three people were killed in the capital, harare after it was announced the governing zanu—pf had won a two thirds majority in parliament. the result of the separate presidential election is yet to be announced. president trump has urged his attorney general to end the investigation into russian interference in the 2016 election. and this story is trending on bbc.com. one of australia's biggest supermarkets, coles, has reversed a decision to stop giving customers free plastic bags. it follows pressure from some irritated shoppers. other consumers say the ban was good for the environment. that's all. stay with bbc world news. now on bbc news, hardtalk‘s sarah montague interviews paul redmond, chair of the coalition of mother and baby homes survivors in ireland. 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, against the mothers‘ wishes and sometimes without their 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, tried to figure it out in my own head, and i never fully understood it, but i somehow developed a bond with my fallen crib mates really. and i‘d 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 second, third and fourth biggest of the nine mother and baby homes.

ok, so what you‘ve 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. yeah, 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 write 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 could 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. yes. 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 — what i discovered basically was 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 ‘20s, 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. st patrick‘s, the first and oldest, the biggest of the homes, that hit 50% in the ‘20s. 0ne hit 50% twice in the ‘30s. 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 ‘20s. yes. i mean, 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, who‘s 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. but i first met archbishop diarmuid martin in 2012, and presented him 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. he 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. he said they‘d only laugh at me, paul, he said that 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 which will be reporting in february and looking at all these. do you accept that as the right process? yes and no. i mean, certainly the inquiry was the right way forward, but it is a flawed inquiry in that it is not addressing the whole issue. a large section of our community has been excluded. one of the things 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, though, a scoping inquiry into the scale of illegal adoptions. now, there are some claims you have made. you‘ve made claims that these were forced adoptions. what evidence do you have? the evidence — i talk to a great deal of survivors, including to the mothers. i‘m talking about hundreds of people, and i have listened 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.

this peaked in 1967 in ireland, when over 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 their society happened to be at the time? as a general rule, you could say they were going along with it because they felt they had no choice. there was no representative group. so it wasn‘t 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 attitudes from the government. 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. i mean, we‘re not talking about that. we are — we are. i literally know women whose babies

were taken out of their arms, crying and begging for their babies to be given back. i know women who went back to mother and baby homes and adoption agencies looking for their babies back, and were told their babies had died, they were adopted, they‘d gone to america. 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 in advance, which essentially co—wrote the irish constitution. we have a situation i know, as well, you would like to change. when you came to look for your mother, as you started to do 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 phone call with her, about 40 minutes long. and there won‘t be any more, and that‘s it. when i was 13 days old, in castlepollard, my mother and i were transferred

to st patrick‘s mother and baby home, and i was taken out of her arms in the hall by sister agnes and sent to the wards. they had notorious huge wards in the place. she was told to go outside, sit on the wall and wait for her father to come collect her. he had an office in town, and i‘ve never seen her since that day, and i never will. but 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 had 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 were very happy to meet me. but she did not want — she was talked into taking a phone

call by her brother. why do you think she didn‘t want to talk to you? she was too traumatised. i did lean 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 sent her to dublin, and she says my father collected me outside a place like the one i‘d been in. but i know in actual fact we were driven to dublin by a local taxi driver, one of the sacred hearts. 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 wasn‘t a disappointment. i take the positive out of it.

i know so many adoptees who‘ve never, ever had as much as a name of their mothers. i know adoptees who‘ve never had a birth certificate, i know adoptees who‘ve been reunited with gravestones. i take the positive out of it. at least i had a conversation. so i cannot too upset about that, compared to other people. and the important point i do make there, as well, is that it has given me something permanent, solid to fix onto 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. and it is. many people would listen to this and think that the last home closed in 1996. we‘re talking about events and mortality rates which were an awful long time ago. what value is there in raking over this now? 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, which i founded and run, our oldest member‘s daughter is 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. and a proper inquiry, a proper apology and a redress scheme, compensation scheme at the end of that, hopefully, will give a lot of closure to those people. you don‘t feel you‘ve had a proper apology? we‘ve never had an apology of any description from church or state, never. in ireland? never, because one of the things to understand is that, if somebody apologises in ireland, it‘s almost an admission of legal liability in ireland. neither the church nor the state has apologised. but society has changed. the church is not as allied, as close to the state as it was. no, absolutely not,

because the church dug in and 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. and again, that‘s not ancient history by any stretch of the imagination. and do you think that this is one of the reasons that the church has lost its grip on the state? it‘s one of them. but the fact of the matter is that the church was drenched and drowned in scandal after scandal. first there was the child sex abuse scandals by the clergy, then there was the cover—up by the hierarchy in ireland, then the industrial and reformatory schools. it‘s just been a shocking list of horror and abuse all the way through the 1990s, and that‘s what broke the catholic church. it‘s not ancient history it‘s only 20 years ago. paul redmond, thank you for coming on hardtalk. thank you.

hello there. the last two days have been topping up the last two days have been topping up around 20 celsius, but the sum over the next two days we will have values into the mid— 30s. increasingly warm and humid ahead, some sunshine but also a fair amount of cloud, crowded places, because as you can see from the earliest satellite picture we got this pipeline of cloud just plugging its way across british isles, and western areas particular, where you are exposed to that moist south—westerly flow, seeing a lot of cloud the start of thursday. some rather misty, murky conditions for some coasts and hills, a bit drizzly and places, the odd shower here and

there. but for north—east scotland and certainly for a good part of england and the south—east of wales we start the day with some sunshine. in these areas will keep sunshine through the day. and in some other spots the cloud will tend to break up. the most favoured spot for sunny skies, though, in shelter to the north—east of higher ground. so the north—east of higher ground. so the north—east of higher ground. so the north—east of scotland doing quite nicely for sunshine. 24 degrees there in aberdeen, but with some extra cloud in glasgow, more like 21. and we could well see some heavy rain just drifting across northern ireland. some extra cloud in the coastal parts of england and wales, certainly in the west, but further east more on the way of sunshine and those temperatures in london up to 29. maybe somewhere in the south—east getting up to 30 degrees. now, as we go through thursday night still quite a humid feel. still a lot of cloud as well ploughing its way from the south—west. some outbreaks of showery rain starting to develop across parts of northern

england, southern scotland, as the night wears on. and temperatures not dropping far at all. 15 to 18 degrees in many places. so starting friday on a mighty note for most places. what we have is this cold front just trying to places. what we have is this cold frontjust trying to drift its way southwards. not a lot of progress, though, and along the front a little bit of rain. at what the front mainly does is it divides northern areas, where there will be some relatively cool air, from southern areas, we will be tapping into this increasingly hot air from the near continent. so is quite a split in temperature is emerging as a go through friday. here is ourfrontal system through friday. here is ourfrontal syste m o nly through friday. here is ourfrontal system only very slowly moving southwards. rain physically across northern england, much of it light and patchy, the odd heavy burst. to the north, across scotland and northern ireland, the odd shower. downes was the south—east, lots of sunshine and temperatures upto 32 or 32 degrees. and we keep that split in fortunes as we go through the weekend. low 20s likelier northern and western areas, with a fair. a bit of rain at times, but not all the time. further south and east holding onto lots of sunshine. 30 degrees on saturday, may be a little cooler on sunday, but not by much.

i‘m sharanjit leyl in singapore. the headlines: gunshots soldiers open fire in zimbabwe as opposition supporters claim monday‘s elections were rigged. it has changed dramatically the atmosphere in the last 24 hours — really volatile now. we‘ve had tear gas fired, shots fired. i think we‘ve got to go. a gesture of goodwill. 55 sets of war remains from north korea are transported to the united states. i‘m babita sharma in london. also in the programme: