In the moments he thought were his last on earth, Paul Cullen finally understood what was “the central fact of my life”. Sliding helplessly through the snow on Germany’s highest mountain, the Zugspitze, he realised how profoundly his adoption had shaped the intervening 52 years.
But if fate had dealt the baby an unplayable hand, it saved the man, bringing him to a halt before he could be swept over the edge. While hoping and waiting for rescue, he resolved to go back into the past and see if he could piece together the remaining fragments of his early years in order to make himself whole again.
That strange epiphany in the snow was more – if more were necessary – than a human being’s shocked attempt to understand his life in its last stage. The proximity to danger was also a hideous echo of the risks that are forced on young children when they are permanently parted from their parents. As his later research would show, the odds of an early death or a distorted personality were much higher for those lonely children than for the wider population. And the sudden Alpine terror had made him look in the face that fear which he had spent five decades trying to avoid.
Who could trace the past better than a former news and health editor of The Irish Times? Cullen made his professional home in this stable for more than 30 years. Maybe journalism is an ideal occupation for people who, from their earliest days, had to make rapid sense of new environments. The BBC’s former war correspondent Kate Adie and the Daily Mail columnist Andrew Pierce (born Patrick Connolly) also tread this path, and were both born to Irish Catholics. Like them, Cullen possesses the abandoned child’s everlasting understanding of pain.
READ MORE
Deeply loved by his adopted parents who took him into their house in Marian Grove, South Dublin, he empathises with their suffering. Life events had robbed this second father “of any vestige of confidence. He was, effectively, a shadow of himself – a loving, gentle but broken man".
By contrast, Cullen is himself drawn, over-confidently, to endurance challenges and putting his safety at risk – hence the marathons, triathlons and, of course, the climb on the Zugspitze. Eventually he realises that this characteristic is born out of that strange start in life: “I seem to be attracted to risk, to danger. Where did that come from? What does it say about my relationship to everyday, normal life?”
Another of his roles with this newspaper took him through war and disaster zones, from Rwanda to Mozambique. And so he goes on learning more about himself by discovering the harrowing events of the first 28 months he passed before his adoption. Kindly carers did much to help but they could not protect him from a system which bounced him around like a pinball. Apparently small administrative errors could have profound, even life-threatening, consequences. He narrowly escaped being sent to St Patrick’s Mother and Baby Home on Dublin’s Navan Road, which had a 50 per cent mortality rate, the highest in Ireland. A note written on his file threatened to delay his adoption to such an extent that he would have been deemed unadoptable and, therefore, would have spent his childhood and teenage years in an orphanage.
Providing details about how the research was done has become a fashion for many writers, often slowing the momentum they are hoping to build. Outsider is an exception to that. Even if the odyssey he describes was often a fight against bureaucracy and the rigidity of the State’s outlook, he manages to show the psychological effects on small children of being processed through the system. In describing his search for his biological parents, he completes a journey made by thousands of other innocents – finding doors opened and closed by rule changes, the 1987 illegitimacy reforms, the film Philomena, the horror in Tuam, easier access to information on adoption introduced in 2022, developments in DNA and other unexpected events.
Like many other lone children, he became a stoic from a young age – probably because he had little alternative. In an obvious sense, he is an outsider; but he also manages to patch up his wounds as best he can and play a central role almost everywhere he goes. His moving and compelling book is the type that can haunt its reader in the middle of the night, holding a torch up on the cruel attitudes of the past and urging kindlier approaches in future.
Neasa MacErlean is a journalist and writer, and was informally adopted.
