In the quiet week between Christmas and new year, a small boy bustles around the sitting-room with no regard for the early hour of the day. My son is half-running, half-staggering, chortling at me as he recites his favourite nursery rhymes.
All earnestness and beseeching, the straw licks of his hair caught now in pale beams of sunlight. So endearing, so loveable, so tiny and yet so complete. I am dumbstruck with love for him.
A light comes on inside me. This small being, this fully formed little boy, with words and actions and so much joy spilling out of him – this was me. This was me, once.
I too was once a living, breathing, rounded mini-human capable of movement, speech and humour. But even in this moment, many years later, I have no idea where I was, or with whom, at his precise age, two years and four months.
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I have always known I was adopted, but before that happened, my early years – unwitnessed, unrecorded, unremembered – were one big void. Never have I felt this lack so strongly as in this small revelation prompted by my son.
It prompts me to try to find out more but, as I quickly discover, the walls of secrecy around my early life are high. Truth be told, I am also busy living the life of a harassed parent, so progress is slow.
Fast forward a few years, and another epiphany. I am lying in a ravine on a German mountain, drifting in and out of consciousness. I have just fallen 150 metres down a snow-covered slope, the mountain tossing me from hummock to hummock like a projectile in a pinball machine before I came to an unsteady stop. With the light draining from the day, my body temperature is dropping. Something feels broken deep inside me.
[ Nearly 5,000 children adopted by parents in Ireland since 1991Opens in new window ]
Lying there in shock, waiting, hoping for rescue, I think again about those questions that have been lurking beneath the surface for so long. Who am I? Where did I come from? Where was I in those early years before I was adopted?
Everything has changed now, I know, with this calamity. If I am lucky enough to get out of here, some good will have to come out of it. I will try to answer these questions I have been pushing to the back of my mind for so long.
My book, Outsider, is the unexpected result of the promise I made myself on the mountain eight years ago. On one level, it’s a story of survival; I sustained serious injuries in the accident, but escaped with my life. The book is also about the unlocking of family secrets and the search for meaning, and it explores how life can set you back, and how resilience, or the lack of it, can affect recovery.
On another level, it’s a testament to the phenomenon of adoption and the repressive society in which it thrived, and those hundreds of thousands of Irish people who were directly and permanently affected by it, as children, birth parents, adoptive parents or wider family members. Talking to people while researching the book, I quickly discovered that nearly everyone has a family story involving illicit relationships and hidden babies in a past that is not all that distant.
Adoption is by no means unique to Ireland, but somehow, for several decades in the last century, we became a world leader in its use. Numbers peaked in 1967, when almost 1,500 children were formally adopted – almost 97 per cent of all “illegitimate” children born that year.
Most adoptions were handled by Catholic agencies, of which there were dozens. But there were also a few agencies run by Protestant interests, and in Dublin, there was even a Jewish agency for adoption and fostering.
Adoption, after it was put on a legal basis in 1953, was a social fix that married society’s need to deal with stigmatised women who had had babies outside marriage with the needs of married couples unable to have their own children in a pre-IVF world. Social engineering was built into the process, as were notions of class. Babies from impoverished backgrounds were placed with families of modest means, while the babies born to middle-class girls were matched with families higher up the social scale. As late as 1985, the adoption agency which placed me with my adoptive family was opposed to placing children with couples where the mother was working outside the home, though it made an exception for teachers and, later, doctors.
Irish babies were also in huge demand in the United States, where several thousands were exported in the mid-20th century, often with money changing hands. And to ensure domestic demand was met, there was a steady reimportation of Irish women who had given birth out of view in England returning here to give up their children for adoption – as my birth mother had done.
My research uncovered tragic events in both my adoptive and birth mother’s lives
— Paul Cullen
We adoptees are, in some sense, misfits. I have always felt myself an outsider even when this was, palpably, no longer true. Throughout my life, until the birth of my children, my default was to regard people as being “other” or “different” from me.
As adoptees, we have lost our birth parents, even as those parents have suffered their own losses. We look the same as everyone else. We get on with our lives, with varying degrees of success; every story is different. But we are also expected to get on with our lives, to feel grateful to have escaped an early life in institutional care.
For me, things began to change only when I realised there was a piece of me in my daughters’ blue eyes or my young son’s fair hair. It took the experience of watching my toddler son displaying the full range of human emotions to shatter the detachment I had felt up to then. And to realise for the first time that I had no idea where I was up to the age of three, when I was formally adopted.
I had started to look into my background in my 30s, spurred by a contact from my birth mother. Our first meeting was a collision of generations, outlooks and backgrounds, but over time we have built a good, if understated, relationship.
The years after my accident coincided with a lifting of the secrecy that has traditionally surrounded adoption. In 2022, after decades of debate, adoptees were finally given access to their files, after they were passed from the religious-run adoption agencies to Tusla and the Adoption Authority of Ireland.
Many accounts have been written of the cruelties inflicted on unmarried women and their babies in the last century, but Outsider is probably the first to benefit from information gleaned through the recent opening of adoptees’ files. I remember reading my documents for the first time and having to remind myself: “This is about me!”
Here it was, the tortuous twists and turns of my early life: my first month spent in a mother-and-baby home in London (never once had I imagined that I had been in such an institution); my birth mother’s lonely journey with me on the night ferry to Dublin, where I was handed over to the adoption agency; those early years spent in a foster home south of Dublin, of which I remembered nothing and from which I was not remembered; the hoops my adoptive parents had to jump through before I could be placed with them; their never-ending insecurities about my adoptive status. Obtaining further documents on appeal, I learned just how brusque and dismissive the social workers organising adoptions could be about my adoptive parents, my birth mother and even six-month-old me.
As the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world in 2020, I resorted to a DNA test to try to track down by birth father, who was proving as elusive in this story as these fathers generally have been from this period in history. The technology worked, a match was made, but the outcome was unexpected.
It wasn’t until I had reread my file several times that I noticed a small, pencilled note on one of the documents from London that showed my birth mother had been part of a wider, more structured apparatus of containment and repatriation. P.F.I., it said - Pregnant from Ireland. This was shorthand used by officials in England to describe the thousands of unmarried Irish women who were shunted back across the Irish Sea after they had given birth in England.
By now, everyone is familiar with the harsh treatment unmarried mothers endured in the Ireland of the mid-20th century. But these women were also mistreated in supposedly liberal England, and, by virtue of being shuttled between countries, they were shunned in both. As many as 10,000 women and babies may have been deported from Britain to Ireland in this way, ITN News estimated last year – and, yes, deported is the word that was used.
From the 1950s, London County Council placed officials for six months a year in Ireland charged with looking for homes for the repatriated children. In their desperation to find homes in which repatriated Irish babies could be placed, standards may have been allowed to drop. “The stench was awful,” a British Sunday newspaper investigation of one of these foster placements reported in 1968. “Cobwebs hung from the ceiling and cots in what the widow called ‘the nursery’ were covered in dirt.”
In the year I was born, my birth mother was one of 135 PFIs who had given birth in England and were then repatriated to Ireland via adoption agencies in both countries. She even paid the fare herself.
After more than 70 years of legal adoption, it is hard to measure the impact, for good or ill. One reason is the secrecy that attached to adoption for so long. There is also the fact that adoption was effectively privatised in the hands of religious agencies for years, with minimal State involvement or external accountability. The administrative records of these agencies remain closed.
But there may be clues in the relative rarity of the practice, now that great choice exists. Today, the number of adoptees is vanishingly small. In 2019, for example, just six children were placed for adoption in Ireland (outside a step- or extended family situation). Notwithstanding the problems around adoption, that seems a pity.
Perhaps I’m influenced by my story, which is not one of good versus evil, black and white. As a friend says, I am “dappled by the light and shade of adoption”. I had a happy childhood with my parents, shot through with darker moments. My research uncovered tragic events in both my adoptive and birth mother’s lives, recounted in the book, which left them damaged for life.
Overall, the sense I gained was of the people in my life doing their best for me in straitened circumstances. Even my social worker, who I tracked down as part of my investigations, seemed regretful. “What was it all about? Níl fhios agam,” she told me. “We thought we were doing the best at the time. But maybe we weren’t.”
Outsider: Survival, Family Secrets And The Search To Belong by Paul Cullen is published by Hachette Books Ireland, RRP €16.99
