Some popular Dermot Bolger novels

The Journey Home

Father’s Music

A Second Life

In an author’s note to the 2022 edition published by New Island he writes:

 

“Looking back on that afternoon, twenty-nine years later, I realise that the three women, sitting virtually unnoticed at a table outside the GPO, were perhaps the first members of what became The Magdalene Memorial Committee (MMC). Magdalene laundry survivors, they sat with dignity but also a certain timidity, unused to drawing attention onto their status – or what “respectable society” once termed their stigma.

But here they were in 1993, defiantly collecting signatures for a petition to have a monument erected to compatriots who died in the High Park Magdalene laundry in Drumcondra. The nuns who ran that institution had applied for an exhumation license to move the remains of 136 women who died while incarcerated there, to facilitate selling the site to a developer.

So much has changed in Irish society since 1993 that some context is needed. In 2015 a referendum to legalise Gay marriage was passed by a majority of 62.07% of voters and in 2017 Ireland become the fourth country with an openly Gay head of state. But in 1993, homosexuality was only being decriminalised. Divorce crept in two years later, in a referendum passed by just 50.28% of voters, mainly because God exercised shrewd judgement. He saturated Connacht (where some constituencies opposed divorce by 65%) with torrential rain, causing 9,115 voters who would have altered the result, to stay home.

The Ireland where my novel A Second Life is set, was on the cusp of change and I witnessed one small, seismic moment of change when signing the petition for those High Park laundry survivors at the GPO.

The High Park nuns planned to cremate the remains all the women buried there. They could only produce death certificates for 75 of the 133 women and, during the exhumation, a further 22 forgotten women were unearthed. The letter from the nuns’ solicitors to the undertaker stated how ‘our clients wish to keep costs to a minimum’. The undertaker endeavored to comply, stating that each coffin (into which it was hoped to fit the remains of two or three women) would be ‘simple with no embellishments and suitable for cremation’.

The demands of the woman outside the GPO were modest. They wanted a plague on a bench in St. Stephen’s Green in memory of women who died in High Park. They also felt that the exhumed women deserved a public funeral.

They got their first wish, three years later, with a plaque unveiled in St. Stephen’s Green by Mary Robinson, President of Ireland. But in September 1993, the ashes of the exhumed women were buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, without families being informed in advance. Some MMC members reached the cemetery in time to see the grave filled in. One member said, ‘the Catholic Church had an opportunity to make amends’ by giving those women a dignified re-internment, but ‘the same veil of silence that put those women away in the first place was still there’.

Not everything went to plan for the nuns. Firstly they were saddled with additional expenses when officials attending the exhumation insisted on more coffins than the nuns budgeted for. Secondly it shone a light on open secrets that Irish society never wished to acknowledge. Those secrets included the reasons why women were incarcerated in such places, often for a few months, but sometimes for decades if they felt unable to leave; what happened to the children born in such institutions; and just how legal those incarcerations and adoptions actually were.

Laws were, at best, bent, and at worst, broken to facilitate the discreet placing of children within Irish families and the lucrative trade of giving children to rich American couples, with no evidence of consent from birth mothers. Children’s true names and dates of birth were expunged from records.

In his book, Banished Babies, which exposed Ireland’s baby export business, Mike Milotte quotes American army officers in the 1950s calling Ireland ‘a happy hunting ground’ for babies. One Dublin taxi driver remembered driving an American couple from orphanage to orphanage (children of unmarried mothers were regularly called ‘orphans’) to select a baby. An Aer Lingus employee recalled her shock when an American passenger mentioned having ‘bought’ the infant on his knee.

If one of Ireland’s Taoisigh wished to learn how his nation’s laws were circumnavigated, he had only to ask his son and namesake. A respected consultant gynecologist, Prof Eamonn de Valera Jr. was exposed in 2021, in a heartrending documentary, RTÉ Investigates: Ireland’s Illegal Adoptions, as having facilitated illegal adoptions, with birth certificates falsified.

The sight of those High Park survivors outside the GPO in 1993 always stayed in my mind. Today novelists send manuscripts to their publishers by email. Back then manuscripts needed to be posted. I was entering the GPO that day to send the first version of A Second Life by registered post to my editor at Penguin. Listening to those women speak movingly about their experiences, it felt like my novel was coming alive before my eyes. I was tempted to say, ‘This envelope contains a novel about women like you. It tries to tell one of your stories.’

Wisely I said nothing. Because while A Second Life was among the first novels to explore adoption in Ireland, and the obstacles preventing birth mothers and children being reunited, no novel could encapsulate the complexity of all their stories. Only those women could tell the stories they uniquely owned. I could only hope – in 1993 and in the revised edition republished this week – to capture some aspects of their lives.

Thankfully since then increasing numbers of women (whom, as scared young mothers, were coerced into giving up babies) and increasing numbers of adults (given second lives when a few weeks old) – have now powerfully told their stories and demand facts that even today often remain hidden from them.

Just as the truth was kept from one interviewee on that RTÉ Investigates programme, who, having been told for decades that she was ‘A Lough Derg baby’ – bestowed on her parents after eight miscarriages – was informed by TUSLA, that she was adopted. As she eloquently put it, ‘It is still surreal. I don’t have an identity now. Okay, I am still the person that I think I am … But I don’t know where my roots are. All I can think is it is like a tree fallen over: the roots are gone. There are no roots – that is exactly how I feel.’

Another participant – one one of many babies sent to America – described his shock at discovering how he was adopted and how he couldn’t gain access to files that might reveal his identity. He described it as ‘like having two identities … it’s just very, very weird … it’s just not normal.’

But even in the 1970s, Irish society considered this not just normal but in the child’s best interests. In 1974, Minister for Justice, Paddy Cooney, presumably felt that he reflected mainstream thinking when stating, ‘I think that we are all agreed that the consensus opinion in our society is to the effect that adoption is better for the illegitimate baby than to be cared for by its mother.’ But so many women were finding the courage to keep their children, that one social worker with The Adoption Board could write in The Irish Independent in 1976 that ‘this tendency (for mothers to keep their babies) may have progressed too far. Fewer babies are coming onto the adoption market as a result’.

In 1993 I got a sense of how complex adoption could be when a fellow writer who read A Second Life confided in me that she and her brother were adopted, but her brother – a successful man in his forties – still didn’t know. My friend’s adoptive parents (kindly, hardworking people in a midlands town) hadn’t the courage to tell him. They feared that he would be devastated and might reject them in response. They had lovingly raised two children but remained so fearful of society’s pervasive sense of judgement that they warned my writer friend they would cease contact with her if she ever told her brother. A family were bound together, yet cut off from each other, by two secretive adoptions.

In the year when A Second Life was first published, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled, in a case where an adopted woman sought to discover her birth father’s identity, that although the institution where she was born had guaranteed confidentiality to her birth mother, the adopted woman had a constitutional right to know her father’s identity. It stated ‘the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion and the right of freedom of expression, also includes the right to know one’s parents.’

In Sweden adopted people at eighteen gain legal rights to know all facts about their origins. Their rights takes precedence over rights of confidentiality. In Germany adopted people aged sixteen have access to adoption files: the law giving greater weight to their interests over the interests of natural parents who wish to remain anonymous.

In Ireland, when A Second Life was first published, adopted children seeking information about birth mothers hit a brick wall of silence or deliberate disinformation from religious orders controlling the records. These orders claimed to be bound by contracts with unmarried mothers that contained a ‘guarantee of confidentially’ never to reveal their identities. But as Mike Milotte states in Banished Babies, ‘there was never any legislative requirement to give such guarantees, and no documentary evidence of their existence… Even if something loosely resembling a contract or agreement was reached, the process was carried out from very unequal positions… the nuns were effectively in a position to demand anything they wanted, and the shamed and humiliated mothers had little option but to accept the nuns’ terms, however unreasonable and however inadequately understood those terms might have been. Secrecy – which would seriously damage the health of many of their women – was itself a function of conservative Catholicism.’

If writing A Second Life for the first time today, I’d have landmark books to consult, like Suffer The Little Children by Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan, that forensically dissected the Irish childcare system from the 1930s onwards. Groups like the Adoption Rights Alliance and Justice for Magdalenes Research run impressive websites. There have been government reports and apologies, documentaries and pieces of legislation (including one in preparation) that initially promised much but have yet to deliver the right for adopted people to truly know their origins. Much has changed in three decades. Adoptees used DNA to open new doors and officials cited GDOR restrictions in claiming a need to keep doors shut. Numerous adoptees have traced birth mothers through new conduits, but others who spent years fighting for access to their files are disappointed to find the files crammed with pages of blacked out redacted information. For one adopted person, quoted on RTÉ Investigates, the process still ‘feels like swimming in treacle’.

But when first writing A Second Life all I had to go on were conversations with women who underwent similar experiences to those in the novel. None mentioned legally binding contracts with nuns. Their phrase was ‘waiting for the brown envelope’. This envelope contained the document they felt pressurised into signing. It gave away all rights to a child who, as the nuns told them, was never theirs to begin with, but belonged to God. All mentioned the secrecy involved and I suspect that many would agree with Milotte’s contention that it damaged their physical and mental health in the decades after, when they told me how they thought, almost daily, of children they never got to know.

Not every mother was coerced into giving up their babies. Some reunions – if the child tracked down their birth mothers – were uncomfortable encounters, with mothers wanting no reminders of their past. But more mothers spent decades hoping to be found. No story shared with me influenced this novel more than one woman’s account of her best friend, who gave up a child for adoption when very young, but became convinced that her child was about to find her. She was right, but tragically so. After her years of waiting, the nervous first contact from a son who finally bypassed the roadblocks – came a week after her death from cancer.

I’d like to say that these private stories became the starting point for A Second Life, but it began by being about something else. When first writing it, my life – as a father of two small children – was probably as pressurized as that of its central character, Sean Blake, who is prompted by a near-fatal car crash to try and track down his birth mother.

But while adoption becomes the novel’s central theme, it did not set out to be about these searches where adopted children try to unearth the truth and to understand the plight of young mothers who felt they had to sign away children who became perpetual absences in their lives, often not even mentioned to their future husbands.

In 1992 I had a play staged during the Dublin Theatre Festival. During each blackout in the slow technical set up, the only lights visible were illuminated ‘No Smoking’ signs and the glow of cigarettes as an anxious cast and crew puffed away. The cast talked a lot, and one actor described being in a car crash. It was so serious that his heart stopped and he found himself observing the scene from above, detached from his body, watching paramedics cut him from the wreckage.

From such seeds novels are born. This image haunted me. When I started a new novel, I knew I had my opening. Some novelists meticulously plan plot in advance. I work the opposite way. What draws me to my desk is a combination of anxiety, stress and curiosity. I’ve no idea what happens next on the page.

As a citizen you must have your antennae open to discourses within society. When writing A Second Life I’d often turned on radio programmes like The Gay Byrne Show or Liveline, then presented by the fearless Marian Finucane. On these programmes people with no other platform made their voices heard  and I realised how many birth mothers and adopted children were desperate to find each other, unsure how to overcome the obstacles and whether, if they succeeded, their approaches would be rebuffed.

As the novel progressed, adoption became its backdrop and then its central theme as I absorbed these stories finally being told. Mothers and children once silenced by shame refused to be silenced. No unmarried fathers phoned in, safely hiding behind guaranteed anonymity. Irish society was never ruled by a real devotion to religion but more by a fetish for respectability – which involved keeping family secrets secret. But in 1993 the wall of silence caused was being eroded by lone tentative voices – a decade before films like The Magdalene Sisters. But the physical walls behind which adoption files were kept remained impenetrable.

When first trying to write the novel, I was trying to absorb every undercurrent rippling through Irish society. Around this time I attended a Jennifer Johnston play. The superb actress Rosaleen Linehan entered, sat down and commenced her monologue. But after ninety seconds she something incredibly brave. She said to the audience, ‘Excuse me; I got off on the wrong note. If you don’t mind I’ll start again.’ Walking off stage, she returned a moment later and mesmerized us.

A Second Life was published by Penguin in 1994. But for decades I didn’t let it be reprinted. I kept remembering Rosaleen Linehan’s courage in saying, “I got off on the wrong note”. In trying to capture a time when birth mothers were making their voices heard, I too got off on the wrong note. In the white heat of writing to a demanding deadline, I’d burdened Sean Blake with too many scores to settle.

But the book found its audience. A British politician who gave up a daughter for adoption, told me how, when her daughter made contact, their initial meeting was disastrous. But then her daughter sent her A Second Life, saying that reading it had helped her understand her mother better and maybe the book might help the politician to grasp her daughter’s conflicting emotions. Such letters made me feel my novel achieved its purpose but I still felt that, when first writing it, I was trying to photograph a moving object and always playing catch up with the complexity of adoption.

Therefore this revised text of A Second Life published this week is not the old novel and yet not a new one. I call it a ‘renewed’ novel: the novel I might have written if – amid all the pressure – I’d possessed the courage to tell my publishers, ‘Excuse me; I got off on the wrong note. If you don’t mind I’ll start again’.

I didn’t know what happened to those Magdalene survivors I met outside the GPO. I just hope A Second Life pays some small tribute to them. No novelist could so eloquently tell their stories in the way that survivors of mother and baby homes have done so in interviews and memoirs in the years since, when walls of silence were breached and ageing mothers and grown-up children tentatively tried to fill in the missing gaps of secrets that once could never be told.

Much has changed in the saga of adoption since 1993, but I find it tragic that barriers to the truth still exist, under different guises. I can only hope that the rights of adopted people, recognised in many European counties, has now finally in 2022 been enshrined in Irish law and people born in institutions no longer have to endure the sort of search Sean Blake endures in my novel. Finally, they are being granted the basic human right to know who they are truly are.”