Carlow man tells court of illegal adoption ‘bombshell’

A man suing a Catholic adoption agency and the State has told the High Court it came as a “bombshell” when he learned in 2012 he had been “illegally” adopted.

Patrick 'Paddy' Farrell said he was shocked when he discovered he was not the child of the now deceased Maeve and Jim Farrell from Tullow, Co Carlow.

Following a communication from the Adoption Authority of Ireland in late 2012, he was informed he had been illegally adopted and a meeting was arranged in early 2013 with his birth mother Tressa Reeves, he said.

After 50 years of being Paddy Farrell, he said he discovered he was André Donnelly.

He met his birth mother in early 2013 at a “controlled and very strange” meeting arranged at the Authority’s offices where they were told not to exchange personal details. After the meeting, he spoke to Ms Reeves in the carpark, they went for a coffee and had “a good old natter” in a hotel where they exchanged phone numbers and addresses, he said.

He was giving evidence on the first day of his damages action against Saint Patrick’s Guild and the State over the circumstances of his adoption.

They deny claims by Mr Farrell and by his birth mother Tressa Donnelly Reeves, who spent decades looking for her son following his birth in Dublin in March 1961.

When asked by his counsel Eanna Mulloy SC about his feelings over his mother’s quest to find him, Mr Farrell said he was very angry and “words fail me” that his mother was “given the run around for years and years and years and years.”

The “lot of them should be shot” for what they had done to her, he said.

Preoccupied

He and his immediate family suffered after he found out he had been adopted, he said.

Things had been difficult for him and his family as he became preoccupied with and tried to come to terms with being adopted, particularly when word got out in the small community where he lives, he said.

His work was affected and he left a good job working on the Luas for a less well paid job closer to home.

He attended counselling but the people dealing with him were not able to help him, he said.

He “got on very well” with the Donnelly family but “you cannot buy time, and how can you get back even the last 20 years”. He never got to do the things an elder brother does for his sisters and his biggest regret was he never got to meet one sister who died in 2006.

He had erected a monument to her by building a garden in her honour at his home where he felt “at peace”.

He said this contrasted with his experience of violence he suffered at the hands of his adoptive father Jim Farrell.

While Maeve Farrell had “doted” on him, his father was often violent towards the family, he said.

He told the court of several incidents where he was beaten and injured by his father, including one where his father broke the knuckles in his right hand with a hurley after he, Paddy, lost a handball match in Croke Park.

His father also struck him with a part of a plough, leaving him requiring 32 stitches, because he had played outside in his “good confirmation clothes”.

As a young child, he was beaten all the way to school by his father because he had intervened when his father was violently beating his (father’s) wife, he said.

His father also took him out of school early to work in the family business when he would have preferred to go on and do his Leaving Cert, he added.

The case continues.