Chapter 5 — Family contact

Following discharge

Two hundred (200) witnesses (25%), 87 male and 113 female, reported that they lost contact with their extended family one way or another through the process of their institutionalisation. They stated that that being separated from parents, siblings and others with whom they had affectionate bonds was traumatic and had a devastating impact on their emotional development. They were giving a man’s salary to the religious to keep us, me and my sister and brothers, but would not give it to my dad to keep us together. After my mother died, we were very poor. My father would be dressed so poorly when he visited us. The local TD did try to help my father and spoke to ...Ministers of Government... to help my father get us, but he did not succeed.... Once we were split the link was broken, it’s hard to link back up again. We think we can be together, my sisters, but we can’t. • My mother tried to get me out when I was 15. She tried, she wrote to ...the Government Minister.... Br ...X...he wrote to her and said “no he is better off here”.... My mother she wrote every week, she had it hard too. We were branded as criminals when we came out just because we were poor. • My father, he tried so many times to get us back and they would not let him have us. I did not know where he was ...(when discharged)... he tried really hard. I think he gave up in the end, I remember him crying from the time he came in ...(to visit)... ’til the time he left ...(contact had been lost).... I didn’t even know he was dead ...crying.... He always came to see us.

Admission arrangements were also described as having an impact on the subsequent contact between siblings following discharge. When sibling groups were admitted to out-of-home care, sisters who were placed together in the same School were more likely to maintain contact following discharge. In circumstances where their brothers were placed in separate Schools subsequent contact was more often minimal, and frequently lost, following discharge. We are all strangers, we don’t know each other, we were all destroyed in our heads, the family is split up, but in touch, the years of separation did too much damage.

Thirty three (33) witnesses reported that they were given inaccurate information about their parents, including being told that they had no parents or that they were dead and discovering in recent years, following search and tracing, that this was not the case. I was told about 15 years ago my mother was dead, they told me all my records were destroyed. ...Then... after 47 years I had contact with my mother, I picked up the phone and she said “it’s your mum”.

A number of witnesses also learned in later years that their parents had visited or written to them but that the contact was denied and letters were not passed on. Such discoveries were particularly distressing for witnesses who learned they had unknowingly lived near their parents and/or other relatives for much of their adult lives. Other witnesses reported learning about the existence of parents and relatives after their mother or father had died and experienced a double loss as a result. The nuns told me my mother was dead, they said “do you see that star up there, well she is up there”. Then a few years ago, I got a phone call to say my mother was dead ...(had just died).... ... I’m in such shock, I can’t believe it. I asked some questions and then said “it’s got to be my mother”, if only I had been given a chance to see her, to say goodbye and to say “look mum I understand and I forgive”.

The upset and associated loss of secure relationships that followed separation from parents and siblings was reported by almost all witnesses, including those who had no known family. In different ways this experience of loss of family left a mark on each witness’s memory and was a background to their reports on life in the Schools. The following chapters outline the everyday routine of institutional life reported by the witnesses and the types of abuse they experienced and wished to report.