ITV News Social Affairs Correspondent Sarah Corker travelled to Dublin to speak to victims of a ‘horror’ forced repatriation scheme run by British and Irish Catholic and state organisations for decades
In 1973, Terri Harrison was 18, pregnant and unmarried. The ultimate taboo in Catholic Ireland.
She decided to flee Dublin and travel to London to start a new life, hopeful that she could get a job and safely raise her son there.
Instead Terri was “abducted by a priest” whilst heavily pregnant and forcibly returned to Ireland to live in a notorious mother and baby institution, where her son was later “kidnapped” and put up for adoption aged five-weeks-old.
Terri, now 70, was among thousands of young women who fled from the country to avoid the brutal Irish institutions, where unmarried mothers were often incarcerated for a minimum of two years.
From 1930 to the late 1970s the numbers making a similar journey were so high, officials in London called them PFIs – ‘pregnant from Ireland’.
The British authorities saw them as a burden on the taxpayer and put pressure on the Irish state to address the situation, while the Catholic Church in Ireland feared the children would grow up in non-Catholic families.
The result was a repatriation scheme – it was supposed to be voluntary – but women have told ITV News they were effectively deported from Britain and their journeys were organised and paid for by the state and the Church.
By analysing official records of the organisations behind forced repatriations, and speaking to experts in this field, ITV News has discovered that as many as 10,000 women and babies may have been deported from Britain to Ireland between 1931 and 1977
The children, now adults, often only found out they were British citizens decades later.
“It was a form of people trafficking,” Patricia Carey, Ireland’s Special Advocate for Survivors, told ITV News.
“Because they were trafficked from one country to another against their will, we have the added complication that files and documents was lost between the two states. They have lost part of their identity.”
Terri Harrison: ‘We were given a number, we weren’t human anymore’
Terri recalls the “day of horror” when she came home to find a priest and two nuns waiting for her in London.
They told her she’d “committed a crime” because she was pregnant outside of wedlock and what happened next still haunts her.
“I was no match for this man, and he just threw me into the car and pushed me down into the back seat … I started to become invisible from the minute he got me,” she told ITV News.
Terri was flown from Heathrow Airport to Cork, in southern Ireland, and was one of thousands of women “imprisoned” in Bessborough mother and baby home.
Once there she was “processed” and given a new name and number. “I became Tracey 1735, we weren’t human anymore,” she said.
“I was abducted from one country and brought back to this one, and my son was sleeping peacefully in his cot and a stranger in a black habit, stripped him and walked out of that institution.
“That’s kidnapping. That’s what happened to me. We must speak the truth.”
Documentation from the time shows a religious organisation called the Crusade of Rescue, now known as the Catholic Children’s Society, based in London, was involved in the adoption and repatriation of Irish women and children from Britain from the 1930s to the 1970s.
Terri believes the charity was responsible for her “abduction”.
Dr Lorraine Grimes from Maynooth University has spent a decade investigating these Irish institutions
Dr Lorraine Grimes from Maynooth University has spent a decade investigating these institutions and said that “Catholic Church viewed it as a battle for catholic souls”.
“They preferred to see Catholic Irish children grow up in institutions long term, rather than placed with Protestant families or another faith,” she told ITV News.
Dr Grimes, who has written a book about her research, describes the repatriations as “in essence deportations” despite the fact that “the British Home Office nor any welfare organisation had the legal authority to deport a child that was born in Britain”.
Paul Cullen: ‘They were playing god and creating families’
Paul Cullen was four-months-old when he made the journey by boat from Holyhead, in Wales, to Dublin.
“My mother and I were met at the docks by an official from the adoption agency,” he told ITV News.
He’d always vaguely known that he had been born in London and adopted in Dublin, but only it was only recently found out the whole truth about his birth and his early years.
“I went half a century without knowing,” Paul said. ‘When the law was changed in 2021, I was eventually allowed access to my files.
“I began to realise that I was part of something much bigger, and the moment the penny dropped and I saw the acronym ‘PFI’, pregnant from Ireland.”
Paul was born at Whittington Hospital in north London in 1963, and then spent a month at St Pelagia’s home for unmarried mothers in Highgate, north London, which was run by catholic nuns.
His mother, who was in her 20s and working as a nurse in the capital, was unmarried and pressured to return to Ireland where Paul was placed for adoption, a journey organised through the Crusade of Rescue.
Obsessive secrecy around adoptions at that time meant he was issued a second Irish birth certificate which falsely states that he was born in Dublin, when in fact he is a British citizen.
Paul, now 62, said of how he spent years in foster care where his health deteriorated: “I was in bad condition, my health was poor, my teeth were rotting.”
He wasn’t adopted until he was three-years-old and believes the church put his spiritual wellbeing before his physical health.
“In London I was in the hands of the Crusade of Rescue and they were rescuing Catholic babies from non-catholic families, that was the priority,” he said.
“There was a certain amount of playing god here, because they were creating families. The PFIs, the women who were shunted between two countries, have fallen between the cracks and were forgotten about.
“I was one of 130 PFI children in 1963 alone. It’s clear the women weren’t welcome in Ireland, they weren’t welcome in London, and everything was done in secret.”
Paul, a retired journalist and the former health editor of The Irish Times, has now reunited with his birth mother, but the man he thought was his father died just weeks before they were due to meet.
His first project in retirement has been writing his memoir and researching his own “fractured” history.
“I think redress has to start with saying sorry. I think we have heard prominent people in Ireland do that, but that’s not the case in England.”
Since her mother’s death, Fiona Cahill feels it’s her duty to carry on the campaign for justice and recognition
Survivors are now campaigning for compensation from both Irish and British governments – who they say were directly involved in the “brutal” repatriation scheme from 1930 to the late 1970s.
Like the Cahill family, in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, who have had three generations deeply affected by what happened decades earlier.
Fiona Cahill’s mother, Maria, was born in London in 1954, but as a baby was sent to one of Ireland’s most notorious mother and baby institutions with her mother Philomena, who was unmarried.
The family is now calling for all archives from religious and state run mother and baby institutions in the UK to be preserved and accessible. Fiona wants a special site to house documents, objects and oral history, so that this dreadful period of history cannot be forgotten.
The Crusade of Rescue, now known as the Catholic Children’s Society, said: “Many young mothers in the past felt they had no choice but to place their child for adoption due to the stigma of being unmarried and the lack of support available to them from the government, their families and wider society at the time. This is deeply regrettable and a tragedy for all involved.”
In 2021 the Irish Taoiseach delivered a formal apology for historic forced adoption and the suffering caused.
That apology was “accompanied by a Government Action Plan for Survivors providing for actions under eight themes including redress, access to records and memorialisation,” a spokesperson for the Irish government said.
In response to our investigation, the UK government said: “This abhorrent practice should never have taken place, and our deepest sympathies are with all those affected.
“We take this issue extremely seriously and continue to engage with those impacted to provide support.”
In 2016 the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales apologised “for the hurt caused by agencies acting in the name of the Catholic Church”.
Cardinal Vincent Nichols acknowledged “the grief and pain caused by the giving up of a child through adoption”, and added that “the practices of all adoption agencies reflected the social values at the time”.
If you have been affected by the issues in this report, please visit the links for help and support:
- Adult Adoptee Movement – provides links to resources offering information and support for adoptees in the UK
- Movement for Adoption Apology – provides information on forced and coerced adoption in the UK and around the globe
- Safe Spaces – an independent service offering confidential support to survivors of Church-related abuse on 0300 303 1056 or on their website
- PAC UK – Specialist therapy, advice, support, counselling and training for all affected by adoption and permanency
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