the homeland security secretary in the us has welcomed facebook‘s closure of what the company says are at least 30 fake accounts apparently aimed at influencing the mid—term elections in november. facebook executives say some of the fake posts had links to accounts used by the russian government. a passengerjet has crashed shortly after takeoff in a heavy hailstorm in northern mexico. 85 people have been injured, but many passengers managed to walk from the wreckage to a nearby road, seeking help. officials in durango say the pilot tried to abort the flight when the plane got into difficulties. the criminal trial of president trump's former campaign manager paul manafort has begun, and prosecutors have claimed he lied and placed himself above the law, hiding millions of dollars in income from lobbying in 30 foreign bank accounts, to evade tax and fund a lavish lifestyle. he denies 18 counts, including bank fraud, and could face up to 30 years injail. time for hardtalk.

welcome to hardtalk, i'm sarah montague. it was front—page news around the world when a mass grave was discovered at a mother and baby home in ireland. the remains of almost 800 babies were found. but research by paul redmond, my guest today, showed that was only the tip of the iceberg. he collected evidence of higher death rates at homes for illegitimate children across ireland, and he also claimed catholic nuns who ran them were trading in adoptions, being paid to send children to the united states for adoption, often against the mothers‘ wishes and sometimes without her knowledge. he was born in one of those homes and adopted before he was a month old. now, he feels he has a duty to expose what went on. paul redmond, welcome to hardtalk.

thank you. you refer to a life—changing moment in your book the adoption machine when you went back to the castlepollard home, in which you were born, in 2011 with a group of other people from there, who had been adopted, and you visited something that is called the angels‘ plot. can you tell us about that? yes, the angels‘ plots are the common term we use to describe the baby graves that are attached to the mother and baby homes. not all of them had the plots attached, so sometimes they used public cemeteries for the babies. but in the place where i was born, i have discovered since that there are 200 babies buried there,

along with at least another 100 stillborn babies. but i had never visited the place before, this is only going back to 2011, and i helped to organise a visit, and we decided to plant a tree in the angels‘ plot in memory of the babies. we considered them our crib mates, as we refer to them. and it ended up with me digging a hole for quite a large tree in the middle of the angels‘ plot, and it was a life—changing moment for me. i have never been able to fully explain it, although i tried for month afterwards. i wrote poems, i wrote plays, i tried to figure it out in my own mind, and i never fully understood it, but i somehow developed a bond with my fallen crib mates, really. and i often say, the one word i would say to define it is that i walked into the plot as an adoptee but i walked out as a survivor,

hellbent and determined to do something. hadn‘t a clue what i was going to do, or how to do it, i had no experience in the field, but ijust knew i had to do something. because your experience in that home, which is where you were born in 1964, was — well, it was obviously very different from those in the angels‘ plot, in that you survived. but it was also — it was not a bad experience, was it? well, i don‘t personally remember it, but castlepollard was unusual in terms of the mother and baby homes in that it was a strange mixture of public and private. because the head of the sacred heart order at the time when that was built was actually a local woman from county westmead, and she didn‘t want a notorious hellhole in her own backyard, so to speak. so it was the jewel in the crown of the sacred heart empire. they owned the four biggest of the nine mother and baby homes. ok, so what you have since worked out is that your mother went

in there for a month, and you were successfully adopted and have had... i mean, you love your adoptive parents. absolutely, yes. yes, no, adoption does damage, but good parents and a lot of love can heal a lot of that damage, and certainly i was incredibly lucky to have wonderful parents. my dad passed away about three years ago. my mum is still alive, and i still love her to bits, and i still love my dad every day. you wrote in this book that you had this fantasy about what it was like — an old georgian house, young mother in a chair with colourful throws, and sun streaming through the window, and nuns... fluttering around and taking care of her. yes, that‘s the image i had growing up in my head. all adoptees develop some fantasy of their own background, and that was mine. it turned out to be complete rubbish, of course. what do you know about it? about the institution itself?

a huge amount. there is probably no more known about castlepollard than i knew about the mother and baby homes. so what would the real scene have been? the real scene was that it was a 75—bed maternity hospital with 145 cots. it was a great custom—built institution. standards were... in effect it was a cross between a maternity hospital for single mothers and low to medium security prison. the wards where the babies were kept were locked at night. the dormitories where the mothers were kept were locked at night. and there was one midwife at a time working in the place. there was no doctors or nurses. food was absolutely grim. it was a working farm. the girls were expected to work on the farm for, generally speaking, about two years, to supposedly repay the debt to the nuns for taking care of them, despite the fact the government was paying for their care. because these were women who would have been taken there by their own families.

i would kind of have issues with that particular phrase now. ireland was, to all effect, a theocracy for a lot of this time, and the church ruled the roost. and families didn‘t really have much choice. there was elements there of, yes, they did bring their daughters there, but it was because most of them had little or no choice in the matter. so they would, what, go to the priest? the local parish priest, as a general rule, was the entry point into the system for most people. all of the parish priests in ireland will have had the phone numbers and the addresses of the mother and baby home they used. and when any mother or father came to them going, my daughter is in trouble, well, this is what‘s going to happen, and there was no discussion about it.

so in places like castlepollard, there would have been single mothers who would have their babies there. yes. and the child would stay for... the child would stay — in my case, because i was a private patient, i was there for 13 days. but most children semi grew up there, to the point of two or three years of age. i know of at least one case where a child was in a mother and baby home until they were just short of six years of age. but we were all then adopted out, but the children and mothers were separated throughout the day. the mothers went off to work. children were left in large wards and grossly neglected. 0ne mother would be put in charge of them, and she, as a general rule, she just couldn‘t cope with the amount of babies in a particular ward. it could be anything from 12 to 20 babies at a time. to take you back to that moment that you said changed your life in the angels‘ plot, you write that you are determined to do something. that you became an activist by default. i wanted to ram hard facts

and figures down ireland‘s throat. and i still do. what facts, what figures? basically, i wrote a report — i discovered basically that, after that experience in the angels‘ plot, that there was nothing known about the system or the homes, either individually or collectively. there was no books about them, there was no reports about them. the activist community, which had existed for over 20 years at that stage, had been obsessively focused on opening the adoption records and had missed the big picture — that sealed adoption records are really a small part of a massive network and system that existed to punish single women viciously. and i wanted every fact and figure i could find about that, and particularly about mortality rates in homes. and what has been discovered since has been absolutely shocking, and has shocked people to their core. to give a good example, in 19114, the chief medical officer of ireland pulled a surprise visit to bessborough, a very decent man called james deeny. and he writes in his autobiography, to cure and to care,

that the previous year 180 babies had been born at bessborough, and considerably more than 100 had died. it was actually since determined that 131 had died. that‘s a mortality rate of 68%. the following year, after his intervention, it went up to 82%. so that is in one year. more typically, and you looked at the figures which he gave for the ‘205, when they were across the homes roughly around 30%, which was, say, four orfive times the national... mortality rate, and spiking up to 50% locally. the first and oldest, the biggest of the homes, that hit 50% in the ‘205. 0ne hit 50% twice in the ‘305. what was going on? why do you think the mortality rates were so high? neglect — straightforward neglect. the nuns just simply didn‘t care if they lived or died back then. we were not — the illegitimate were considered the defective,

stained, tainted children. there was a common belief in society, particularly in ireland at the time, that if you were illegitimate, that somehow you had some sort of notjust a moral weakness, but a physical weakness, and that you would die easily. so in ireland it was no surprise, really, that babies were dying at these sort of rates. peoplejust shrugged their shoulders. now, you are putting the blame on the catholic church, but there was a church of ireland, a protestant home, bethany, and that similarly had very high rates. it did, in ireland, and it seems to have aped the catholic homes in ireland, which is kind of bizarre. it would suggest it was a problem of society, rather than the church. well, i can‘t really speak for exactly what was going on in the protestant bethany home. but a great deal of research has been done into that home by derek leinster from the bethany group. it‘s comparable with what happened in the catholic homes, but it seems to have

been unique to ireland. even with these infant mortality rates, you are talking about going back to the ‘205. yes. that was at a time when there weren‘t antibiotics, when they weren‘t vaccinations. and when those come in, the mortality rate drops dramatically. well, yes and no. the mortality rate dropped dramatically in ireland from the late ‘iios onwards, but that coincided with the start of the banished babies trade, which was a huge moneyspinner for the nuns. i want to pick you up on that, because this is a central claim of your book, and it is a very stark criticism. you suggest that the reason that the death rates go down is because the nuns, the catholic church, saw these babies — realised they could make money out of them. yes, that is a fact. well, where‘s the evidence? the evidence is the fact that the mortality rates plummeted after the banished babies trade started. you can see the correlation

between them. from the time the banished babies trade started, in 1945, that‘s when the mortality rate started to fall. but it also coincides with a time when rationing was ended, when vaccinations began, and when antibiotics began. there is no question that, whatever way you dress it up, and you can look into all these fact, figures and aspects of it, but the fact of the matter is there is no excuse for children dying at a rate of out of every five babies dying in 1945. that is not to do with antibiotics. that is to do with lack of care. it is a point that has been made by david quinn, who writes in the irish catholic, and he puts it down to the fact that you don‘t even mention this idea of vaccinations and antibiotics coming onstream, and cutting infant mortality across society. i‘m sorry, but david quinn as head of the iona institute, which is basically a very conservative catholic group in ireland. he has a motivation for saying that.

he has provided absolutely no evidence whatsoever... but you do accept that that cut the infant mortality rate across society, and would have had an impact in these homes. i don‘t believe so, because there wasn‘t an impact in general society in ireland. there was no dramatic fall in infant mortality rates in ireland across those years. dr lindsey earner—byrne, a lecturer in history at university college dublin, said this, and has written about this time period and what was happening — says that tuam, which is the home where 800 babies were found in a mass grave, didn‘t happen in a vacuum. and she makes the point that every year in the ‘30s and ‘40s the number of deaths of illegitimate children was published. it was known, it was in the public domain. society knew. society did know, but society didn‘t care, and society thought they knew the reason for that was because illegitimate children were weaklings. you have to remember, at the time, illegitimate people couldn‘t become priests in the catholic church, they couldn‘tjoin the police force,

they were officially banned from becoming gardai. but why do you direct your ire and yourfire on the catholic church, when it is society that is just as responsible? i don‘t accept that society is responsible. i believe that the catholic church‘s influence on society was so pervasive and so corrosive that they must accept their full responsibility for it. they forced people into the mother and baby homes. and ultimately, at the end of the day, how can you justify running a maternity hospital without doctors or nurses or medical equipment, or painkilling drugs? you can‘t justify that, in any way, shape or form. but the head of the catholic church in england and wales, cardinal vincent nichols, apologised for the hurt caused by agencies acting in the name of the catholic church. the current head of the church in ireland, archbishop of dublin diarmuid martin, has said that it is something he believes it is important that pope francis addresses when he comes to ireland in august. so it is recognised by the catholic church now.

just about. i first met the archbishop in 2012, when i presented him with what little evidence we had at the time about the mother and baby homes. when you talk about what happened at castlepollard, that was only seven or eight months after that. it was presented with the facts and figures we had at the time. he was asked to call for a public inquiry, and he refused. he refused? he point—blank refused, and that happened a number of times. he simply would not do anything about it. but what has happened as a result of the information that has come to light is that the government is taking action. there is a commission that will be reporting in february and looking at all these.

do you accept that as the right process? yes and no. certainly the inquiry was the right way forward, but it was a flawed inquiry in that it does not address the whole issue. a large section of our community has been excluded. one thing we‘re campaigning for its full inclusion in the inquiry, because unless you are actually born in a mother and baby home, you are not included in the inquiry. there is scope in the inquiry into the scale of illegal adoptions. there are some claims you have made — you make claims that these were forced adoptions. what evidence do you have? i talk to a great deal of survivors, including to the mothers. i‘m talking about hundreds of people, and i‘m listening to the testimonies and sad stories over and over again, over the years, and there‘s no doubt in my mind that people were forced into this.

it peaked in 1967 in ireland, when the 97% of all illegitimate children were adopted, and that is a phenomenal figure. was it happening against their wishes as in they were saying i do not wish this to happen, or were theyjust going along with the way that society happened to be at the time? as a general rule, you could say they felt they had no choice. there was no representative group. so it was not forced in that sense. it was forced in the sense that the catholic church were pervasive in ireland, and were in control of the government in terms of social legislation and social attitude. so it was down to social attitudes that this was happening. that is very different. if you talk about forced adoption, people have in their head the idea of a baby being wrenched from someone. we are not talking about that. we are. i literally know women whose babies were taken out of their arms,

crying and begging for their babies to be returned. i know women who went back to mother and baby homes and adoption agencies looking for their babies, who were told they were dead. it was forced adoption. the point i would make is that the church was a very formidable organisation in ireland, which vetted all social legislation and which essentially co—wrote the irish constitution. we have a situation i know you would like to change. when you came to look for your mother, as you started to do so at the age of 15, but it took years and years before you located her, didn‘t it? it took 33 years, until i was 48, to have a single call with her, about 40 minutes long. and there will not be any more. that‘s it. when i was 13 days old, in castlepollard, my mother and i were transferred

and i was taken out of her arms in the hall by sister agnes and sent to the wards, notoriously huge wards. she was told to go outside, sit on the wall and wait for her father to come collect her. i have never seen her since that day, and i never will. you had this conversation with her. why do you say there will not be another one? she made it clear she does not want anything to do with me. i kind of knew that anyway, because social services contacted her many times over the years, or at least tried to. she was avoiding them. and she was never in any way, shape or form proactive or open to contact over the years. but i still felt i needed to know some of my natural family, and some of them did want to know me when i contacted them, and they were happy to meet with me. but she — she was talked into taking a phone call by her brother. why do you think she did not

want to talk to you? she was too traumatised. she has a complete memory blackout of the time, a form of selective amnesia from the time i was born. she is convinced that the nuns put her on the train the same day i was born, and she says my father collected me outside a place like the one i had been in. but i know we were driven to dublin by the local taxi driver, mum in the car. you talk about the decades you have spent searching for her. you have written about it. that it ended that way, that must have been a huge disappointment to take, and not what you expected. yes and no. it was not a disappointment. i take the positive out of it. i know so many adoptees who never

ever had so much as the name of their mother. i know adoptees who‘ve never had a birth certificate, who have been reunited with gravestones. i take the positive out of it. at least i had a conversation. i cannot too upset about that, compared to other people. and the important point i do make, as well, is that it has given me something permanent and solid to fix on to and deal with and have closure, as much as i possibly can. other people never get that. you end your description by saying an ugly truth is better than a beautiful lie. it is. many people would listen to this and think that the last home closed in 1996. we are talking about events and mortality rates that were a long time ago. what value is there in raking over this? the truth. there is always value in the truth. and the fact of the matter is that it may have happened a long time ago, but in the castlepollard

group, a members‘ daughters are in the group, and she was born in 1925, the year it opened. this is not ancient history. there are tens of thousands of survivors of the system, still left alive in ireland and still suffering. a proper inquiry, a proper apology and a redress scheme, a compensation scheme, will give a lot of closure to those people. you don‘t feel you‘ve had a proper apology? we have never had an apology of any description from church or state. in ireland? never. because one of the things to understand is that, if somebody apologises in ireland, that is an admission of legal liability. neither the church nor the state has apologised. but society has changed, and the church is not as allied, as close to the state as it was.

absolutely not. the church resisted social change as much as possible. and it is still a powerful force in ireland, but in a way that power was only broken in the early 1990s. again, that is not ancient history by any stretch of the imagination. you think that this is one of the reasons that the church has lost its grip on the state? it is one of them. the fact of the matter is that the church was drenched and derailed in scandal after scandal. first the child sex abuse, and then the cover—up by the hierarchy in ireland, and then industrial and reformatory schools. just a shopping list of horror and abuse all the way through the 1990s, and that‘s what broke the catholic church. it is not ancient history it is only 20 years ago. paul redmond, thank you for coming on hardtalk. thank you. hello there.

just when you thought we were done with the heatwave, the temperatures are beginning to climb again over the next few days. particularly across southern parts of the uk. further north and west of there will be a little bit of rain at times, but certainly not all the time. 0n the satellite picture from a little earlier on, you can see clumps of cloud circulating around an area of low pressure and as we go through the next couple of days, we will continue to seek areas of cloud feeding in from the south—west. we start tomorrow with temperatures across the country, 11—14 degrees, the best of the morning sunshine will be found across england and wales and for the far

north—east of scotland. as we go on through the day to the parts of the midlands, we will develop more cloud. best of the sunshine towards the south—east and for northern ireland and western scotland, the cloud thickens up all the while and we will see outbreaks of mostly light and patchy rain. quite easy across these western areas, north—east scotland holding onto a little bit of brightness. some of this rain pushing out of northern ireland towards the north—west of england and north—west of wales, further south and east of what we are into good spells of sunshine and temperatures in london getting up to around 26 degrees. as we go through wednesday evening, there will be some sunshine to end the day in the south as we go through the night we are to be piling a lot of cloud in from the south—west. it will turn misty and murky for coastal areas, a few splashes of rain and those temperatures begin

to come up, and increasingly humid feel into thursday morning because we will have brought this warm front across the country. not much rain on it, but that is the reason for extra cloud and with high pressure to the south, southern areas particularly are going to start to tap into increasingly warm air from the near continent. further north and west, a somewhat fresher feel of air from the atlantic. temperatures not as high. during thursday, a lot of cloud in through western and parts of the uk, particularly the odd spot of rain and showers. further south is the best chance of seeing sunshine, those temperatures creeping upwards, 29 in london on thursday. we keep that split in temperature fortunes as we head to the end of the week and western areas have seen more in the way of cloud, mostly dry temperatures, generally in the low 20s. further south, it will be the low 30s, 32, maybe 33 degrees, with plenty of sunshine to take us into the weekend.

this is the briefing — i‘m sally bundock. our top story: as facebook fights to fix its reputation — the company reveals new foreign attempts to influence the us midterm elections. an airliner crashesjust after takeoff in northern mexico — dozens are injured but everyone survives from today women wearing a full face islamic veil in denmark can be fined — but some say they‘ll defy the ban. apple reveals its best third quarter in history as its customers go for the more expensive models of the iphone.