Alison O'Reilly

My Name Is Bridget is a well-written book about a horrible subject. It examines the horrors of Ireland’s “mother and baby homes,” where for the better part of the 20th century the Roman Catholic church and Irish state incarcerated women who became pregnant out of wedlock. Conditions were criminal: ostracized by their families and congregations, the women were forced to labor for little or no pay—indeed, often charged for their incarcerations—and coerced into surrendering their show more children upon delivery; malnourishment, mistreatment, and communicable diseases ravaged women and children alike. Many died, and were often improperly buried: in the Tuam Mother and Baby Home alone, nuns discarded the bodies of at least 796 infants and children in a septic tank.

The titular Bridget is the mother of Anna Corrigan, whose discovery in adulthood that she had two older brothers, both born in Tuam, O’Reilly uses to frame much of the book. Corrigan’s subsequent advocacy for surviving victims and their families, as church and state first denied, then downplayed, then reluctantly agreed to establish an investigative commission, is heartrending, not least because document irregularities suggest her second brother might still be alive: on top of everything else, the church also placed—for a fee—children born in the homes with Roman Catholic adoptive families abroad, sometimes illegally falsifying documents to do so. Corrigan’s story is not an outlier; O’Reilly interviews dozens of men and women separated from their mothers or children in Tuam or other institutions, forced for years to provide free labor in Magdalene laundries or on farms after giving birth out of wedlock or being “fostered” out by the church, or who discovered in adulthood that they had siblings or had themselves been born in a mother and baby home. Some of these people reunited with blood family, some made the attempt and were rebuffed, some never manage to reunite with their children or parents; some escaped the institutions, some tried and failed; some never recovered and others went on to rebuild their lives. By including this diversity of experience and outcome, O’Reilly illustrates the multiple, long-lasting impacts of the system and its myriad failings.

Granted, the book would have benefited from a thorough edit: O’Reilly repeatedly misspells the name of a major organization, and phrases and quotations are repeated across and within chapters—sometimes within paragraphs of each other. But these are small quibbles with a powerful and important book. show less