Abused as a child, barely able to support herself as an adult, Maria Arbuckle was one of thousands of unmarried women who suffered in Ireland’s mother and baby homes. She talks about her long battle to be reunited with her son – and the tragedy that struck soon after
When Maria Arbuckle thinks of her time in Ireland’s largest mother and baby home, she thinks of the nursery and its snug rows of cots, each one filled with a tiny, bleating bundle. She thinks of her boy, Paul, among them, and the 8lb 10oz weight of him in her arms. She thinks of how she fed and washed him under the careful watch of the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. And she thinks of the refrain that ended each visit, when she had to hand him back to them: “He’s not yours any more. He doesn’t belong to you.”
Arbuckle, 62, was six months pregnant when she was sent by social services in Northern Ireland to Saint Patrick’s mother and baby home over the border in Dublin. She was 18 and emerging from a childhood spent shunted between a children’s home, an abusive foster home and a church-run industrial school for children considered to be in “moral danger”. It was 1981, Northern Ireland was in the thick of the Troubles and she was living in the border county of Monaghan, far from her native Derry. Her first serious relationship had collapsed, she had no contact with the foster family who had raised her for 11 years and she was barely making ends meet with her traineeship with a bookmaker. “At the mother and baby home, they told me that I had nowhere to go,” she recalls, more than four decades later. “I was on my own. I had no man, no family. And they were right.”
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