An Athlone woman’s Mother and Baby Homes story

Athlone woman Jacinta O’Connell has written movingly of her time as a pregnant fifteen-year-old in the Mother and Baby Home in Bessborough in Cork.

‘Girls Like You – The Long Road Back from Bessborough’, published by Red Stripe Press, an imprint of Orpen Press, charts the journey from an Athlone childhood to a seven-month stay in Bessborough House Mother and Baby Home and the ramifications and impact of the time on herself and her immediate family.

Jacinta, who was assigned the name 'Margaret' in Bessborough, gave birth to a baby girl in September 1973. The following year, finding herself pregnant again, she made her way to England where her son was born in Guy’s Hospital, London.

Against all the odds she brought her daughter home from Cork. Her son was given up for adoption in London.

Her story, written in memoir form, shines a light on family and society in twentieth-century Ireland and through the prism of one woman’s experiences focuses on the power wielded by Church and State over the personal lives of women.

It highlights the dilemmas facing young women who found themselves pregnant in Ireland of the 1970s in a society that was in thrall to the church.

Jacinta, who was born and grew up in Assumption Road, Athlone, told the Westmeath Independent that the book had been in the making for a decade or more.

She said she was motivated to write ‘Girls Like You’ by a desire firstly to tell her own story.

“It was my desire to write my story but it’s also the story of countless other women in this country.”

The book is not written from a societal or political perspective and is instead a deeply personal story and a vivid and clear portrayal of the dilemmas and traumas facing one young woman. But by telling her own story she has sketched a portrait of the politics and power structures of Irish society, and Jacinta is clear that the personal and political are intertwined.

“The political is always personal. It took me a long time to realise that. I think a lot of us have a tendency to keep the political out there kind of at a remove and think that it doesn’t impact our lives but it actually does.”

She said she was also motivated to write her story for her own granddaughters and nieces.

Jacinta said she was focused throughout on writing a book that “portrayed how every single woman in the home was a person with an individual story.”

“We were just ordinary women who grew up in ordinary houses in terraces and in towns. That was one of the things I set out to do is to show that there is a face to each of these women.”

Jacinta said she also wanted to challenge the culture of silence around Mother and Baby Homes but to her own surprise found in the process of writing the book that she had yet to shed the guilt and blame that were implanted by a society and by an institution that stripped her of her individuality and that hammered home the message that she was “shameful, sinful and selfish”.

She said she found that she was writing whole paragraphs where she was constantly explaining, and justifying her actions.

“I didn’t realise I was carrying so much shame because I thought I had educated myself out of it, I didn’t realise it was so ingrained.”

Jacinta ascribes this to the legacy of Bessborough. The book's title 'Girls Like Us' references the psychological brainwashing inflicted by the nuns.

In the book, she vividly sketches the process of belittlement and control enacted by the nuns at Bessborough.

“It was punitive in a different way, very psychologically damaging,” she explained

The report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission was published during the preparation of the book. It has been heavily criticised by survivors and campaigners for not prioritising the testimonies of women, for suppressing their voices and giving priority to accounts of institutions, religious orders and the Staet.

Jacinta didn’t participate in the Mother and Baby Homes Commission partly because at the time she didn’t feel she was a victim having managed to bring her daughter home from Bessborough and also because of a lingering distrust of the purpose of a Government-established body.

Nonetheless, the publication of the report was a difficult time for her.

“I think I was retraumatised all over again reading sections of that report. I found that very difficult.

“There’s no way to sugarcoat it. To actually say in a statement that the girls were happy to be given an alias when I know, I was in Bessborough for seven months, that is not true,” said Jacinta.

She also was aghast at the claim by the order who ran Bessborough that their role was to build up the self esteem of girls whose family rejected them – describing it as “a downright lie”.

Jacinta said that while there were nuggets of important historical information in the report, she would prefer to have her story told to the public through ‘Girls Like You’.

She also highlighted that the issues in the report have not simply disappeared, citing, as an example, the planning application to build a development of luxury flats on part of the site of Bessborough at a time when the burial place of over 800 babies who died there has not yet been identified.

'Girls Like You' also charts Jacinta’s decision in 2017 to reveal that she had a son born in London who was given up for adoption.

This was an immensely difficult time for her. “All my family knew about Bessborough but didn’t know about my son in England,” she explained.

The process of telling about the birth of her son is recounted in the book and led to the the tragic discovery that he had passed away some years previously.

Reflecting now as her book is published and as she commences a series of media interviews, the author, who is known to many locally as Jacinta Daly, says she hopes the book might encourage other woman to speak up.

“Not that they have to do it publicly, they might not even want to speak to their family, but even to speak to a a counsellor because there is absolutely no shame in what they went through. They were the ones who were sinned against. I would hope that it might help people to even speak to a friend, to a colleague or maybe write a book themselves,” she said.

“Let women’s voices be heard.”