I was taken as a baby…I didn’t know who I was, part 1

This episode contains outdated racial language that some might find offensive.

Jackie McCarthy O’Brien was just a baby when police officers flanked by a nun and a priest came to her unmarried mother’s door in Limerick, Ireland and took her. She would grow up in an industrial school where silence is expected, questions are discouraged, and even the simplest routines come with cruelty. As a mixed-race child, she is singled out, made to feel different, less than, and alone. Every Saturday, a woman with ‘sad eyes’ comes to visit her, but Jackie doesn’t know who she is. She has no real understanding of what a mother is, or what family means.

Jackie shares her story over two episodes. In this first episode she recounts the early years of her life, but when she is eventually taken out of the institution aged five, instead of freedom, she finds herself in a home that feels just as unfamiliar, surrounded by people she doesn’t know and can’t yet trust.

But slowly, beyond this childhood, a different sense of identity begins to form. It will take her onto the pitch, into the green jersey of Ireland and the record books, and towards a version of herself that can hold on to love.

Presenter: Jo Fidgen
Producer: Edgar Maddicott

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(Photo: A damaged grainy photograph taken of Jackie as a young girl. Credit: Courtesy of Jackie McCarthy O’Brien)