Up to 10,000 women may have been deported from Britain to Ireland in forced adoption scandal

Irish Independent

05-05-2025

ITV News carried out a year-long investigation into the story, which the broadcaster said shows women and babies were deported from Britain and incarcerated in state institutions because the mothers were unmarried.
The mothers then had their children forcibly adopted.
The investigation also found evidence of falsified birth certificates and allegations of "people trafficking'.
The children, now adults, often only found out they were British citizens decades later.
Survivors are now campaigning for compensation from both the Irish and British governments.
One mother, Terri Harrison, experienced a "day of horror" when she came home to find a priest and two nuns waiting for her in London.
They told her she had "committed a crime" because she was pregnant outside of marriage.
'I was no match for this man and he just threw me into the car and pushed me down into the back seat,' she said. 'I started to become invisible from the minute he got me."
Ms Harrison was flown from Heathrow to Cork and was one of thousands of women "imprisoned" in Bessborough mother and baby home in Cork. Once there she was "processed" and given a new name and number.
She said: "I became Tracey 1735; we weren't human any more. I was abducted from one country and brought back to this one, and my son was sleeping peacefully in his cot and a stranger in a black habit stripped him and walked out of that institution.
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"That's kidnapping. That's what happened to me. We must speak the truth."
ITV News said documentation from the time shows a religious organisation called the Crusade of Rescue, now known as the Catholic Children's Society, based in London, was involved in the adoption and repatriation of Irish women and children from Britain from the 1930s to the 1970s.
Paul Cullen was four months old when he made the journey by boat from Holyhead in Wales to Dublin.
He had always known that he had been born in London and adopted in Dublin, but only recently found out the truth about his birth and his early years.
Mr Cullen (62) told ITV News: 'I went half a century without knowing. When the law was changed in 2021, I was eventually allowed access to my files. I began to realise that I was part of something much bigger and the moment the penny dropped and I saw the acronym 'PFI', pregnant from Ireland.'
Mr Cullen, the former health editor of The Irish Times, was born at Whittington Hospital in north London in 1963, and then spent a month at St Pelagia's home for unmarried mothers in Highgate, north London, which was run by Catholic nuns.
He contacted ITV News after seeing the publication's investigation into the home.
His mother, who was in her 20s and working as a nurse in London, was unmarried and pressured to return to Ireland, where he was placed for adoption, a journey organised through the Crusade of Rescue.
He was issued a second Irish birth certificate which falsely states that he was born in Dublin, when in fact he is a British citizen.
The retired journalist has now reunited with his birth mother but the man he thought was his father died just weeks before they were due to meet.
Fiona Cahill's mother Maria was born in a Red Cross mother and baby home in London in 1954, but as a newborn, she was sent to an Irish institution with her mother Philomena, who was unmarried.
Philomena had moved from Ireland to London for work as a teenager and later met Maria's father. Like thousands of others, she was labelled as a 'PFI'.
Ms Cahill, (50), an artist and carer, said her mother had PTSD symptoms and that trauma has been passed down the generations.
Maria, who lived in Doncaster, Yorkshire, and passed away in 2023 aged 69, only found out she was adopted when she was 21 when she applied for a passport.
It wasn't until she was 40 that she discovered she was a British citizen after finding out that she had two birth certificates, a UK one and a 'falsified' Irish one.
A spokesperson for the Catholic Children's Society – formerly known as the 'Crusade of Rescue' – said: "We recognise that many young mothers in the past felt they had no choice but to place their child for adoption due to the stigma of being unmarried and the lack of support available to them from the government, their families and wider society at the time.
"This is deeply regrettable and a tragedy for all involved. Our agency supported mothers to place their child for adoption when requested. Our records also show cases where the Crusade of Rescue offered support to unmarried mothers to help them keep their child.
"Today we offer a post-adoption service to support all those who were adopted through us, and their families... We take this responsibility very seriously and work hard to provide an open and transparent service."