By Fiona Cahill
In 2023 Left Horizons published an article on unmarried mothers and their treatment in Ireland. With the excavations being resumed at the mass baby grave in Tuam, Ireland, finally hitting the headlines, perhaps it is time to follow up on the total lack of an apology from the British state for how it treated unmarried mothers and for the ‘repatriations’, issues that it continuess to ignore.
“You couldn’t bring butter or alcohol up over and down the border, but you could bring children.”
I am an artist and carer based in Doncaster, and I am also a single mother. My grandma, Philomena, and her baby, Maria (my mother), were deported from London directly into a notorious Irish institution, simply because my grandma was an unmarried Irish mother. They never saw each other again and the details were kept secret under Irish law. Mum never knew she was born a British citizen in London until she was 40 years old.
On the second anniversary of mum’s passing, and on the same day that ground was finally broke for excavating the Tuam babies site, I sat down with a survivor, Marie Arbuckle, at my art show on the subject. Marie is a survivor of an Irish mother and baby home. She was trafficked across the border from Northern Ireland to give birth. Her son was trafficked back across for adoption. They lived in Derry together and never knew each other.
As I start the camera, I notice Marie has perfectly positioned herself underneath my definition of ‘Rendition’
Marie: “Can I swear?”
Fiona: “You can swear if you like”
Marie: “Usually, I’m not like that. Are you ready?”
Fiona: “Yeah, it’s going”
Marie: “Hi, my name’s Marie Arbuckle and I’m here today in Doncaster at the exhibition called ‘Rendition’…And it interested me because I was also a survivor of a mother and baby home and I would like to know more about the other mother and baby homes that were in Ireland as well. I had been in touch with Maria before her sad passing and I was interested in her story so I came up today to see the exhibition…when you look at it, it tells the story of where she was born, how she got to Ireland”
Fiona: “People don’t understand the cross-border stuff, the trafficking, the difficulty with the paperwork do they?…”
Marie: “Well, you can’t even call it trafficking because when I went to the Guards, I gave my statement to the Gardaí and that, and they asked me why I called it trafficking? And I’m like, well, if you take something from one country to another without permission, is that not trafficking? And especially as it was children coming across, and who was bringing them across but nuns, so did they have a special permission? They bring these children back and forward, and then they try to say that the states and the churches weren’t in cahoots with each other. Of course they were, because how was all this made possible? You couldn’t bring butter or alcohol up over and down the border, but you could bring children up and down the border.”
Fiona: “Exactly, it’s actually shocking isn’t it? And still yet to be acknowledged, we’ve still got to do this…”
Marie: “Here in England it hasn’t been acknowledged yet. In Northern Ireland it’s been acknowledged and it’s been written about and at the minute we’re actually fighting a bill that isn’t fit for purpose at the moment there. The south made a whole shambles of their mother and baby enquiry and we don’t want that; we don’t want that in the North of Ireland now.
“In England they just need to get their fingers out and start doing this enquiry because these people are entitled to at least an apology if nothing else. They need to be given this apology for what they were put through. Half of the mothers aren’t even here anymore, so they’re not getting their justice in it, and the children are now getting older and older as we go on…”
“…Like I sat down there in the Houses of Parliament and listened to Nadhim Zahawi
“That’s how we got talking, didn’t we?”
“And he turned around and went… See the minute he says “but”, I was all, ‘come on, get up, get up, walk out of here. He’s not going to give you what you want’. And them poor mothers in there thought, ‘no, just listen to him. Wait…’ And then he says, ‘I’m not giving you an apology because we didn’t do it’… Your predecessors done it! You are coming down that line. So what they did is your responsibility now”.
Fiona: “Sure if you’re representing the British state, you can say sorry for the state’s actions. It doesn’t matter whether you did it yourself!”
Marie: “Some of them never got to meet their babies. Some babies have never got to meet their parents because their parents were dead before… The mothers were dead before they found out who they were even.”
We take a few seconds in silence both in our own memories of loved ones and friends now lost. I hear mum’s voice on her old Phillips projector TV beside me “ Keep Strong!” Marie continues…“And a lot of these adoptions were illegal. How are you transferring kids across the water to a different country? That is illegal. And you’re not going to apologise for it?!” She takes a breath and a resigned tone “I don’t understand that”
The Republic of Ireland apologised but refused to accept accountability, in yet another ‘commission of Investigation’ that abused survivors’ human rights. Marie and I wait still for a meaningful apology them, from Northern Ireland and from Britain, that fully accepts wrong-doing criminality and the forced nature of the family separation so many endured.
Rendition is not a term defined by international law, and as such there are various understandings of what the term means. At the heart of them all is the movement of detained persons across state boundaries in a manner which is outside of any legal framework. On the wall above Marie I have written ‘Rendition – the covert transportation of a person from one jurisdiction to another with less regulation for their humane treatment’.
My exhibition ‘Rendition’ contains a detective board of documents mum spent her life finding and chasing after, a film of my pilgrimage across the water and into Castlepollard, nods to my activism, mum and my poetry and art made from paper.
Rendition can still be seen at Artbomb 60 Hallgate, Doncaster, up to August 9. Both pictures courtesy of Fiona Cahill showing the exterior and part of the interior of the Rendition exhibition.
