When Maria Arbuckle thinks of her time in Ireland’s largest mother and baby home, she thinks of the nursery and its snug rows of cots, each one filled with a tiny, bleating bundle. She thinks of her boy, Paul, among them, and the 8lb 10oz weight of him in her arms. She thinks of how she fed and washed him under the careful watch of the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. And she thinks of the refrain that ended each visit, when she had to hand him back to them: “He’s not yours any more. He doesn’t belong to you.”
Arbuckle, 62, was six months pregnant when she was sent by social services in Northern Ireland to Saint Patrick’s mother and baby home over the border in Dublin. She was 18 and emerging from a childhood spent shunted between a children’s home, an abusive foster home and a church-run industrial school for children considered to be in “moral danger”. It was 1981, Northern Ireland was in the thick of the Troubles and she was living in the border county of Monaghan, far from her native Derry. Her first serious relationship had collapsed, she had no contact with the foster family who had raised her for 11 years and she was barely making ends meet with her traineeship with a bookmaker. “At the mother and baby home, they told me that I had nowhere to go,” she recalls, more than four decades later. “I was on my own. I had no man, no family. And they were right.”
The day she signed the adoption papers was the worst day. Social services brought Paul in to see her one last time. “I just remember crying and crying,” she says. Now, all she feels is rage.
Tens of thousands of women like Arbuckle were sent to Ireland’s mother and baby homes throughout the 20th century, most from the Republic, but some, like her, from Northern Ireland. Run by religious institutions and funded by the state, the homes acted as holding pens where unmarried women and girls – some as young as 12 – gave birth in secret before being pressed into giving their babies up for adoption. A 2021 report found that about 9,000 children had died in them – a shockingly high mortality rate of 15% – and that “there was no doubt” that women were emotionally abused. (Some survivors’ groups accused the report of watering down the extent of forced adoptions.) The report was prompted by the excavation of infant remains from an underground septic tank in the grounds of a former mother and baby home in Tuam, County Galway, in 2017.
The last of these institutions, Bessborough in County Cork, didn’t close until 1998 – 17 years after Arbuckle gave birth to Paul, whom she named after her brother. He had brown eyes and dark hair and she would spend four decades searching for him. “I never knew if he was living or dead,” she says. “Every birthday came and went and I had no idea. I have all these questions going around in my head – like why didn’t I fight harder? But there was no one there to fight for me. I’d been let down by every authority figure who was supposed to protect me.”
Arbuckle was born in 1962 and spent the first few years of her life in a church-run children’s home in Derry. One of nine siblings, she was fostered at four by an abusive, overcrowded family. “It was like I was playing cat and mouse all the time. I was always trying to be one step ahead of them so that nothing would happen.”
As a child, the abuse was physical; as a teenager, it was sexual. It came as something close to relief when, at 13, a girl across the street informed Arbuckle that the people she was living with weren’t her real family, as she had believed. In hindsight, there were clues: strange children who arrived and stayed only at weekends; others who came for a period and left again. “But I was only a child. I wasn’t really thinking.”
Three of her foster mother’s biological sons sexually abused her. She began staying out late, watching the house from afar until the lights went out. “I would take a hiding every night rather than take the abuse,” she recalls. Shortly after, social services sent her to St Joseph’s training school – an institution for girls that was, in effect, a remand home – miles away in County Armagh. The Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry, conducted between 2014 and 2016, would find that “systemic physical abuse” took place at the institution during its five decades of operation. But for Arbuckle, it was a refuge. “It was all girls – I felt safe there. It was my safe haven.” One of the kinder members of staff at the school later walked her down the aisle at her wedding.
When Arbuckle left St Joseph’s at 18, the world was just beginning to open up. She had her traineeship and a room in a houseshare with two other girls from work. She had friends; a social life. Having spent all of secondary school being known as the “home girl” by the other children, she was finally free.
Then her friends introduced her to a 19-year-old singer in a band that sang Irish rebel songs. “In those days, it would have been hard to find a band in Monaghan singing anything else,” she says with a laugh. For Arbuckle, it was love – her first, with all the complications that go with it. When the doctor told her that she was pregnant, it didn’t register. “I had always had problems with my kidneys, so I went in for a test. When he did a pregnancy test and it came back positive, I thought: how? I didn’t know the facts of life – I’d never been taught them anywhere.”
When the relationship broke down after six months, she went to St Patrick’s – but most of it is a blur. “Psychologists have diagnosed me with complex PTSD [post‑traumatic stress disorder]. They think my time there must have been so traumatic that I blocked it out.”
What she does remember, though, is how terrified she was just before the birth. How alone she felt. How she kept imploring the midwives: “What’s going to happen?” She didn’t even know which part of her body the baby was going to come from. And she remembers afterwards, seeing him for the first time across the room. “I remember the nurses saying: ‘Look over there,’ and there was this huge baby. And they said: ‘That’s your baby.’”
The nuns saw it differently. According to her records – which she got back from the Irish child and family agency in 2021 after three years of chasing – she wouldn’t rest after he was born. She kept visiting the nursery, the only part of the building lodged lucidly in her brain, to see him. “It’s written in my file that I wasn’t being compliant with them and that they had to take me away from the situation.”
She was removed from the home and wouldn’t see Paul again until she signed the adoption papers in April 1981. He was three months old. She attempted suicide that day. “I always thought that I didn’t want children – that I didn’t want to bring a child into the world that I’d grown up in,” she says. “But I knew when I was carrying him that I wanted him. It was everybody else that was telling me I couldn’t keep him.”
While Arbuckle acknowledges that she wasn’t in an ideal position to take care of Paul – she had never been told about the one-parent benefit and her job barely paid enough to support her on her own – she believes she was coerced into giving him up for adoption. “If I’d known about the help that was available to me, things could have been different.”
Within a few months of losing Paul, she married a man she met playing pool in a pub and who proposed to her the second time they met. She didn’t hesitate. It was nothing to do with love. “I couldn’t go through that pain again. I thought: I can’t do this again if I get pregnant. They’re not going to take the next baby. For years, I thought that this was all me; that I’d done it to myself. It was only when I spoke to other people, and I got my files back [from the state], that I began to see what really happened.”
Arbuckle spent almost 40 years pleading with social workers to find out about Paul, but they continued to tell her that he would have to be the one to find her. She knew that he had been adopted, that he had a new family, but she just wanted to know if he was OK. She wondered what his life was like – whether he was even called Paul any more. She had five more children, separated from her husband and moved to Lincolnshire, where she still lives. She wrote poems to try to make sense of what had happened. One of them, Where Are You?, is addressed to Paul and to the state that allowed him to be taken. It closes: “The truth will always come out; our voices will be heard / All over the world our stories will be shared.”
When she decided to share her story, she didn’t expect it to resonate with so many people. As her children became adults and the story of what happened in Ireland’s mother and baby homes began to gain traction – thanks in part to Philomena, the 2013 screen adaptation of the journalist Martin Sixsmith’s book about the Magdalene laundry survivor Philomena Lee – she began to talk to the local press about her search for Paul. She joined a Facebook group for survivors and began to piece together a picture of what her life had been like at St Patrick’s.
Then, in 2021, she got a call. Just before a report on mother and baby homes and Magdalene laundries in Northern Ireland launched, Arbuckle was told by a social worker that they had found Paul. “I couldn’t even speak. My sister had to take the phone. It was just before his 40th birthday. I just had this feeling that they were going to find him around then.” She sent him a letter, but she had to keep it light and informal. There were to be no photographs of his siblings and no birthday card. They had prepared her for any sort of contact to take months.
One day, she got a Facebook request from a local woman. Arbuckle was active in survivors’ groups and assumed it was somebody with connections to St Patrick’s looking for help. She was in Derry visiting family, with just a few days left before she returned to Lincolnshire. She accepted, but didn’t think any more of it, until she received a message. It was Paul, using his partner’s account. “It said: ‘I’m your son. I hear you’ve been looking for me.’”
He was living around the corner from where she had grown up. Her sister worked at the school where his daughter was a pupil. “It turned out that for the majority of his life, he would come and spend summers in Derry, two minutes’ walk from my sister’s house.” They messaged back and forth. That weekend, he invited her to his house.
When she saw him, they hugged. “I thought that this hug was never going to stop. I think I was sort of expecting to meet a baby. But, of course, he wasn’t a baby. He was this big, grown man.” His hair was greying, but he still had the same dark eyes. Arbuckle was reassured to hear that his childhood had been good and that he was happy. All the years of waiting had been worth it. “When I finally got my files back from social services, I found a school report that was basically 12 pages saying how stubborn I was. It was that stubbornness that got me through. I’m still that same person that I was back then.” She corrects herself: “Actually, I’m much more outspoken.”
They still speak regularly – although Arbuckle says it has been hard for Paul, who goes by a different name. “No matter how much proof you have, they’re still in some way going to think that you abandoned them.”
Just as Arbuckle got one son back, she lost another. In October 2023, her 38-year-old son Tony was murdered by his housemate, Nicholas Ward. After a night of heavy drinking, Ward had accused Tony of stealing electronic devices. He stabbed him repeatedly in an assault lasting hours. In May, he was given a minimum sentence of 20 years. The devices were later found in a bag belonging to Ward. “When I found out, I thought: I really can’t do this again. They say that life only gives you what you can handle, but it must think that I’ve got very broad shoulders. I had all those years with him and now he’s gone.” She sat for weeks in her house, unable to open the curtains. Now, she is slowly piecing her life back together all over again.
Speaking to other survivors has helped, she says – as has speaking about what happened to Tony and to Paul. “By getting my story out there, even if it helps just one person get their voice back … well, that’s all I can do.”
She thinks of trauma as a sea and herself as a lone sailor trying to navigate it. “There are some days where it’s wee, small waves and I can jump over them. Then there are other days when I might need a hand to get over them. And then there are days where it’s a tsunami and I think that I’m drowning – but I always manage to pull myself back. I’ll always be a survivor. I didn’t have any other choice.”
