I was raped by a priest, almost drowned and mutilated by nuns who snatched my newborn away in evil mother and baby homes
CLUTCHING a tiny handful of possessions, Sheila O'Bryne waved one last goodbye to her parents, took a deep breath and knocked on the door of St Patrick's.
The year was 1976 and the pregnant teen was one of thousands of women sent to Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes to hide their ‘sin’ from the community.
At the Dublin home, the frightened 19-year-old was made to work every hour of the day, physically abused by nuns who tried to drown her in the bath, and raped by a priest.
When her son arrived, she was banned from even looking at him and forced to give him up for adoption at six weeks.
“My heart was broken and I couldn’t speak about it to anybody because being pregnant out of wedlock was a terrible thing,” she tells The Sun Online. “I had brought shame on the family and I had to pay for that.”
In 2017, the true scale of the homes' horrific abuse was revealed when a mass grave of babies' bodies was found at Bon Secours in Tuam, County Galway.
As many as 800 children are thought to have died in that institution alone.
It’s estimated that 35,000 unmarried mums passed through the Catholic-run homes between 1904 and 1996, when the last one closed, and at least 9,000 babies died.
Many more were thought to have been sold to American couples in an illegal adoption racket, with the institutions filing fake death certificates.
Last month, the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, originally set up in 2015, delivered its long overdue report confirming one in seven of those born in the 18 institutions, between 1922 and 1998, had died there.
On 13 January 2021, Taoiseach Micheál Martin made a formal apology to survivors on behalf of the state.
But the victims of the institutions, both mothers who lost their babies and the children born there, claim the commission has failed to listen to them.
Babies put in 'reject ward' like animals
Brought up in a conservative family in Dublin, Sheila was “never told about the birds and bees" and fell pregnant after going back to a friend’s house with a lad she met at a dance.
Her furious father initially sent her to live with a couple who were paid to take in unmarried mums but, after falling ill while being made to lug heavy furniture up and down stairs, she ran away to a friend's house.
After a meeting with her parents, she was told she was going to be with “other girls like me” and was driven to St Patrick’s.
Run by the Catholic church, this was one of many homes set up to take in unmarried mums and hide them from society until their babies were born.
Three months pregnant, Sheila was immediately put to work, cleaning the nursery, serving food and looking after “sick and dying babies”.
One nun used to drag babies around like rag dolls, and I knew something was going to happen
Sheila O’Bryne
“There was a room they called the ‘reject ward’, where they put mixed race and disabled babies and they were treated like animals.
“One nun used to drag them around like rag dolls, and I knew something was going to happen to them. Every time I went into the nursery there was another cot empty.”
Sheila also saw the nuns giving them injections. It is believed that up to 3,000 children died at St Patrick’s from 1904 until it closed in 1985, many as a result of vaccine trials and other mistreatment, including malnutrition.
Most were buried in a mass grave in Glasnevin Cemetery, known as an Angels Plot, but the remains of several hundred babies were also donated to Trinity College for medical research.
'Nun tried to drown me'
Sheila says the expectant mums worked from seven in the morning until they were sent to the dormitory at 9.30pm.
“I was expecting a mixed race child and I was segregated from the rest,” she says. “I got shingles and I was really ill but they still made me work. They didn't care.”
Although the home was run by nuns, the work was supervised by a lay person Sheila called an “overseer”.
On one occasion, when Sheila had angered her, the overseer took the rubbish from the bin and the leftover “slops” in the kitchen and threw them on the floor.
“She told me to pick it up and I said ‘I won’t. I didn’t put it there you did.’ She started punching me and smacking the right side of my head off the wall. My nose was pumping blood.”
In defiance, Sheila stole some salt from the kitchen to put in her bath. That night, as she bathed, a nun came crashing into the bathroom and “tried to push me under the water”.
“I managed to get out myself, to save myself and the unborn baby, and I pushed her into the water.”
'Raped by a priest at baby's Christening'
When her waters broke, Sheila was made to walk around the garden for 39 hours before being subjected to a brutal forceps birth.
“They butchered me, I swear to God,” she says.
“I remember this nun shouting at me 'you keep your voice down. You'll lower the tone of the building,’ and telling me, ‘You’re paying your penance now.’ And I did pay.”
Her healthy baby boy was immediately whisked away and she was banned from touching him.
“They kept saying ‘no looking, no touching’. I was still working in the nursery and I was allowed to hold the other babies but not mine. I was in bits.”
The only time Sheila was allowed to hold her son was when he was christened but, after the nurse put him in her arms, she was left alone with the priest – who she claims raped her.
“I put the baby down on the sheet on the ground so he wouldn’t be hurt,” she recalls. “It was horrific.
“After the botched birth, I was so destroyed inside that at least I couldn’t get pregnant again.”
Sheila kept quiet about the attack “because you'd end up in an asylum if you told”.
Forced to give up baby son
Six weeks after her son’s birth, she was made to stand on the steps of St Patrick’s as he was driven away, in preparation for his adoption.
She was allowed to see him once more, at a home in Dublin’s Temple Hill before she was forced to sign adoption papers.
“I told him 'I know I can’t bring you with me'. It broke my heart because I had to go home empty handed,” she says. “It was terrible.
“I couldn’t go home with a baby, much less a mixed race baby, because of the shame that I’d brought on the family, the neighbours and the whole parish. You were treated like a leper.
“My dad signed me out after three months so I was allowed home but it was never mentioned again.”
Sadly, Sheila never had any more children, which she believes is a result of the internal injuries she sustained at the home.
Eventually she moved to Cork, where she suffered a breakdown and spent three years homeless.
I couldn’t go home with a baby because of the shame that I’d brought on the family. You were treated like a leper
Sheila O’Bryne
She has spent two decades trying to track down her son, initially being met with closed doors. But, after contacting her local MP, she was assigned a social worker and given some help.
She has now met her 43-year-old son and his adoptive parents.
“It was a joyful and emotional meeting and we get on great,” she says.
“He said he understood what happened and I told him it nearly killed me to give you up. And his adoptive mum thanked me from the bottom of her heart for giving her the gift of my son.”
Now living in Cork, Sheila spends much of her time campaigning for justice for the mums and babies who went through the homes.
“I think about those poor babies that died in there all the time,” she says. “I want to see justice for them.”
'I don't know if my daughter is alive or dead'
One of those babies belonged to Ann O’Gorman, sent to Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork by social workers, after falling pregnant at 17.
She gave birth to daughter Evelyn, on July 24, 1971.
“I heard my baby cry just after she was born,” she tells The Sun Online. "But there was no experienced midwife and the old nurse who the nuns called in twisted the afterbirth out of me. I passed out from loss of blood for two or three days.”
When Ann woke up, one of the nuns told her baby was now “an angel in heaven”.
“I was frightened, alone and heartbroken,” she said. “I went to the window and I saw two men walking down by the graveyard in the grounds.
"One was carrying a wooden orange box on his shoulder and the other had a shovel, so I really believed Evelyn was in that box.”
After leaving the home, Ann said she could tell no one about the birth. But, after getting pregnant again, in 1975, she returned to Bessborough and was told they had no record of her giving birth to a daughter there.
This time, she had a healthy baby boy, Mark, and she was determined to keep him. “I'd seen the girls in the room crying because their babies had been taken away so I ran away with him.”
Ann went on to have three more children with Mark’s father but the birth of her daughter came flooding back in 2014, when she read an article about babies being sold to America out of the homes.
Barnardos estimates up to 15,000 babies could have been illegally adopted from the homes, with many mums being told they were dead.
“It was like someone got a key and unlocked everything,” she says. “Now I don’t know if Evelyn is dead or alive.”
Ann went to Ireland’s Department of Health and demanded her files, and found the records had been falsified.
I'd seen the girls in the room crying because their babies had been taken away, so I ran away with mine
Ann O’Gorman
The date of her daughter’s birth had been recorded as June 24, a month earlier than the true date, and she was listed as premature.
“I was very upset and sick to my stomach,” she said. “There are supposed to be 908 babies that died at Bessborough and they can only account for 64.
“So I don’t know if Evelyn was illegally adopted out or whether she’s laying in the ground.”
Ann went to the police to register her daughter as a missing person, but so far she has found no answers.
Bessborough, which was run by the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, closed in the 1990s and was recently bought by a property developer.
Now Ann and other victims of the home are fighting to stop them building on the unmarked graves in the grounds.
“I hope to God they don’t build there,"she says. "If she is there, we don't need her to come up from the ground, but we want a place for flowers, and a bench to remember her and all the other babies.”
'My brothers could be in Tuam mass grave'
Like Ann, Dublin-born Anna Corrigan is desperate for the truth about her own relatives – in her case two older brothers, born to her mum Bridget, in the Tuam home.
Growing up, she had no idea that her mum Bridget had given birth to two boys, John and William Dolan, in 1946 and 1950.
She stumbled across the records while investigating the background of her dad, who had been brought up in one of Ireland’s industrial schools.
Tragically, her mum had been forced to leave John at the home and still sent five shillings a week for his upkeep, despite the nuns being paid by the state.
He was listed among the 796 babies who died at Tuam and she believes he was starved to death, like many others.
Sickening mass grave discovery that shocked Ireland
A mass grave of babies in a sewage tank was discovered in 2017 at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway.
It proved crucial new evidence in a probe started in 2014, when local historian Catherine Corless tracked down death certificates for 796 babies and children at the institution.
There had long been suspicions that the vast majority of children who died at the home had been buried on the site in unmarked graves during the period of high child mortality rates across Ireland
The Mother and Baby Homes Commission, chaired by Judge Yvonne Murphy, has been given given funding of £18m to deliver a report into Tuam and 13 other Catholic homes in Ireland, along with four state-run institutions.
The deadline, originally February 2018, has been extended twice.
In March 2017, after months of excavation at Tuam, investigators found an underground structure divided into 20 chambers containing "significant quantities of human remains".
DNA analysis of selected remains confirmed the ages of the dead ranged from 35 weeks to three years old and were buried mainly in the 1950s. The home closed in 1961.
Interim reports published by the Commission have found evidence of illegal adoptions, often to the US, as well as babies bodies being handed over for medical research.
In a 1947 report from the home John was cruelly described as “a miserable, emaciated child with voracious appetite and no control over bodily functions, probably mentally defective”. He died at 15 months, in June 1947 and his death certificate calls him “a congenital idiot”.
“It said he died of the measles but I’m convinced he died of malnutrition because of that description in the report,” says Anna.
Barnados, who helped Anna trace the paperwork for her brothers, found no death certificate for William and, on documents submitted to the Department of Health, his birth date had been changed.
Anna, 65, now believes he could have been illegally adopted and is desperate to find him. She has registered him as a missing person and the family’s story has been told in My Name is Bridget, written by Irish journalist Alison O’Reilly.
She also helps run the Tuam Babies Family Group, a support group for relatives which campaigns for justice.
Taken from mum at 13 days
Paul Jude Redmond was born in Castle Pollard Mother and Baby Home, in Dublin, in December 1964.
His 20-year-old mum, who came from a well-to-do family, named him Jude - after the patron saint of lost causes.
At 13 days, he was taken from his mum and transferred to St Patrick's where, four days later, he was adopted.
Brought up in Stillorgan, South Dublin, as the oldest of five, he only found out he was adopted at the age of 15 and he started looking for his mum straight away.
He tracked her down in America, using a US tracing service but she initially refused to speak to him. After a cousin intervened, she eventually agreed to one phone call.
"It was a very emotional phone call," he says. "A lot of the chat was about my life, and why the nuns changed my name.
"But she was very reluctant to answer questions. Just that she hated Castle Pollard, it was a terrible shock to her system to end up there and she was still traumatised by the place all those years later.
"She didn't want to meet because it was extremely painful for her.
"But ultimately it was a healing phone call because I'm very conscious from talking to a lot of people in the same situation that many never find answers. At least I got to chat to her once in my life."
Nuns' 'psychological warfare'
Activist Catherine Coffey O’Brien is among those fighting for answers over the scandal.
She was seven months pregnant when she fled Bessborough and says the nuns used “psychological warfare” to make girls give up their babies.
“They called the babies ‘it’, never he or she,” she says. “They’d say ‘What do you know about being a mother? There are lovely families out there that could give this child a proper future. How could you provide for a child?
“I saw one girl who had knitted booties and a hat and she went down to the nursery to get her baby dressed and ready, went out through the double doors into the hall and handed over her child to to a Baptist couple.
“When she came back she was crying and I said, ‘Why did you give him up?’ She said, ‘I had no choice’. My instinct told me to get out of there.”
Catherine, 48, fled to Kerry where her partner’s dad took her in and she had a healthy baby boy in the local hospital. The couple later married and had more children.
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She is now helping survivors of the Mother and Baby Homes in their fight for information and was critical of the delays from the Commission, which twice postponed the report.
Despite the publication of the report, campaigners say the government has ruled out any form of redress or compensation.
For the mothers and children torn apart by the homes - and those searching for the graves of their loved ones - the pain looks set to go on.