ages’ misses the pointOpens in new window ]
With McCormick, O’Connell co-chairs Northern Ireland’s Truth Recovery Independent Panel, which is carrying out a truth recovery inquiry talking to those affected by mother and baby homes, the laundries, or workhouses.
The panel has no legal powers, but it is preparing the way for a full statutory inquiry next year, following recommendations from a 2021 report carried out by Deirdre Mahon, Maeve O’Rourke and Phil Scruton.
The scale of the recommendations caused surprise, but the then First Minister of Northern Ireland Paul Girvan and Deputy First Minister Emma Michelle O’Neill’s decision to accept them fully caused even more, especially among Stormont officials.
“They were completely accepted by the Northern Ireland Executive, quite amazingly and brilliantly,” says Maria Cogley, one of three survivors who are members of the 10-strong panel.
The Republic’s investigations into institutions, though they have the credit of having happened earlier, offer instruction, nevertheless, in how damaged people should not be dealt with by inquiries, says O’Connell.
He argues the 2013 report into the Magdalene Laundries led by Martin McAleese, former senator and husband of former president Mary McAleese, failed to value the testimony of the women held in them. “You have to get to Chapter 19, I think, before any of them are quoted.
“That’s pretty amazing given that they are the women about whom the report had been written, and then they get presented in such a way that you can’t follow their stories,” he says.
Equally, he argues, the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, published in Dublin in January 2021, was flawed, since it did not find “evidence of abuses or mistreatments”, even though it carried testimony from survivors alleging exactly that.
“Then there was the fine line between the different types of testimony and the forums in which it was given. If it was given one way then it wasn’t counted in terms of the official report, et cetera, et cetera,” he says.
“People gave testimony not knowing what was going to happen to it. And that testimony disappeared,” he says. “People were told it had been deleted, so there was no informed consent.”
People going before the Northern investigation are given a number of pledges: “We’re going to record your testimony. We’re going to keep the audio unless you want us to delete it. If you want us to delete it, we will delete it.
“The transcript will be used by the independent panel. If you want it to go to the public inquiry, it will go there. If you want, the transcripts and/or the audio will go into an archive. Then, it’s there for history.
“It’s your transcript, your testimony. It can be done with your name, or anonymously. Either way. Obviously, most people are choosing anonymity, but some want to be named,” he says.
The only way I could see my adoption records was via a social worker. She was able to write down what was in it and tell me what was in it, but she couldn’t take copies or show them to me
— Maria Cogley, Truth Recovery Independent Panel
If the survivor wants to be identified, then redactions will be made to the transcript and the audio to “take out other people’s names”, he says, because “we can’t be identifying other people like that”.
Soon, the panel will seek the thoughts of survivors about the shape of the archive. Should it be part of the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, or “in a separate building, with a separate staff?
“It’s about informing people at every stage, about trying to give them a sense of empowerment, as much as we can,” he says, adding that counselling is being offered to survivors.
Support from qualified staff is needed when survivors look at their own records, because “there might be things that they don’t like when they see words written down about themselves, or their mother. People can be disappointed when there’s just a few lines about something really significant in their lives, such as their adoption. They can feel upset and dismayed by that,” he adds.
Today, O’Connell is a six-year veteran of such work: “We’re dealing often with traumatised people. You have to try and get beyond that and build a rapport with them. Sometimes, they’ll say things that annoy people.”
So far, the team, which was appointed in April 2023 and began collecting testimony in February 2024
, has collected 100 testimonies, including drawing on some of the work that was done for the 2021 report, and it has until next October to finish its investigation.
Currently, the panel is offering advice to people who were adopted from such homes about finding their own records: “Who’s the gatekeeper? How do you go to them? What kind of letter should you write? What do they do if they say ‘No’?” he goes on.
[ First Minister welcomes ‘milestone’ mother and baby homes inquiry in NorthOpens in new window ]
For Cogley, this deeply matters. Her mother was from north Belfast. Faced with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, she had been sent in 1969 to the nearby Marianvale mother and Baby home run by the Good Shepherd nuns.
Ten days after her birth, Cogley was removed from her mother and placed with adoptive parents. Fifty years on, she still does not know the full details of her birth and subsequent adoption.
Despite the challenges, Cogley built a great life for herself, earning university degrees and working as a primary school teacher for 25 years. However, her brother Paul, who was also adopted, Paul was not so lucky.
“I know he was trafficked across the Border. He ended up in Fahan Children’s Home in Donegal, run by the Sisters of Nazareth, an institution that was excluded from the commission report [in the Republic] on redress schemes.
“It was pretty much used as a holding centre for babies. Considerable numbers in Northern Ireland have discovered that they spent time in Fahan and were adopted in the South or adopted back into Northern Ireland.
“That was the case for my brother. He was adopted back into Belfast,” says Cogley, who says that her brother “struggled” throughout his life before dying by suicide in his 30s.
His story is typical of many others, since he was born in a private nursing home in Belfast. These were often used by wealthier families wanting more comfortable surroundings for a birth, or by those with money who wanted to hide one.
“I tried to get his records. I did discover his birth certificate. On it, it says he was born in an address that I didn’t recognise in north Belfast. When I did a little bit of research, it turned out to be a private nursing home.
“A certain amount of tenacity is required to discover these things by yourself,” she says. “There was a covert operation that went on both North and South. Why put just an address on a birth cert rather than the name of a nursing home?
“The whole kind of process was set up for secrecy,” she goes on, emphasising that the independent panel is trying to make people aware that there are ways in which they can track down information.
Such work is far from easy. Adoption records in Northern Ireland are held in different places: there are five health and social care trusts, three voluntary adoption agencies, and numerous religious orders.
However, the main problem is court records. Stormont’s Department of Justice does not know where many of the documents are stored, while different courts, inexplicably, operate different rules.
“There are courthouses here where you can go in and view your adoption file. You can’t take it away, but you can view it. But in Belfast, for example, you can’t do that. You can only do it via a social worker.
“I applied for mine. The only way I could see my adoption records was via a social worker. She was able to write down what was in it and tell me what was in it, but she couldn’t take copies or show them to me,” she says.
So far, large numbers of people, now adults, but who were born in mother and baby homes across Northern Ireland, or adopted through them, and who now live in the Republic, Britain, or elsewhere, have not yet discovered the story of their past.
One woman now living in the US found that she was born in Northern Ireland and taken South: “She had three birth certificates, one from here, one from the Republic and one in the USA,” says O’Connell.
Urging others to come forward, he says: “People filled out forms to take butter across the Border then, but babies were moved over and back. Some very unusual things happened.”
* The decision to accept recommendations about the scope of the investigation in Mother and Baby Homes was taken by the then First Minister Paul Girvan and Deputy First Minister, Michelle, and not by Michelle O’Neill and Emma Little-Pengelly
