Cork woman features in new TV documentary about Mother & Baby home scandal
In the documentary Stolen on RTÉ1 on Monday, August 26, at 9.35pm, witnesses reveal the appalling inside story of the Mother and Baby Homes scandal that sparked a government inquiry into the fate of those wronged women.
We hear heart-breaking stories of how women who fell pregnant ‘out of wedlock’ were treated in an Ireland heavily influenced by the Catholic Church.
More than 80,000 unmarried mothers were incarcerated in mother and baby institutions run by nuns from the birth of the Free state in 1922 to 1998.
Most were cruelly separated from their babies after birth. Many of the children who were adopted within Ireland and abroad were rendered untraceable and left unaware of their birth story.
Others were fostered out as cheap farm labour from the age of six, often in circumstances that were abysmally devoid of care and love.
Around 9,000 infants died in these institutions in those decades from 1922 to 1998, a rate that, on occasion, was five times the national average infant mortality rate. In Stolen, by acclaimed filmmaker Margo Harkin, survivors relive their treatment.
One of them, Joanne O’Leary, summed up how the terrible chapter in Irish history came to an end.
Noelle Brown, who was born in the Bessborough Mother & Baby home in Cork, features in the documentary, and has spoken in the past about her experience.
“I’m angry with the State and I’m angry with the Church,” she said in 2021.
App?
