IRELAND
Sunday Independent
Comic PJ Gallagher: ‘I was born in Bessborough but I got away with it. I feel guilty and lucky’
Mary-Elaine Tynan
Published 22/06/2014
IT’S unusual for much-loved funnyman PJ Gallagher to tweet about serious matters; normally he reserves his observations for hilarious comments about life and his passion for bikes and dogs.
Early this month, however, his followers were greeted with the unexpected tweet: “I was born in Bessbourough [sic] House, reading this has upset me more than a little this morning”.
The article attached described the unusually high death rate for children born in the Cork mother and baby home in the early Forties.
Until around 10 years ago, this statistic would have been almost irrelevant since all PJ knew about his life was that he was born in April 1975, was placed briefly in foster care and then adopted by his parents through a Dublin agency.
Until he was in his 20s, PJ’s family home in Clontarf doubled as a care facility for people with mental illnesses, many of whom had previously been in institutions. From his conversations with the people his mother cared for, PJ realised that most were still traumatised from those same institutions. And so, even before he learned the circumstances surrounding his own birth, he always felt great compassion for anybody in institutions.
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