Sir, – Jennifer O'Connell was accurate in stating that Pact (formerly the Protestant Adoption Society) told a Bethany Home survivor that the only information held on her was "a line in a register" (Weekend, March 20th).
Cathal Clifford of Pact contested that (Letters, March 25th). He also denied that Pact was involved in information and tracing in 2013.
I am the survivor who was “fobbed off”.
I first contacted Pact in or around 2002.
Due to the 2010 Adoption Act, Pact hived off information and tracing functions to here2help, which carried on in the Pact tradition. So much so, survivors called it “here to not help”.
Here2help has been defunct since the middle of 2020. It left survivors without a means of accessing information at a crucial time.
Bethany survivor Derek Leinster was denied information until he enlisted the help of social services in the UK.
We had to pay for the pittance of information we were provided with.
In my case, by going back again and again in 2012 and 2013, I received documentation on the circumstances under which, in 1951, I was taken from my mother Emily Sheppy. I dealt with the same people in Pact and here2help.
Some documents were in the name of Hayes and Sons, solicitors.
One, an “adoption agreement”, named Ralph Walker as my mother’s “attorney”. He was also the nephew of Bethany Home residential secretary Hettie Walker. His father previously sat on Bethany’s management committee.
The “agreement” threatened Emily with the cost of raising me, should she change her mind.
It also permitted the adoptive parents to transfer custody of me to a third party, should they so decide.
I never looked for my mother because I was always told I was rescued beside her dead body.
She died in 1976.
Her few possessions included pictures of me in her arms in the Bethany Home.
The news devastated me as I was raised in a family in which the worst sin was to lie.
The 1951 “agreement” is a lie and so were the means whereby my adoption was legalised in 1954.
I would like to thank Jennifer O’Connell for doing such a good job in representing the experience of Bethany survivors, plus the forces ranged against them and their mothers. – Yours, etc,
JOYCE McSHARRY,
Portarlington,
Co Laois.
Sir, – In my response to Jennifer O’Connell’s article , I inadvertently stated that records have been transferred to the Adoption Authority of Ireland (AAI).
By way of correction, please note that the records have yet to be transferred to the AAI. My apologies for the error. – Yours, etc,
CATHAL CLIFFORD,
Principal Social Worker,
Pact,
Dublin 14.