The Adoption Machine (ePub)

MAY 2014. The Irish public woke to the horrific discovery of a mass gravecontaining the remains of most 800 babies in the ‘Angels’ Plot’ of Tuam’sMother and Baby Home. What followed would rock the last vestiges ofCatholic Ireland, enrage an increasingly secularised nation, and lead to aCommission of Inquiry. In The Adoption Machine, Paul Jude Redmond, Chairperson of the Coalitionof Mother and Baby Homes Survivors, who himself was born in the Castlepollard Home,candidly reveals the shocking history of one of the worst abuses of Churchpower since the foundation of the Irish State. From Bessboro, Castlepollard,and Sean Ross Abbey to St. Patrick’s and Tuam, a dark shadow was cast by the collusion between Church and State in the systematic repression ofwomen and the wilful neglect of illegitimate babies, resulting in the deathsof thousands. It was Paul’s exhaustive research that widened the global media’s attentionto all the homes and revealed Tuam as just the tip of the iceberg of thehorrors that lay beneath. He further reveals the vast profits generatedby selling babies to wealthy adoptive parents, and details how infants were volunteered to a pharmaceutical company for drug trials withoutthe consent of their natural mothers. Interwoven throughout is Paul’spoignant and deeply personal journey of discovery as he attempts to findhis own natural mother. The Adoption Machine exposes this dark history of Ireland’s shameful andsecret past, and the efforts to bring it into the light. It is a history fromwhich there is no turning away.