This World s11e07 Episode Script
Ireland's Lost Babies
The Hollywood movie Philomena told the story of one woman's search for the son who had been taken away from her as a little boy.
It moved audiences around the world.
The success of the film took it all the way to Oscar nominations.
My name is Martin Sixsmith, and the film was about how I helped Philomena in her quest to be reunited with her son.
But Philomena's story is just the tip of an iceberg.
In Ireland, thousands of so-called illegitimate children were taken from their mothers and sent off for adoption.
Coming off that plane, I was very scared and frightened and felt alone When those children searched for their mothers they felt frustrated by the Catholic Church.
I had to do an actual car chase to track this Sister Sarto down.
- Catherine? - Sheehy.
- And it was Sheehy? - Now, I've a photograph here to show you of Joseph.
- Yes.
Yes.
And the mothers, too, have struggled.
It's so hard.
This is my journey to discover the true scale of a scandal that has affected so many lives.
I finally found the truth-- that I was never unwanted.
That I was never abandoned.
September 17th, 2014 Philomena is the story of a young woman in 1950s Ireland who fell pregnant outside marriage.
She was taken to a convent and forced to give up the baby for adoption in America.
50 years later, Philomena and I set out to try and track down her son.
Although we discovered her son Anthony tragically had died, the search turned out to be a life-changing experience for both Philomena and for me.
And after the film came out, I was contacted by others with similar stories to tell-- by mothers of children taken by the Catholic Church and by the adopted children themselves now seeking answers.
I'm going on a journey which will take me from Ireland to America to investigate the extent of the scandal.
My journey started in rural Ireland at the home of a woman called Lily Boyce.
- Hello, Lily? - Hello.
- Martin Sixsmith.
Hello.
- Pleased to meet you, Martin.
Lovely to meet you, Lily.
Just like Philomena, Lily grew up in Ireland in the 1950s, when the Catholic Church dominated most aspects of life.
She's never spoken out before.
Sex wasn't you didn't really know really what it was, cos it was never, never, eh, explained to you.
But I was pregnant and ignorant and didn't know I was pregnant.
And I suppose maybe six or eight months and, you know, kind of then knew there was something funny going on, and, yes, kind of so I had to be pregnant.
In a world where sex outside marriage was absolutely forbidden, Lily, then 19, kept her secret as long as she could.
What do I do, like, I mean, who do I tell, and I'm afraid to tell the anybody, not even the father did I tell.
Afraid to tell my mother.
As she went into labour, her mother discovered what Lily had been hiding from her.
My mother said, er, you'd better gather your stuff up and she said, "Get out of here.
" So, er, we started off I didn't actually know where I was going, so we landed in Castlepollard on a very snowy morning.
And when she got me a couple of yards from the door she said, "Now you can do your own dirty work.
" Lily's mother had left her on the steps of Castlepollard, a home run by the Catholic Church where unmarried mothers were hiddenaway in shame to have their children.
Lily gave birth to Joseph the next day in the home.
What can you remember about him? He was a lovable child.
Like, you really bonded with him.
Yeah, sort of like it was so hard.
The women in the home were stripped of their identities and given names by the nuns.
Lily became Ursula.
When you're in there, there was nothing you could do because you're under a false name, you couldn't write out, nor, like, I mean, you couldn't make contact with the outside world without being monitored.
The nuns who ran the home were unforgiving to the young women in their charge.
You just felt, you know, you're a fallen person and that bit of meat that wasn't wanted or whatever, you know, so nobody nobody cared.
- You felt like a piece of meat? - Yeah.
That no-one cared about.
The Republic of Ireland is the most Catholic country in the world.
95% of its people are of the Roman Catholic faith.
As the highest moral authority in Ireland, the Catholic Church was obsessed with sex and its regulation.
Contraception was illegal.
Chastity, the Church said, was the only protection for young women from the mortal sin of sex outside marriage.
If you can control sexuality, you can control the person.
And, of course, the morals of the Catholic Church intruded into the bedrooms of Ireland for generations.
They wanted to control everything that happened in the bedroom.
In 1950s Ireland, the Church and State were inextricably linked in a way that is hard for us to understand today.
The Church policed every aspect of life-- both public and private.
The State relied on the Church to take unmarried mothers, known as fallen women, into its mother and baby homes.
The worst possible thing that could happen in a family was that a girl would get pregnant.
The son could get other girls pregnant, you know, it's a bit of trouble, but if the daughter in the house got pregnant outside marriage, this was a disaster, a social disaster.
The family itself would practically be ostracised, so the girls would be taken away from their home, sent to the nuns in some awful convent somewhere, 60,000 girls just disappeared.
There was little question of the illegitimate children staying with their mothers.
Instead, they were given up for adoption by the nuns.
The young women involved very often didn't give consent.
Where they did give consent, there's a serious question as to whether it was properly informed consent, and the State, I think, went along with that almost entirely because the State did not want to do anything what would anger or upset or annoy the Catholic Church.
Lily knew her child was going to be taken away from her.
If the nuns said, yeah, it was going to America, it was going to America.
I would have loved to have kept him.
The more I had him, the the harder it was, like, to give him up.
Cos you really had bonded then with him.
After 17 months of caring for her son, the time came for Lily to give Joseph away.
My last memory of Joseph, I was told, "Joseph is going in the morning.
" So you go over and you had dressed Joseph.
And he was dressed in his little beige coat and brown trousers and little shoes.
And then he was taken over by Sister Aiden to the front hall of the convent.
And while she got up at the top, I was only allowed to wave to him at the bottom of the stairs.
That was the last I seen of Joseph.
It was an image that would haunt Lily in the decades that followed.
I'm Joseph's mother.
Not the fallen one.
Not the fallen one.
The Church was paid by the State for housing the mothers and children but the adoption process could also be a source of revenue.
Transporting the children to America was a costly process, as these records in the Irish National Archive show.
Here we have our expenses for going to New York in 1952.
The nurse going tourist class would cost 241.
One infant over two years, 50% of the fare, 120.
One infant under two years, 10% of the fare.
Dublin Shannon via car 40.
Em, tax, 8, so total cost to each sponsor-- 220.
80.
It's a lot of money.
So that goes again to the social status and income of the adopting parents, who could afford to pay that kind of money to have the children sent abroad.
That's where you then come down to the question of, these people were always going to be good for donations and good for paying un-itemised invoices, which are in effect charging for the adoption.
Directly selling babies wasn't allowed but it was common for the nuns to accept substantial donations from adoptive parents.
I've looked at a number of cases in some detail where you can see that over the, um, first few years of an adoption people would pay the initial invoice that they got and then they would make a number of donations.
And this would amount to hundreds of dollars.
That would be thousands of pounds in today's money.
The nuns were using what looks like a marketing strategy.
The children in the homes were photographed to attract couples who would provide good homes-- as well as handsome donations for the convents.
Some American adopters travelled to Ireland but astonishingly, many children were taken without their new parents ever setting foot in the country.
The children from Ireland were sent to all four corners of America.
Philomena's son, Anthony, had died by the time we discovered his identity.
But many of Ireland's lost children are of course still alive so I headed to the US to find out what had become of some of them.
My first stop was Florida.
You have reached your destination.
I'd tracked down a woman who had arrived in America as a child in 1958.
- Hello? Hi, Martin.
- Hello, Cathy.
- Martin.
- Hi, how are you? - Very pleased to meet you.
- You look so different than on TV.
- Yes.
- You're better looking! - Thank you! - Oh.
Nice to meet you.
Let's see what we've got.
- This is you, isn't it? - Yes.
OK.
So where's that taken, Cathy? That's at the Sacred Heart, Bessbro and that's what I call one of the "prop shots".
So it's a prop shot because it's posed? - To make you look a happy little - Most definitely.
They told me to sit there.
In 1957, an American couple-- who had been turned down as adoptive parents in the US-- contacted the nuns in Ireland.
They were sent photos of the four-year-old Cathy.
They wanted a female as a companion for their older daughter and to be four or five years old.
So they had a preference.
They did it all by mail.
They didn't fly to and pick out a baby.
So you were literally a mail order child.
Yeah! Uh-huh.
- You were bought from a catalogue.
- Exactly! Cathy says her adoptive parents paid the nuns for a courier to bring her to New York, where they lived.
Coming off that plane, I was very scared and frightened.
And felt alone.
This footage is of Cathy on her first days in New York.
My hands were held by my sister and my mother.
And I just followed them on to a new journey.
I was in a whole new world.
I had everything I could've wanted for or asked for.
Love and affection from my mother and sister was, you know, was just something else.
Cathy had a classic American upbringing as part of a large and happy family.
She received a good education and dreamed of becoming a nurse.
I became a Red Cross volunteer, and on weekends my mother would take me to the local hospital.
And I had my little uniform.
But Cathy's happy childhood began to go wrong when her sister Dolores left their New York home to go to college.
She decided to move to California.
And, um My parents went through, I think, an empty nest syndrome.
And they missed her so much, you know.
With her sister gone, Cathy felt that her father turned against her.
She says he refused to send her to college.
He said, "By the way, you know, we had a college fund for you but we spent it.
And we intend to continue spending it, and we're going on a cruise and we want you out of the house by 18.
A mail order adopted child, it seemed, wasn't regarded as a commitment for life.
Her parents sold their home and set out for California to be with their biological daughter.
It was horrible to say goodbye, cos they they were the ones who said hello to me, you know, when I got off the plane from Ireland.
And now they're saying goodbye.
And, uh, even though I was supposed to be older, I guess, and get over it, like now it hurts, it still hurts.
The pain of rejection would finally lead Cathy to try and find out about her roots, and to look for her birth mother.
Let me see where I'm connected.
Let me go find my roots.
Is my mother alive? Let me go meet her.
You know, let me find her.
It's thought that around 2,000 Irish babies like Cathy were sent to the United States during the 1950s and '60s.
My next stop was the west coast of America, to find a man whose adoption raises some disturbing questions about what safeguards were put in place to protect these children.
- Hello, Mike? - Hello.
Martin.
- Pleased to meet you.
- Good to meet you.
- My wife Susan.
- Hello, Susan.
Martin.
Hello, pleased to meet you.
In 1961, Mike Hawkes and his twin sister were brought to Saratoga in California.
It wasn't a mail order adoption.
An American Catholic priest-- Monsignor Benjamin Hawkes-- identified the children in a Catholic Church-run home in Ireland and delivered them to his own brother for adoption.
They were extremely orthodox Catholic.
Good people in that they put forward a home and clothes and shelter.
And, ah but very strict along the line.
Just like Cathy, Mike's American life started out pretty well.
They told their friends.
They told their acquaintances that came to the home that we were two adopted children from Ireland.
And we were cute little buggers.
I'll be honest.
I'd say that we were probably comfortable together in public and got along seemingly very well.
But as they grew up, the twins rebelled against their parents' strict rules, and their adoptions became the subject of rows and recrimination.
My sister was told that, er, it was unfortunate that she was adopted.
And you Maybe you heard the words that "you won't amount to much".
In the background, the priest who'd brought Mike to California, Monsignor Benjamin Hawkes, continued to play a significant role in his life.
He kept a very tight rein on what you were doing.
My uncle was very strong-willed.
And, er, going against that will was not healthy.
Not healthy.
Hawkes had become a powerful figure in the Church hierarchy.
I believe The Times called him, at one point in time, one of the ten most influential people in Los Angeles.
But the Monsignor had a secret life.
The individual led two lives.
He led a life full of culture as a priest and he led a life as a paedophile or manipulator.
After his death in 1985, a number of men came forward to say that Monsignor Hawkes had abused them as children.
The fact that a paedophile priest appeared to have access to young children raises grave questions about the whole adoption process.
Just how were those involved vetted? The Irish Church set up its own vetting system that relied on local Catholic organisations in America to assess the suitability of prospective adopters.
I had heard about a case that might reveal some of the workings of the whole adoption system.
Well, we've come out here to the beautiful mountains of western Massachusetts on a hunch, really.
We're looking for one Irish girl who was adopted in the 1950s.
- Good day.
- Hello, Mary.
Martin Sixsmith from BBC Television.
- It's a pleasure, sir.
- Very pleased to meet you.
- Nice to meet you, please come in.
- Thank you.
The beginning of Mary Monaghan's story followed a familiar pattern.
My mother was a fallen woman, therefore I'm the spawn of the devil.
I really do not remember a lot, but you have feelings, you know, and, erm you still can feel it, sort of just being ripped away, you know? Even though you don't necessarily remember the physicality.
But, you know, it's an emotional thing.
Mary has managed to track down some of the original documents relating to her adoption.
Could you just read that paragraph to us, because it's a very Right.
"I hereby relinquish full claim forever to my child Mary Theresa Monaghan born on the 7th day of October 1950 and I undertake never to make any claim to said child.
" Gosh! That's quite a That's quite a heart-rending document, isn't it? You're giving away your child to someone.
I know, it's just It's medieval.
According to the Church's policy, the Catholic Welfare Bureau was responsible for vetting the couple who wanted to adopt Mary-- Mr.
and Mrs.
O'Brien.
But Mary has discovered a document that shows that only Mrs.
O'Brien was ever spoken to.
Mrs.
O'Brien clearly was a nice person.
Oh, indeed, she was.
- She would pass their test.
- Indeed.
William O'Brien had adopted a child before in America.
But he wasn't spoken to by the Catholic Welfare Bureau in relation to adopting Mary.
Nevertheless, she was taken from her mother by the nuns and handed over to William O'Brien to be transported to America.
From the start, Mary struggled to adapt to her new life.
I would be ill and I had all kinds of allergies and I'd break out, because I was allergic to food! From the outside, their family life in Huntington Park, California, seemed normal.
Like many of the families given Irish children to adopt, the O'Briens were prosperous and respected within their local Catholic community.
And what are your memories of that period, of your childhood? Ah My memories are terrible, to tell you the truth.
I was physically punished for not being able to eat.
And if I did anything like a little child does, like wet the bed I'd be literally put in the toilet.
And then the sexual abuse began very soon after that and it just progressed.
I had to be kept in my little routine, as it were.
So I wouldn't try to break away.
It's all systematic and it's I mean, it's serious very serious paedophile thinking.
Mary had been placed in the care of a monster.
Throughout her childhood she was abused by her adoptive father.
Was there no way that you could reach out for help outside the family? I could not perceive of any way of doing it, just to protect myself.
Because if it was known that I tried to do that, I don't think I'd probably live to see another day, and that's not an exaggeration.
And this was being done to you by the one person you should be able to trust and who should be there to protect you.
Correct.
Correct.
And he had the world fooled.
The more you talk to the children who were sent out here to America, and there were hundreds of them, the more you realise what a lottery the whole system was.
Some of the children had happy lives with the families they were sent to, but many of them didn't and some of them were physically and sexually abused.
What their stories show, just like Philomena and her son, is that many of the mothers and their children feel an overwhelming need to find answers about their lives.
But over the decades that followed the adoptions, it was to prove almost impossible to find those answers.
By the early 1970s, the export of Irish children to America for adoption had come to an end.
Lord, have mercy In 1973, the government introduced a new, unmarried mothers' allowance that meant women could afford to raise their own children.
seeds of wisdom It's estimated that by then there had been around 40,000 to 60,000 adoptions, most within Ireland itself.
But wherever they'd been adopted, these were mothers and children who might one day start looking for each other.
health of the weak, refuge of sinners Now, coming for a walkie? Coming for a walkie? In the meantime, people got on with their lives.
Lily, who gave up her son Joseph to be adopted to America, eventually married the boy's father.
But they kept it secret that they'd had a child out of wedlock.
If anybody asked me, "Have you any family?" and I always said, "No," I was always in denial, "No".
The shame would have been there.
Lily never forgot her son.
- Now, I have a photograph here to show you of Joseph.
- Yes.
That's Joseph.
- That is very precious to me that I have that photograph.
- Yes.
- And then there's a little surprise.
- Ah.
Oh, my goodness, what's Let me put my glasses on.
This is the tag of his cot.
Yes, oh, let me see.
And it definitely brings back the memories, like, I mean, of all the Gosh, yes, it's got his name on it, his date of birth and Yes.
It took 28 years for Lily to confront the stigma of her past and pluck up the courage to write to the Church to see if they could help her track down her son.
But she didn't get any information from the nuns.
I wouldn't have got his They didn't give me his parents' name or nothing.
I got none of that.
Mary, hiya.
Around the same time Lily was looking for her son, there was a breakthrough in the whole adoption story.
In 1996, an archivist was reviewing Irish government records when she stumbled across secret files on the American adoptions.
- This is our lovely reading room where everyone finds out things about Irish history.
- Yes.
I went downstairs here in our repository and found 2,000 files.
Six of them, these files here that deal with the policy behind the system of adoption of Irish children in America and the others, almost 2,000 of them, dealing with the case files.
The files revealed that government officials were granting the nuns the passports they needed to get the children out of the country.
"Irish passports, issued to children to enable to leave Ireland for legal adoption abroad, nearly all in the USA.
The children concerned were almost all invariably Catholics and of illegitimate birth and were over one year of age.
Figures for the proceeding five years were as follows 1952 - 193.
1953 - 128.
1954 - 182.
1955 - 184.
1956 - 111.
" The files revealed the scale of the American adoptions.
But the documents identifying individual cases were held in secret by the Catholic institutions involved and by the Irish state.
This meant it was impossible for the people searching to obtain the information they needed.
In a lot of cases, as in Philomena's case, the child and the mother had been looking for each other and the nuns to whom they had turned had not brought them together but had forced them apart again, by telling them lies, by deceiving them, by misinforming them, whatever you want to call it.
They have perpetrated the wrongs that they did in the first place.
The Church says it was often prevented from helping by confidentiality laws.
Frustrated after four years of seeking answers from the nuns and the Irish government, Lily asked for help from a search agency in America.
Within months they had tracked her son down.
Lily wrote to him, and a few weeks later received a reply.
"I cannot imagine how hard it must have been for you to spend that much time with me before you had to give me up and I respect your decision that you have made, and I have no resentment towards you.
" And the sad thing is that that came in 1999 - and we're 15 years on.
- That's right, yeah.
That seemed like a breakthrough - but it didn't lead to you finding him.
- No, it didn't.
No, it didn't, no.
Sadly for Lily, Joseph didn't continue the correspondence, and at the time, she felt she had to give up her quest.
I didn't want to hurt the parents and he was very protective of his parents, you know, like when he had stressed that in a letter, that, yeah, he was very He didn't want anyone annoying them, you know, so And it wasn't just the mothers who were looking for answers.
By the 1990s, many of the adopted children had begun their own searches.
Cathy Deasey was one of then, and from 1989 she began writing to Sister Sarto Harney, the nun in charge of records from three of the main homes that sent children to America.
Like many of the adoptees, Cathy found Sister Sarto unhelpful and says she was frustrated by a letter she received from her in 2002.
She told me in a letter that, "Your mother's probably dead so why are you continuing the search?" Finally, Cathy located a group of Irish adoptees who had some experience of searches like hers.
With their help, the mystery of her mother's whereabouts was solved.
I was all excited.
I called about ten friends, I said, "My God, I've found my mother.
" And they said just, "Best of luck", you know, "Be gentle", you know, and, "Good luck and we're all with you.
" Within weeks, Cathy was preparing to set off for Ireland with a friend for the first time since she'd left as a child.
It was good that I had my best friend with me, because I didn't know how to drive, on the wrong side of the road, and we were escorted by my family and then we drove to the house where my mother was.
- How are you? - OK, not too bad.
Good.
- I'm your daughter.
I'm your daughter.
- Uh? - Yeah.
- Yeah.
- So I still have the same red hair? - Huh? I have the red hair.
There she was, this little lady, who was my mother.
It was the happiest moment of my life, you know? And she was smiling and you could see the joy in her eyes.
Cathy discovered that after she had been sent to America, her mother had spent another 35 years in an institution run by the Catholic Church, a few miles away from the mother and baby home where Cathy was born.
It was a miracle to be with her and that she was alive.
I won't forget about you.
Whenever she said that it broke her heart that she I was taken from her that, to me, those were very hard words but it was the truth.
And I finally found the truth that I was never unwanted.
That I was never abandoned.
Never.
Finally reunited with her mother, Cathy wanted answers from the nun in charge of the records who she felt had been so unhelpful to her search.
She headed back to the home where she was born.
I had to do an actual car chase to track this Sister Sarto down.
That's her! I was knocking on the door.
We went in the front door and I confronted her and she said she didn't know anything about my file.
- Can I have your name? - Catherine.
Catherine what? Cathy Deseay.
And it was Sheehey.
- Johanna Sheehey was my mother.
- Yes.
You see, we're dealing with hundreds.
I'll have to look up the reference number.
I said I lived here, I was born here.
I've been writing to you for so long.
It's an awful shame that you didn't make contact with us, that we would have made preparations for your visit.
I said, "I found my mother.
My mother's alive.
" I said, "I had tea with her this morning.
" Cathy felt the nuns could have given her the information she needed about her mother right from the start.
She was right down the street.
All those years I had no idea where she is.
They knew where she was.
After a brief look through the records Sister Sarto found Cathy's file, including the letters Cathy had been sending her, asking for help.
Catherine! There I am.
And there's my letters.
- You've got the whole file! Very good.
- Right.
Cathy's mother died in 2009, seven years after she'd found her.
I innocently just wanted to find my mother.
And the sad part is, I could have met my mother sooner.
Maybe she would have been in better health.
I would have had a longer time with her.
Oh, that's tomorrow.
I asked the nuns, the Order Of The Sacred Hearts Of Jesus And Mary, about why they failed to give Cathy more information about her birth mother.
They said they understood how disappointing and frustrating it must have been, but that they couldn't give out information because of confidentiality laws.
And then we'll see where I was born.
Oh, it's deeper than I thought! The story of Mary Monaghan also raises disturbing questions.
Sent by the nuns into the home of an abuser, her life has been ruined by her experiences.
I think if they did proper vetting, I wouldn't have been placed in that household.
How do you feel now? - Sad.
- Completely defenceless.
- Yes.
- Unable to fend for yourself, in the Church's care.
Church's care?! How do I feel now? Well, it's been a lot to overcome.
Um, I still have flashbacks sometimes.
And I still struggle with, you know, substance abuse occasionally.
And I've been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
The nuns who ran the home where Mary was born also declined to be interviewed.
In a letter they said her adoptive father had previously been cleared to adopt in California and that vetting was the responsibility of either the American adoption agency or the Catholic Welfare Bureau.
Mary, too, had little help from the Church as she searched for her mother.
But finally, through a private agency, she tracked her down in London.
This is wonderful! - Bungee.
- Bungee! Well, that was quite a moment when we first met.
I went up to her and I hugged her.
She froze, she literally froze.
So it came clear to me that I needed to tread lightly.
It was very clear that I was to keep my mouth shut, you know? I'm a secret, that I was a long-lost cousin.
Yeah, so I played along, best I could, but some people did guess.
After spending 52 years apart, despite the difficulties of coming to terms with their relationship, Mary and her mother had nearly a decade together.
- It's nice to see that they all have visitors.
- Yes.
Her mother died in 2010, and is buried near London.
This is the first time Mary has visited her grave.
- You can't pick 'em up, it'd be disrespectful.
- Mary? Oh.
- Oh, there are flowers here, too.
- That's it, isn't it? Teresa Nellie.
OK, I'm going to fuss around a bit here.
I think I can just put these there.
Yeah.
There.
It's just unfortunate that she had to take so much shame to her grave.
Yes.
- It is.
- It isn't right.
So it's been a difficult road but these are all steps on that road and today has been another step.
Yes, yes, a very positive one.
Yeah.
Yes, I hesitate to use the word spiritual but maybe it is, in a way, I don't know.
But it has a calming effect on me, it really does.
My search has come full circle, so Between 40 and 60,000 unmarried mothers gave up children for adoption in Ireland.
Like Mary, many who have sought answers feel let down by the Catholic Church and the Irish State.
Neither the Church's leader in Ireland, nor the Prime Minister would be interviewed for this programme.
But earlier this year came a revelation that may now force the authorities to finally confront these issues.
It's about St.
Mary's, another mother and baby home, run by the Catholic Church in the small town of Tuam.
This is one of the only known photographs.
I'm meeting Catherine Corless, who has uncovered the shocking history of the home.
In the old days, this would have been the back of the home.
- That's right, yes, just the back.
- Yes.
It was a local couple who put the little cross up here on the gate.
- Yes.
After you.
- Thanks.
After the home was demolished in the 1970s, the local council built houses on the site.
But one area was left derelict.
And the children from the estate used it as a playground.
The children who were playing in this rough it was only rubble all here, a wild area, and the children said that there was bones here.
And they were actually kicking around what they thought was a football, but it was actually a skull of a child.
And the people here, they came over and investigated it and they saw in this area here there was a tank and the top was moved over and it was opened a little bit, and they looked down and they could see there was literally, they couldn't innumerable little bodies and skulls and bones.
So they realised then that it was a graveyard.
And do we know how many babies or children are actually buried here? - Well, including the whole area, there's nearly 800.
- Nearly 800? Nearly 800, which is an enormous amount altogether.
It's horrific, really.
Catherine discovered that the young children died between 1925 and 1961 from malnutrition and common diseases whilst at the home.
And she believes that the nuns buried many of them in the unmarked mass grave on the site.
The fact that nobody saw fit to commemorate them-- what does that say about the society that allowed that to happen? They just weren't wanted.
There were just hundreds of unwanted children.
And, er, they were just, um, like a different species or something.
It was just horrific, when you think about it, just horrific.
The revelations about this home have forced both the Government and the Church to finally face up to the scandal of how unmarried mothers and their children were treated in Ireland.
the Irish government has now ordered a police report on the deaths of the almost 800 children at this home.
And it's launching a wider investigation into what was going on in all of Ireland's mother and baby homes, as well as the whole adoption process.
In a statement given to me from the Catholic bishops, they say, "We apologise for hurt caused by the Church as part of this system.
" And that they "encourage all those who had any responsibility for setting up, running or overseeing the homes or adoption agencies to gather any documentation or information that might be of assistance.
" When I began my story about Philomena, I had little idea of the journey I was setting out on.
I've been humbled by the heroic endurance of the people caught up in this tragedy.
Come on.
For Lily, who gave up her son Joseph 48 years ago, the pain goes on.
We'll go and see Joe's grave now.
It's Joe's grave.
Recently, her husband died.
You miss Joe, don't you? You miss Joe, you do.
You miss Joe.
I come down to see Joe every day-- good job he's so near home.
I've been married for 42 years and it's very lonely.
I'm on my own here now-- and it makes me more real to trace my son Joseph.
It's really, really hard and each time you visit the graveyard and think, "Well, Joe would love to be here to do the same.
" 15 years ago, Lily did manage to track down her son and received a letter from him.
But that was the last she heard.
Now she's decided to try again, so she's getting back in touch with the search agency in America.
Two, eight, six, two, three, six, two.
So I would like to make more contact.
Have you still contact for him? Good.
Yes.
OK.
Thanks a million.
Lovely talking to you again.
OK.
OK.
Bye.
I've just phoned America, yes.
And which is mighty.
I've just phoned America.
Yeah.
Lily's last hope is that a lovingly crafted letter will prompt a reunion.
"Dear Joe.
Hope this finds you well.
I have the courage to try again.
I've been curious.
As life goes on, it gets harder not having you in my life.
So, Joseph, please reply to this letter.
I will end for now.
Yours sincerely, Irish Mammy, Lily.
"
It moved audiences around the world.
The success of the film took it all the way to Oscar nominations.
My name is Martin Sixsmith, and the film was about how I helped Philomena in her quest to be reunited with her son.
But Philomena's story is just the tip of an iceberg.
In Ireland, thousands of so-called illegitimate children were taken from their mothers and sent off for adoption.
Coming off that plane, I was very scared and frightened and felt alone When those children searched for their mothers they felt frustrated by the Catholic Church.
I had to do an actual car chase to track this Sister Sarto down.
- Catherine? - Sheehy.
- And it was Sheehy? - Now, I've a photograph here to show you of Joseph.
- Yes.
Yes.
And the mothers, too, have struggled.
It's so hard.
This is my journey to discover the true scale of a scandal that has affected so many lives.
I finally found the truth-- that I was never unwanted.
That I was never abandoned.
September 17th, 2014 Philomena is the story of a young woman in 1950s Ireland who fell pregnant outside marriage.
She was taken to a convent and forced to give up the baby for adoption in America.
50 years later, Philomena and I set out to try and track down her son.
Although we discovered her son Anthony tragically had died, the search turned out to be a life-changing experience for both Philomena and for me.
And after the film came out, I was contacted by others with similar stories to tell-- by mothers of children taken by the Catholic Church and by the adopted children themselves now seeking answers.
I'm going on a journey which will take me from Ireland to America to investigate the extent of the scandal.
My journey started in rural Ireland at the home of a woman called Lily Boyce.
- Hello, Lily? - Hello.
- Martin Sixsmith.
Hello.
- Pleased to meet you, Martin.
Lovely to meet you, Lily.
Just like Philomena, Lily grew up in Ireland in the 1950s, when the Catholic Church dominated most aspects of life.
She's never spoken out before.
Sex wasn't you didn't really know really what it was, cos it was never, never, eh, explained to you.
But I was pregnant and ignorant and didn't know I was pregnant.
And I suppose maybe six or eight months and, you know, kind of then knew there was something funny going on, and, yes, kind of so I had to be pregnant.
In a world where sex outside marriage was absolutely forbidden, Lily, then 19, kept her secret as long as she could.
What do I do, like, I mean, who do I tell, and I'm afraid to tell the anybody, not even the father did I tell.
Afraid to tell my mother.
As she went into labour, her mother discovered what Lily had been hiding from her.
My mother said, er, you'd better gather your stuff up and she said, "Get out of here.
" So, er, we started off I didn't actually know where I was going, so we landed in Castlepollard on a very snowy morning.
And when she got me a couple of yards from the door she said, "Now you can do your own dirty work.
" Lily's mother had left her on the steps of Castlepollard, a home run by the Catholic Church where unmarried mothers were hiddenaway in shame to have their children.
Lily gave birth to Joseph the next day in the home.
What can you remember about him? He was a lovable child.
Like, you really bonded with him.
Yeah, sort of like it was so hard.
The women in the home were stripped of their identities and given names by the nuns.
Lily became Ursula.
When you're in there, there was nothing you could do because you're under a false name, you couldn't write out, nor, like, I mean, you couldn't make contact with the outside world without being monitored.
The nuns who ran the home were unforgiving to the young women in their charge.
You just felt, you know, you're a fallen person and that bit of meat that wasn't wanted or whatever, you know, so nobody nobody cared.
- You felt like a piece of meat? - Yeah.
That no-one cared about.
The Republic of Ireland is the most Catholic country in the world.
95% of its people are of the Roman Catholic faith.
As the highest moral authority in Ireland, the Catholic Church was obsessed with sex and its regulation.
Contraception was illegal.
Chastity, the Church said, was the only protection for young women from the mortal sin of sex outside marriage.
If you can control sexuality, you can control the person.
And, of course, the morals of the Catholic Church intruded into the bedrooms of Ireland for generations.
They wanted to control everything that happened in the bedroom.
In 1950s Ireland, the Church and State were inextricably linked in a way that is hard for us to understand today.
The Church policed every aspect of life-- both public and private.
The State relied on the Church to take unmarried mothers, known as fallen women, into its mother and baby homes.
The worst possible thing that could happen in a family was that a girl would get pregnant.
The son could get other girls pregnant, you know, it's a bit of trouble, but if the daughter in the house got pregnant outside marriage, this was a disaster, a social disaster.
The family itself would practically be ostracised, so the girls would be taken away from their home, sent to the nuns in some awful convent somewhere, 60,000 girls just disappeared.
There was little question of the illegitimate children staying with their mothers.
Instead, they were given up for adoption by the nuns.
The young women involved very often didn't give consent.
Where they did give consent, there's a serious question as to whether it was properly informed consent, and the State, I think, went along with that almost entirely because the State did not want to do anything what would anger or upset or annoy the Catholic Church.
Lily knew her child was going to be taken away from her.
If the nuns said, yeah, it was going to America, it was going to America.
I would have loved to have kept him.
The more I had him, the the harder it was, like, to give him up.
Cos you really had bonded then with him.
After 17 months of caring for her son, the time came for Lily to give Joseph away.
My last memory of Joseph, I was told, "Joseph is going in the morning.
" So you go over and you had dressed Joseph.
And he was dressed in his little beige coat and brown trousers and little shoes.
And then he was taken over by Sister Aiden to the front hall of the convent.
And while she got up at the top, I was only allowed to wave to him at the bottom of the stairs.
That was the last I seen of Joseph.
It was an image that would haunt Lily in the decades that followed.
I'm Joseph's mother.
Not the fallen one.
Not the fallen one.
The Church was paid by the State for housing the mothers and children but the adoption process could also be a source of revenue.
Transporting the children to America was a costly process, as these records in the Irish National Archive show.
Here we have our expenses for going to New York in 1952.
The nurse going tourist class would cost 241.
One infant over two years, 50% of the fare, 120.
One infant under two years, 10% of the fare.
Dublin Shannon via car 40.
Em, tax, 8, so total cost to each sponsor-- 220.
80.
It's a lot of money.
So that goes again to the social status and income of the adopting parents, who could afford to pay that kind of money to have the children sent abroad.
That's where you then come down to the question of, these people were always going to be good for donations and good for paying un-itemised invoices, which are in effect charging for the adoption.
Directly selling babies wasn't allowed but it was common for the nuns to accept substantial donations from adoptive parents.
I've looked at a number of cases in some detail where you can see that over the, um, first few years of an adoption people would pay the initial invoice that they got and then they would make a number of donations.
And this would amount to hundreds of dollars.
That would be thousands of pounds in today's money.
The nuns were using what looks like a marketing strategy.
The children in the homes were photographed to attract couples who would provide good homes-- as well as handsome donations for the convents.
Some American adopters travelled to Ireland but astonishingly, many children were taken without their new parents ever setting foot in the country.
The children from Ireland were sent to all four corners of America.
Philomena's son, Anthony, had died by the time we discovered his identity.
But many of Ireland's lost children are of course still alive so I headed to the US to find out what had become of some of them.
My first stop was Florida.
You have reached your destination.
I'd tracked down a woman who had arrived in America as a child in 1958.
- Hello? Hi, Martin.
- Hello, Cathy.
- Martin.
- Hi, how are you? - Very pleased to meet you.
- You look so different than on TV.
- Yes.
- You're better looking! - Thank you! - Oh.
Nice to meet you.
Let's see what we've got.
- This is you, isn't it? - Yes.
OK.
So where's that taken, Cathy? That's at the Sacred Heart, Bessbro and that's what I call one of the "prop shots".
So it's a prop shot because it's posed? - To make you look a happy little - Most definitely.
They told me to sit there.
In 1957, an American couple-- who had been turned down as adoptive parents in the US-- contacted the nuns in Ireland.
They were sent photos of the four-year-old Cathy.
They wanted a female as a companion for their older daughter and to be four or five years old.
So they had a preference.
They did it all by mail.
They didn't fly to and pick out a baby.
So you were literally a mail order child.
Yeah! Uh-huh.
- You were bought from a catalogue.
- Exactly! Cathy says her adoptive parents paid the nuns for a courier to bring her to New York, where they lived.
Coming off that plane, I was very scared and frightened.
And felt alone.
This footage is of Cathy on her first days in New York.
My hands were held by my sister and my mother.
And I just followed them on to a new journey.
I was in a whole new world.
I had everything I could've wanted for or asked for.
Love and affection from my mother and sister was, you know, was just something else.
Cathy had a classic American upbringing as part of a large and happy family.
She received a good education and dreamed of becoming a nurse.
I became a Red Cross volunteer, and on weekends my mother would take me to the local hospital.
And I had my little uniform.
But Cathy's happy childhood began to go wrong when her sister Dolores left their New York home to go to college.
She decided to move to California.
And, um My parents went through, I think, an empty nest syndrome.
And they missed her so much, you know.
With her sister gone, Cathy felt that her father turned against her.
She says he refused to send her to college.
He said, "By the way, you know, we had a college fund for you but we spent it.
And we intend to continue spending it, and we're going on a cruise and we want you out of the house by 18.
A mail order adopted child, it seemed, wasn't regarded as a commitment for life.
Her parents sold their home and set out for California to be with their biological daughter.
It was horrible to say goodbye, cos they they were the ones who said hello to me, you know, when I got off the plane from Ireland.
And now they're saying goodbye.
And, uh, even though I was supposed to be older, I guess, and get over it, like now it hurts, it still hurts.
The pain of rejection would finally lead Cathy to try and find out about her roots, and to look for her birth mother.
Let me see where I'm connected.
Let me go find my roots.
Is my mother alive? Let me go meet her.
You know, let me find her.
It's thought that around 2,000 Irish babies like Cathy were sent to the United States during the 1950s and '60s.
My next stop was the west coast of America, to find a man whose adoption raises some disturbing questions about what safeguards were put in place to protect these children.
- Hello, Mike? - Hello.
Martin.
- Pleased to meet you.
- Good to meet you.
- My wife Susan.
- Hello, Susan.
Martin.
Hello, pleased to meet you.
In 1961, Mike Hawkes and his twin sister were brought to Saratoga in California.
It wasn't a mail order adoption.
An American Catholic priest-- Monsignor Benjamin Hawkes-- identified the children in a Catholic Church-run home in Ireland and delivered them to his own brother for adoption.
They were extremely orthodox Catholic.
Good people in that they put forward a home and clothes and shelter.
And, ah but very strict along the line.
Just like Cathy, Mike's American life started out pretty well.
They told their friends.
They told their acquaintances that came to the home that we were two adopted children from Ireland.
And we were cute little buggers.
I'll be honest.
I'd say that we were probably comfortable together in public and got along seemingly very well.
But as they grew up, the twins rebelled against their parents' strict rules, and their adoptions became the subject of rows and recrimination.
My sister was told that, er, it was unfortunate that she was adopted.
And you Maybe you heard the words that "you won't amount to much".
In the background, the priest who'd brought Mike to California, Monsignor Benjamin Hawkes, continued to play a significant role in his life.
He kept a very tight rein on what you were doing.
My uncle was very strong-willed.
And, er, going against that will was not healthy.
Not healthy.
Hawkes had become a powerful figure in the Church hierarchy.
I believe The Times called him, at one point in time, one of the ten most influential people in Los Angeles.
But the Monsignor had a secret life.
The individual led two lives.
He led a life full of culture as a priest and he led a life as a paedophile or manipulator.
After his death in 1985, a number of men came forward to say that Monsignor Hawkes had abused them as children.
The fact that a paedophile priest appeared to have access to young children raises grave questions about the whole adoption process.
Just how were those involved vetted? The Irish Church set up its own vetting system that relied on local Catholic organisations in America to assess the suitability of prospective adopters.
I had heard about a case that might reveal some of the workings of the whole adoption system.
Well, we've come out here to the beautiful mountains of western Massachusetts on a hunch, really.
We're looking for one Irish girl who was adopted in the 1950s.
- Good day.
- Hello, Mary.
Martin Sixsmith from BBC Television.
- It's a pleasure, sir.
- Very pleased to meet you.
- Nice to meet you, please come in.
- Thank you.
The beginning of Mary Monaghan's story followed a familiar pattern.
My mother was a fallen woman, therefore I'm the spawn of the devil.
I really do not remember a lot, but you have feelings, you know, and, erm you still can feel it, sort of just being ripped away, you know? Even though you don't necessarily remember the physicality.
But, you know, it's an emotional thing.
Mary has managed to track down some of the original documents relating to her adoption.
Could you just read that paragraph to us, because it's a very Right.
"I hereby relinquish full claim forever to my child Mary Theresa Monaghan born on the 7th day of October 1950 and I undertake never to make any claim to said child.
" Gosh! That's quite a That's quite a heart-rending document, isn't it? You're giving away your child to someone.
I know, it's just It's medieval.
According to the Church's policy, the Catholic Welfare Bureau was responsible for vetting the couple who wanted to adopt Mary-- Mr.
and Mrs.
O'Brien.
But Mary has discovered a document that shows that only Mrs.
O'Brien was ever spoken to.
Mrs.
O'Brien clearly was a nice person.
Oh, indeed, she was.
- She would pass their test.
- Indeed.
William O'Brien had adopted a child before in America.
But he wasn't spoken to by the Catholic Welfare Bureau in relation to adopting Mary.
Nevertheless, she was taken from her mother by the nuns and handed over to William O'Brien to be transported to America.
From the start, Mary struggled to adapt to her new life.
I would be ill and I had all kinds of allergies and I'd break out, because I was allergic to food! From the outside, their family life in Huntington Park, California, seemed normal.
Like many of the families given Irish children to adopt, the O'Briens were prosperous and respected within their local Catholic community.
And what are your memories of that period, of your childhood? Ah My memories are terrible, to tell you the truth.
I was physically punished for not being able to eat.
And if I did anything like a little child does, like wet the bed I'd be literally put in the toilet.
And then the sexual abuse began very soon after that and it just progressed.
I had to be kept in my little routine, as it were.
So I wouldn't try to break away.
It's all systematic and it's I mean, it's serious very serious paedophile thinking.
Mary had been placed in the care of a monster.
Throughout her childhood she was abused by her adoptive father.
Was there no way that you could reach out for help outside the family? I could not perceive of any way of doing it, just to protect myself.
Because if it was known that I tried to do that, I don't think I'd probably live to see another day, and that's not an exaggeration.
And this was being done to you by the one person you should be able to trust and who should be there to protect you.
Correct.
Correct.
And he had the world fooled.
The more you talk to the children who were sent out here to America, and there were hundreds of them, the more you realise what a lottery the whole system was.
Some of the children had happy lives with the families they were sent to, but many of them didn't and some of them were physically and sexually abused.
What their stories show, just like Philomena and her son, is that many of the mothers and their children feel an overwhelming need to find answers about their lives.
But over the decades that followed the adoptions, it was to prove almost impossible to find those answers.
By the early 1970s, the export of Irish children to America for adoption had come to an end.
Lord, have mercy In 1973, the government introduced a new, unmarried mothers' allowance that meant women could afford to raise their own children.
seeds of wisdom It's estimated that by then there had been around 40,000 to 60,000 adoptions, most within Ireland itself.
But wherever they'd been adopted, these were mothers and children who might one day start looking for each other.
health of the weak, refuge of sinners Now, coming for a walkie? Coming for a walkie? In the meantime, people got on with their lives.
Lily, who gave up her son Joseph to be adopted to America, eventually married the boy's father.
But they kept it secret that they'd had a child out of wedlock.
If anybody asked me, "Have you any family?" and I always said, "No," I was always in denial, "No".
The shame would have been there.
Lily never forgot her son.
- Now, I have a photograph here to show you of Joseph.
- Yes.
That's Joseph.
- That is very precious to me that I have that photograph.
- Yes.
- And then there's a little surprise.
- Ah.
Oh, my goodness, what's Let me put my glasses on.
This is the tag of his cot.
Yes, oh, let me see.
And it definitely brings back the memories, like, I mean, of all the Gosh, yes, it's got his name on it, his date of birth and Yes.
It took 28 years for Lily to confront the stigma of her past and pluck up the courage to write to the Church to see if they could help her track down her son.
But she didn't get any information from the nuns.
I wouldn't have got his They didn't give me his parents' name or nothing.
I got none of that.
Mary, hiya.
Around the same time Lily was looking for her son, there was a breakthrough in the whole adoption story.
In 1996, an archivist was reviewing Irish government records when she stumbled across secret files on the American adoptions.
- This is our lovely reading room where everyone finds out things about Irish history.
- Yes.
I went downstairs here in our repository and found 2,000 files.
Six of them, these files here that deal with the policy behind the system of adoption of Irish children in America and the others, almost 2,000 of them, dealing with the case files.
The files revealed that government officials were granting the nuns the passports they needed to get the children out of the country.
"Irish passports, issued to children to enable to leave Ireland for legal adoption abroad, nearly all in the USA.
The children concerned were almost all invariably Catholics and of illegitimate birth and were over one year of age.
Figures for the proceeding five years were as follows 1952 - 193.
1953 - 128.
1954 - 182.
1955 - 184.
1956 - 111.
" The files revealed the scale of the American adoptions.
But the documents identifying individual cases were held in secret by the Catholic institutions involved and by the Irish state.
This meant it was impossible for the people searching to obtain the information they needed.
In a lot of cases, as in Philomena's case, the child and the mother had been looking for each other and the nuns to whom they had turned had not brought them together but had forced them apart again, by telling them lies, by deceiving them, by misinforming them, whatever you want to call it.
They have perpetrated the wrongs that they did in the first place.
The Church says it was often prevented from helping by confidentiality laws.
Frustrated after four years of seeking answers from the nuns and the Irish government, Lily asked for help from a search agency in America.
Within months they had tracked her son down.
Lily wrote to him, and a few weeks later received a reply.
"I cannot imagine how hard it must have been for you to spend that much time with me before you had to give me up and I respect your decision that you have made, and I have no resentment towards you.
" And the sad thing is that that came in 1999 - and we're 15 years on.
- That's right, yeah.
That seemed like a breakthrough - but it didn't lead to you finding him.
- No, it didn't.
No, it didn't, no.
Sadly for Lily, Joseph didn't continue the correspondence, and at the time, she felt she had to give up her quest.
I didn't want to hurt the parents and he was very protective of his parents, you know, like when he had stressed that in a letter, that, yeah, he was very He didn't want anyone annoying them, you know, so And it wasn't just the mothers who were looking for answers.
By the 1990s, many of the adopted children had begun their own searches.
Cathy Deasey was one of then, and from 1989 she began writing to Sister Sarto Harney, the nun in charge of records from three of the main homes that sent children to America.
Like many of the adoptees, Cathy found Sister Sarto unhelpful and says she was frustrated by a letter she received from her in 2002.
She told me in a letter that, "Your mother's probably dead so why are you continuing the search?" Finally, Cathy located a group of Irish adoptees who had some experience of searches like hers.
With their help, the mystery of her mother's whereabouts was solved.
I was all excited.
I called about ten friends, I said, "My God, I've found my mother.
" And they said just, "Best of luck", you know, "Be gentle", you know, and, "Good luck and we're all with you.
" Within weeks, Cathy was preparing to set off for Ireland with a friend for the first time since she'd left as a child.
It was good that I had my best friend with me, because I didn't know how to drive, on the wrong side of the road, and we were escorted by my family and then we drove to the house where my mother was.
- How are you? - OK, not too bad.
Good.
- I'm your daughter.
I'm your daughter.
- Uh? - Yeah.
- Yeah.
- So I still have the same red hair? - Huh? I have the red hair.
There she was, this little lady, who was my mother.
It was the happiest moment of my life, you know? And she was smiling and you could see the joy in her eyes.
Cathy discovered that after she had been sent to America, her mother had spent another 35 years in an institution run by the Catholic Church, a few miles away from the mother and baby home where Cathy was born.
It was a miracle to be with her and that she was alive.
I won't forget about you.
Whenever she said that it broke her heart that she I was taken from her that, to me, those were very hard words but it was the truth.
And I finally found the truth that I was never unwanted.
That I was never abandoned.
Never.
Finally reunited with her mother, Cathy wanted answers from the nun in charge of the records who she felt had been so unhelpful to her search.
She headed back to the home where she was born.
I had to do an actual car chase to track this Sister Sarto down.
That's her! I was knocking on the door.
We went in the front door and I confronted her and she said she didn't know anything about my file.
- Can I have your name? - Catherine.
Catherine what? Cathy Deseay.
And it was Sheehey.
- Johanna Sheehey was my mother.
- Yes.
You see, we're dealing with hundreds.
I'll have to look up the reference number.
I said I lived here, I was born here.
I've been writing to you for so long.
It's an awful shame that you didn't make contact with us, that we would have made preparations for your visit.
I said, "I found my mother.
My mother's alive.
" I said, "I had tea with her this morning.
" Cathy felt the nuns could have given her the information she needed about her mother right from the start.
She was right down the street.
All those years I had no idea where she is.
They knew where she was.
After a brief look through the records Sister Sarto found Cathy's file, including the letters Cathy had been sending her, asking for help.
Catherine! There I am.
And there's my letters.
- You've got the whole file! Very good.
- Right.
Cathy's mother died in 2009, seven years after she'd found her.
I innocently just wanted to find my mother.
And the sad part is, I could have met my mother sooner.
Maybe she would have been in better health.
I would have had a longer time with her.
Oh, that's tomorrow.
I asked the nuns, the Order Of The Sacred Hearts Of Jesus And Mary, about why they failed to give Cathy more information about her birth mother.
They said they understood how disappointing and frustrating it must have been, but that they couldn't give out information because of confidentiality laws.
And then we'll see where I was born.
Oh, it's deeper than I thought! The story of Mary Monaghan also raises disturbing questions.
Sent by the nuns into the home of an abuser, her life has been ruined by her experiences.
I think if they did proper vetting, I wouldn't have been placed in that household.
How do you feel now? - Sad.
- Completely defenceless.
- Yes.
- Unable to fend for yourself, in the Church's care.
Church's care?! How do I feel now? Well, it's been a lot to overcome.
Um, I still have flashbacks sometimes.
And I still struggle with, you know, substance abuse occasionally.
And I've been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
The nuns who ran the home where Mary was born also declined to be interviewed.
In a letter they said her adoptive father had previously been cleared to adopt in California and that vetting was the responsibility of either the American adoption agency or the Catholic Welfare Bureau.
Mary, too, had little help from the Church as she searched for her mother.
But finally, through a private agency, she tracked her down in London.
This is wonderful! - Bungee.
- Bungee! Well, that was quite a moment when we first met.
I went up to her and I hugged her.
She froze, she literally froze.
So it came clear to me that I needed to tread lightly.
It was very clear that I was to keep my mouth shut, you know? I'm a secret, that I was a long-lost cousin.
Yeah, so I played along, best I could, but some people did guess.
After spending 52 years apart, despite the difficulties of coming to terms with their relationship, Mary and her mother had nearly a decade together.
- It's nice to see that they all have visitors.
- Yes.
Her mother died in 2010, and is buried near London.
This is the first time Mary has visited her grave.
- You can't pick 'em up, it'd be disrespectful.
- Mary? Oh.
- Oh, there are flowers here, too.
- That's it, isn't it? Teresa Nellie.
OK, I'm going to fuss around a bit here.
I think I can just put these there.
Yeah.
There.
It's just unfortunate that she had to take so much shame to her grave.
Yes.
- It is.
- It isn't right.
So it's been a difficult road but these are all steps on that road and today has been another step.
Yes, yes, a very positive one.
Yeah.
Yes, I hesitate to use the word spiritual but maybe it is, in a way, I don't know.
But it has a calming effect on me, it really does.
My search has come full circle, so Between 40 and 60,000 unmarried mothers gave up children for adoption in Ireland.
Like Mary, many who have sought answers feel let down by the Catholic Church and the Irish State.
Neither the Church's leader in Ireland, nor the Prime Minister would be interviewed for this programme.
But earlier this year came a revelation that may now force the authorities to finally confront these issues.
It's about St.
Mary's, another mother and baby home, run by the Catholic Church in the small town of Tuam.
This is one of the only known photographs.
I'm meeting Catherine Corless, who has uncovered the shocking history of the home.
In the old days, this would have been the back of the home.
- That's right, yes, just the back.
- Yes.
It was a local couple who put the little cross up here on the gate.
- Yes.
After you.
- Thanks.
After the home was demolished in the 1970s, the local council built houses on the site.
But one area was left derelict.
And the children from the estate used it as a playground.
The children who were playing in this rough it was only rubble all here, a wild area, and the children said that there was bones here.
And they were actually kicking around what they thought was a football, but it was actually a skull of a child.
And the people here, they came over and investigated it and they saw in this area here there was a tank and the top was moved over and it was opened a little bit, and they looked down and they could see there was literally, they couldn't innumerable little bodies and skulls and bones.
So they realised then that it was a graveyard.
And do we know how many babies or children are actually buried here? - Well, including the whole area, there's nearly 800.
- Nearly 800? Nearly 800, which is an enormous amount altogether.
It's horrific, really.
Catherine discovered that the young children died between 1925 and 1961 from malnutrition and common diseases whilst at the home.
And she believes that the nuns buried many of them in the unmarked mass grave on the site.
The fact that nobody saw fit to commemorate them-- what does that say about the society that allowed that to happen? They just weren't wanted.
There were just hundreds of unwanted children.
And, er, they were just, um, like a different species or something.
It was just horrific, when you think about it, just horrific.
The revelations about this home have forced both the Government and the Church to finally face up to the scandal of how unmarried mothers and their children were treated in Ireland.
the Irish government has now ordered a police report on the deaths of the almost 800 children at this home.
And it's launching a wider investigation into what was going on in all of Ireland's mother and baby homes, as well as the whole adoption process.
In a statement given to me from the Catholic bishops, they say, "We apologise for hurt caused by the Church as part of this system.
" And that they "encourage all those who had any responsibility for setting up, running or overseeing the homes or adoption agencies to gather any documentation or information that might be of assistance.
" When I began my story about Philomena, I had little idea of the journey I was setting out on.
I've been humbled by the heroic endurance of the people caught up in this tragedy.
Come on.
For Lily, who gave up her son Joseph 48 years ago, the pain goes on.
We'll go and see Joe's grave now.
It's Joe's grave.
Recently, her husband died.
You miss Joe, don't you? You miss Joe, you do.
You miss Joe.
I come down to see Joe every day-- good job he's so near home.
I've been married for 42 years and it's very lonely.
I'm on my own here now-- and it makes me more real to trace my son Joseph.
It's really, really hard and each time you visit the graveyard and think, "Well, Joe would love to be here to do the same.
" 15 years ago, Lily did manage to track down her son and received a letter from him.
But that was the last she heard.
Now she's decided to try again, so she's getting back in touch with the search agency in America.
Two, eight, six, two, three, six, two.
So I would like to make more contact.
Have you still contact for him? Good.
Yes.
OK.
Thanks a million.
Lovely talking to you again.
OK.
OK.
Bye.
I've just phoned America, yes.
And which is mighty.
I've just phoned America.
Yeah.
Lily's last hope is that a lovingly crafted letter will prompt a reunion.
"Dear Joe.
Hope this finds you well.
I have the courage to try again.
I've been curious.
As life goes on, it gets harder not having you in my life.
So, Joseph, please reply to this letter.
I will end for now.
Yours sincerely, Irish Mammy, Lily.
"