Out of the shadows: Single parent self-help group celebrates 50th anniversary, but work of founders not yet done

The short afterthought in a letter from a “very worried” unmarried mother of twins is telling of its time: “PS. Please put ‘Mrs’ on the envelope”. The writer is eight months pregnant and despairing about how she is going to manage with three children under two, but keeping up appearances is still vital in early 1970s Ireland.

She is seeking advice from Cherish, a self-help group set up in 1972 by some single mothers who were determined to throw off their cloak of invisibility. Her letter is one of hundreds, along with thousands of case files, in the archive of Cherish (renamed One Family in 2004), which will be transferred to the National Library as the organisation celebrates its 50th anniversary. A sample of letters seen by The Irish Times, with names and locations changed, evoke a very different country half a century ago.

One unmarried mother fears her brothers will throw her out of their home when they hear she’s pregnant again: “I guess I would not blame them. Once is bad enough.” Another, stuck in a house of ill-repute, writes how the owner “would rather I get out, as he knows I am not one of his young women to amuse his pub-mates. When he brings them in, myself and the baby lock ourselves into the room. Sometimes, I wake up wishing I was dead. But when I look at my child, I know I must try to stick it out”.

There are heartening stories, too. One is from a mother whose parents were completely against her keeping her son and another couple took them in. She got a “lovely job” with a photographer, who then drove her and three-month-old Peter to visit her parents. “They were delighted to see us, and want me to go home with Peter for my summer holidays. As you can see, I have been extremely lucky!” Although, even she adds: “Please address the reply to ‘Mrs’ as I want it understood, for the sake of my child, that I am a widow.”

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For all the societal changes since, these letter writers’ concerns about finding somewhere to live, poverty and irresponsible fathers, resonate for lone parents today. A reminder came again this week too of the painful legacy of babies parted from their birth mothers through adoption, as a new State service under the Birth Information and Tracing Act 2022 came into operation.

The Cherish founders were women who had kept their babies and wanted to show others that they could do the same. One of those was Evelyn Forde (77), who had concealed her pregnancy – luckily, “smocks were all the rage” – until she was signed off sick from her job in a semi-State agency for “pernicious anaemia”. Heading to London for the third trimester, she intended to give up the baby for adoption at birth and return to Ireland to resume her life, without even her parents, flatmates or colleagues any the wiser.

“I didn’t know what it’s like one day not to be a mother and the next day have this bundle of joy put into your hand,” she says now. “All of a sudden, everything changed – the moment I held him in my arms and realised he was real; this was what was inside me for nine months.”

Forde is grateful for the support of people she met in London. Her landlady, for instance, said: “Nobody told me to have my child adopted, why should they be telling you?” Forde’s baby son, Robert, was placed with foster parents in London while she returned to work in Dublin and tried to figure out what to do.

“I couldn’t just arrive back in Ireland with a child,” she points out. However, during nearly two months apart from Robert, she could not stop thinking about this “extension” of herself. She had heard there were some single mothers getting together in Dublin, and she tracked them down to the Kimmage home of Maura O’Dea (now Richards).

We drew energy from one another: if one goes here, why can’t another one follow? It was great to have that peer support

“So much stuff dropped away from me in that initial meeting – she was so warm and so kind,” says Forde of O’Dea. It made her think: “If she can do this, why can’t I?” O’Dea, and other co-founders such as the late Annette Evans (née Hunter), Margaret Murphy and Colette O’Neill, were inspiring. “We drew energy from one another: if one goes here, why can’t another one follow? It was great to have that peer support. I don’t know how we all managed.”

Forde was living in a smart flat on the Upper Rathmines Road in Dublin with three other women. When she told them about Robert, they asked why she had not told them she was pregnant, and that they would have helped her. “But when I brought Robert back, two of them couldn’t get out of the flat fast enough, in case they were tarred with the same brush.” Yet she does not recall being angry at such attitudes: “I just remember getting on with it.” She adds, however: “I was very angry with the father, who wasn’t supportive.”

She was also angry with the solicitor she went to about maintenance, who patted her on the hand and advised her to get her baby adopted. Through Cherish, she found another solicitor who got an order for maintenance, although “it was only £3 a week and it didn’t come very regularly”. It was “very hard to pin down the fellas”, she points out, and women only had six months from the time of birth to seek maintenance. Fifty years later, she believes that taxpayers are still paying for some men’s actions: “They just pull up their trousers and go.”

Within a year of formation, Cherish saw the introduction of the unmarried mothers’ allowance – hardly a fortune at £8.15 a week but valuable State recognition. “It helped to remove the terrible shadow, I would call it, on single mothers that they would get the State allowance,” says Mary Robinson, who was the first president of Cherish, a position she held until she was elected President of Ireland in 1990.

Rather to my surprise, Bishop Eamonn Casey became a patron, but of course we know now that he had more insights than we might have thought

As a barrister who had been appointed a law professor in Trinity College Dublin in 1969 at the age of 25 and elected a senator the same year, what motivated the young Robinson to become a figurehead for this new and unproven collective?

“What interested me was that you had a group of women who were regarded by many in Irish society as sinners, as fallen women, as girls who had to be put away into laundries,” she replies. O’Dea had approached her, explaining they wanted to form an official group called Cherish – a name challenging society to live up to the 1916 Proclamation that Ireland would “cherish all children of the nation equally”. They did not want to be patronised by some other established group as women who needed help: they wanted to help themselves.

“I remember [O’Dea] stressing this, and I liked that very much,” says Robinson, who will be the keynote speaker at 50th anniversary celebrations this Thursday (October 13th). “I was very impressed by their sheer determination to make progress for the women and children involved and to do it themselves.”

Nonetheless, she initially protested that she was too young to be president of anything. O’Dea told her they needed her name and reputation, and said they were also asking the Catholic Bishop of Kerry, Eamonn Casey, to be a patron. “Rather to my surprise, he became a patron, but of course we know now that he had more insights than we might have thought,” Robinson remarks dryly.

In one example of the late bishop’s contrasting public and private lives, it emerged years later that he had tried to pressurise Annie Murphy, the mother of his son Peter who was born in 1974, to have him adopted.

Robinson’s legal and political talents were key in the long campaign for the abolition of the concept of illegitimacy. Until the 1987 Status of Children Act, those born outside marriage were regarded in law as the “child of no one” and had no inheritance rights.

Anna Lee became the second social worker employed at Cherish in 1975, as it strove to build credibility and capacity. Having coming from London, where single-parent families were supported with accommodation, she says that “one of the things that really amazed me was that there were huge housing issues”.

Local authority housing here was decided on medical or family size grounds, so a woman on her own with a child did not get very far up the housing list. Considering it to be hopeless, many unmarried mothers did not bother registering, meaning that nobody knew the extent of the issue, says Lee, who encouraged all to be more articulate about housing. She was also stunned by the numbers of women who concealed their pregnancy, or were thrown out of their homes by family when it was known, leaving them very vulnerable.

“The challenge of being able to map out how you were going to be able to parent alone was enormous. The early founders in Cherish were women who tended to be a little bit older, had more established employment, had more confidence, but could see the importance of building that with everybody else,” she says.

The current CEO of One Family, Karen Kiernan, still hears echoes of the stigma those founders were up against. “When you look at the Mother and Baby homes report and you look at our history, there’s a very strong thread of judgment, of secrecy, of punishment,” she says. “Some parents, and we in One Family, still see and experience that. That’s the thread from then to now.”

Looking at Budget 2023, they were “horrified” that there was no targeted support for one-parent families. Housing is a crisis for many, but 55 per cent of the 1,483 families, with 3,220 children, relying on emergency accommodation, according to August figures, are headed by a lone parent. Reports consistently show children in one-parent families are at a much higher risk of poverty than those living with two parents.

The other big issue is family law, with maintenance still very problematic. Unlike most other countries, there is no statutory agency to assess and pursue the liable relative. Publication of a report by a Child Maintenance Review Group, headed by Judge Catherine Murphy, is still awaited. Meanwhile, “the courts are clogged up, parents are in conflict, children are poor because the State is not supporting people to resolve this in a fair way”, says Kiernan.

One reflection of positive change is the increasing amount of work One Family does with people who are co-parenting after relationship breakdown. “There are mums, and sometimes dads, who are parenting completely on their own,” Kiernan says, “but a lot of people are trying to figure out how to share parenting well, and it’s difficult because we have practically no supports to help them.”

Lack of State action to protect children of lone parents from poverty leaves One Family reflecting on the reasons for that. “Are we still left with some kind of, at best, apathy and, at worst, prejudice?” asks Kiernan, who has no doubt that, 50 years on, there is still a job to be done to make this a country that cherishes all children equally.