Our skin colour was beaten into us as nothing but pure evil.
We we to be ashamed of it. We were illegitimate, our mothers were whores, our fathers were savages
and we had to pay for those sins.
Do you know anything at all about your parents?
Basically no, it would be easier to break through CIA, KGB files than to get through
information on my background.
From when I was a little girl, I knew I was black, at the age of 4 and a half
I knew what the word nigger meant...
They just don’t see your Irish side. Listen to me. I’m speaking with a Dublin accent!
Countless children in Ireland suffered abuse in institutions run by the Irish Catholic church.
But this is the story of the illegitimate children born to Irish mothers and African
fathers in Ireland in 50’s and 60s.
The abuse and racist treatment of the children has never been acknowledged by the Irish Catholic
church or the Irish state and the secrets of their identities remain hidden.
We didn’t look like a community. But we are a community. You know. We are there.
We are in Ireland, you know, we are experiencing racism.
People discovering their mother only died only a year ago and they’d been 40 years
searching and given the impression they’d no parents. Unbelieveable miscarriage of justice
and nobody seems to accept responsibility for this.
The state just devolved all powers around education and childcare and health to the
religious - the state didn’t want to know, the nuns and priests had complete control
- they were like gods.
Mixed race illegitimate children were very rarely put up for adoption.
The majority were placed into industrial schools.
These were institutions that were run by the Irish Catholic Church to care for children.
They used euphemisms like convents or orphanages. They were industrial schools. They were like
workhouses. The last thing they had in these places was love, care, attention or the welfare
of a child.
When you’ve been in an institution for 18 years and called nigger, wog, golliwog, beaten
stripped, sexually abused. You know why you are there. You know why you’re there.
You know you’re there because your mother didn’t want to look after you.
I never met my father. I was never interested in meeting my mother if I’m really honest.
Rosemary has spent her adult life trying to trace records of her father.
But it’s almost impossible to find anything because all information about him has been redacted
by the Irish state.
At 3 I was sent to this dreadful couple.
I’ve got a letter somewhere.
This is where she says that we are rotting her beds. I’m not keeping them any longer.
Yeah. We are filthy dirty. We were three years old
Rosemary now lives in London and has decided to travel back to Ireland in an attempt to
search for information about her father.
This is the first time in 40 years that she will go back to St Joseph’s Industrial School
in Kilkenny where she was abused as a child.
From Day one i was picked on. The daily micro humiliations designed to keep you in your
place cos you not one of us. You need to be grateful you’re even here, you’re not
as good as the rest of us, cos they’re white.
They're white.
Scrubbing the colour off my skin. Not being allowed to have a bath first.
The water would get dirty.
That’s what Kilkenny means to me but it also means meeting my son’s father.
Meeting a man who gave me love for the first time… (Cries)
I think this is it. This is it. My God that’s it.
I thought they’d torn it down or something.
The word must have got out there was a black girl coming but all these girls were standing
there just looking at me and I’m looking at them and I don’t know what the hell is going on.
They used to take photographs of us here.
Somewhere there’s an archive of school photographs and my little black face is peeking out.
This was the nun’s bit and we were in the grey buildings. We were in those nasty buildings.
What an ugly fucking building. No wonder I was clinically depressed for the ten years
I was here. Ugh.
These are the playing fields.
This was the production site of the industrial school. But I also remember being left in
the chicken coup. That was a common punishment.
You’d be taken out to play and the older girls had responsibility for you.
But that’s when they would take turns sexually abusing you as well.
They’d say I’m going to take you to the toilets, you need to a wee, you need to go for a wee.
So they’d take you into the toilets and do what the fuck they liked with you and the
nuns didn’t say anything because they had completely insulated themselves,
wrapped themselves in luxury.
Rape and sexual abuse were endemic in industrial schools
and orphanages run by the Irish Catholic Church.
Whilst the sexual abuse of children at St Joseph’s was documented in the Ryan Report,
the ill-treatment of mixed race children has never been acknowledged.
Does it feel very strange being back?
I feel incredibly removed from it. I don’t even know if I have any emotion about it.
I mean memories of this place just make me feel dead inside.
When Rosemary was 16 she became pregnant and had to leave St. Joseph’s.
Her son was put into a church run mother and baby home and Rosemary was fostered by Brian
and Mary, who welcomed her into their family.
Rosemary came to us when she was just turned 17 and because Rosemary had just had a baby
the nuns, and the whole of Irish society, believed that there was no way she could either
go back to school or go back to the orphanage where she had been.
That’s my first novel, it’s American edition. That’s what I would have looked like exactly
when she came. That was that same year.
The reason the nuns had rung my wife and asked me would we take Rosemary was because we had
adopted a little girl some time before that.
My wife stood outside the Winns Hotel in Dublin. The Winn’s Hotel was where the priests and
the nuns went for their afternoon tea. And a young nun drove up, skidded to a stop, dumped
this creature on the street and said ‘thanks very much’ and drove off. That’s how she
came into our lives, one week after she had turned, her 17th Birthday and a week or two
after she had had the baby taken.
How was she when she arrived?
She had an air of bravado. Think my wife found her quite exciting and a bit adventurous because
my wife was a, wasn’t exactly the adventurous type. She was very kind and very generous.
Physically she wasn’t in good shape. I realised in fact she was emaciated.
She’d never talked about her experiences?
When she got to trust us she began to talk. I asked her would she write it down.
The most important part was that she was being treated as a sex object even within the orphanage.
But no way I could have used that in the Ireland of the 70’s cause there was no-one who would
have listened to me, no-one would have believed me. And even today it’s hard to say it.
These mixed race Irish children were not considered by the church and state to be appropriate
candidates for adoption. Their stories of racial discrimination, physical abuse and
mental abuse, are truly shocking.
Anne Ferris is a former member of the Irish Parliament. She was adopted herself and has
spent her career campaigning in the Irish parliament for a bill to allow adopted children
access to their family records.
Do you think there was a different policy to deal with children of mixed race?
I don’t know, I really don’t know whether there was a policy, you know, say a state
policy or a religious policy coming from on high. But certainly, listening to the stories,
there was a policy in the various institutions or orphanages that the mixed race people were in.
In Northern Ireland if you’re adopted you can go and get your records. In England you
can get your records. Here we can not get our records, we can’t get them.
And that’s wrong. Of course it’s an abuse of a person’s human rights.
Jude, who’s now in his 70s, has been searching for the identify of his parents for over 50 years.
All I know is that my father was from Trinidad. Now, I still don’t know whether that’s
the truth or not. And my mother was from Carlow.
Slowly as you move on in life you realise that some of it might be deliberately kept from you.
I realised something’s not right here,
There seems to be a barrier that you can not break through. And you wonder, why is that?
You know?
Denise moved to London in her early 20s after both of her adoptive parents died.
She has also been searching for many years for more information about the identity of her father.
If you are born to an Irish mother and there is nothing there that leads you to your father
you either have to create one or be messed up with out it
because you haven’t got it there to, you know...
One of the reasons why I’ve never really fitted in because I’m not white and Irish
but I have Irish sensibilities that have stood to me in this country, you know. So all in
all I think I fared well. I balance, my my two identities.
I know where I come from, I know where my history comes from but I’m not going to
let it hold me back.
Rosemary believes she knows her father’s name and that he once studied medicine in
Dublin but beyond this she has very little information to go on.
I’ve spent years trying to track this name down - it’s like the name doesn’t exist.
So I must admit as I’ve gotten on I’ve thought maybe the name I think I have isn’t even my name.
This is the magic room. I’m so nervous.
Oh my goodness, oh my goodness. Ohhh wow. Ohhh.
So this is the register of Apothecaries Hall and it lists the people as they sit their examinations.
So he’s here.
Amijo Adaser that’s him.
And the address is given as Gold Coast, it’s Ghana.
There’s his name.
Now it says here that he’s a graduate of Paris University.
So he’s already a GP by the time he got here. 498, Student 498.
There he is.
Is it possible for me to take a photograph?
I thought nigger and savage were pet names. I actually thought it was my pet name.
Always, come here N, always called savage. You’re father was a savage, he was a cannibal, he
was this, he was that. And I got this every single day, day and night, there was no exceptions.
So, you know I’m just looking at this and it’s like Fuck you all. There we go.
This skin here was considered a disability therefore I was defective by reason of my
father’s anecestry. My father was, now I can prove, was a physician.
You know it’s like. Fuck’em.