The Catholic Church is still blocking adopted people from accessing their birth records, the survivor of a mother and baby home has claimed. 

Noelle Brown was born in Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork in the 1960s.

Over the past 20 years, Ms Brown has been investigating the circumstances of her birth and told The Pat Kenny Show she has mostly encountered “closed doors, lies and obfuscation”.

“We’re still dealing with delays,” she said.

“All of the same pattern is going on and dealing with Tusla, the Adoption Authority of Ireland - why are we even being dealt with by the Department of Children?

“We’re not children.”

Survivors of mother and baby homes tell their stories in Margo Harkin’s insightful and heartfelt documentary, alongside interviews with journalists, historians, politicians and campaigners.

Stolen opens this FRIDAY.
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Ms Brown was only able to track her birth parents down after their deaths and is angry that officialdom did not do more to help her.

“We’re the only country in Europe that denies the right to identity of an adopted person,” she said.

“This is a decision being… fuelled by the Catholic Church.

“We are an inconvenient truth that they need to push away, they are disappearing us and I think that’s what is going on.

“They don’t want to deal with it, it’s too messy.”

'You’re only scratching the surface'

Ms Brown’s story is one of many told in a new documentary film Stolen about Ireland’s mother and baby homes.

Director Margo Harkin said that the stories of survivors have been “largely ignored” and felt it was time they were told on the big screen.

“You kept being referred from one person to the other,” she said.

“Sometimes people would be very willing to share their story but they couldn’t tell it on television because they didn’t want to offend… their surviving adoptive parents.

“So, there were various reasons but mostly it was an open door, most were keen to tell their stories.

“So, the task for me was to get a representative sample of stories because you’re only scratching the surface.”

Perhaps most scandalously, Ms Harkin said many women have testified that they never formally gave their children up for adoption and the children were simply taken away without permission.

“The Churches will say now that the babies were given up for adoption because they made them sign papers,” she said.

“But we have some individuals who will swear blind that they never signed anything and that when they tried to get their babies back, they were thwarted at every turn.”

Stolen will be released in cinemas on Friday; the Archdiocese of Dublin has been contacted for comment.

Main image: Tributes left at the site of a mass grave for children who died in the Tuam mother and baby home, Galway. Picture by: Alamy.com