Magdalene Laundries: 20 years since the last laundry closed in Ireland, five survivors tell their heartbreaking stories

Adoptionland.orgAdoption, Adoption Trafficking, Europe, Excerpts, Rights 3 Comments

THIS weekend marks the 20th anniversary of the closure of the last Magdalene Laundry in Ireland. On September 25 1996, Ireland’s final laundry, which was located on Sean MacDermott Street in Dublin and run by the Sisters of Our Lady, closed its doors for good. While it’s not known for definite, it’s estimated that 10,000 women were institutionalised in laundries since the foundation of …

Couples devastated by adoption scam

Adoptionland NewsAdoption Trafficking, Agency Complaints, Excerpts, Rights

Eleven Irish couples caught up in an alleged adoption scam in Mexico have been left devastated by the affair, they said tonight. While the lawyer at the centre of the baby trafficking plot remains on the run, the families who returned home last weekend have insisted they believed they were acting legally. Offices belonging to the Lopez Y Lopez firm …

After 1950s forced adoption New Yorker is reunited with his Irish mother

Adoptionland NewsAdoption Trafficking, Excerpts, Rights

Christopher Quirin, 63, was born to a single mother in Ireland in 1950, a time when such a thing was widely considered an unspeakable disgrace. Back then Quirin’s mother was sent by her parents to the now notorious Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea, Co. Tipperary, the same mothers and babies home as Philomena Lee. Lee is the woman whose shocking …

Should adopted children have the right to contact their natural mother?

Paul RedmondAbout Us, Adoption, Adoption Trafficking, Rights

HAVING BEEN BORN in a mother and baby home, I am among perhaps a few hundred members of the active adoption community. But there are also about 50,000 silent adoptees in Ireland today, mostly aged 45 and upwards. At present, all natural mothers are “protected” by the constitutional right to privacy, Many do not want it. But some need it. I …

Screaming Rooms and Banished Babies: Ireland

Paul RedmondAdoption, Adoption Survivor, Adoption Trafficking, Europe, Long Lost Family, Rights

The sad history of where I was born…. THE ORDER OF the Sacred Heart nuns arrived in Ireland in 1922 within months of the formation of the Irish Free state after the civil war. They were invited over from England by the newly-formed Irish government to deal with the ‘problem’ of women having babies outside wedlock. They bought a 200-acre …