Alicia Kearns

“To all the mothers and your stolen children who have wrongly carried grief and shame for so long, you were denied the love that you deserved and tortured by a state—and the silence only revictimized you. We are sorry. It is shameful that Barnardo’s and the Salvation Army have yet to apologise and face up to the role that they played in this. My father was haunted by the way in which Barnardo’s played a role and he would tell me of his horror, which he carried for life, of seeing the laundries as he walked around the streets of Dublin. In addition to those who were cruelly and forcibly adopted, hundreds of babies died—frankly, they were killed—as their mothers were tortured, and they were buried in unmarked graves. Will the Prime Minister, as he continues with his important work on this, put in place an effort to find those graves and to force the opening up of those records so that the mothers who were denied a lifetime of memories with their children can at least now bury them and have time at those graves with them?”