kissandgoodbyenow

The church-sponsored adoption of the babies of Catholic Irish girls and women to the United States up to, and partially including, the 1970s.

The stories of two women, Ann and Eileen who, like so many others, were effectively made prisoners in mother and baby homes, are told here. Their stories were originally told by myself, Padraig O’Morain, in my reporting in The Irish Times.

Many women today still carry the wounds of these holy crimes.

The inspiration for this website, which first appeared some decades ago, then disappeared and is now back, is to fill a gap in the knowledge of the children of these women who sometimes don’t understand the pressures their birth mothers were under and how little choice they had in what happened to them. The ‘context’ page tries to fill this gap.