Ep 449 Rosemary Adaser: Growing up black in Irish institutions

While many of us were rightly outraged by the Government's approach to rushing through the Mother and Baby Homes Bill, and relieved by the U-turn that followed the public campaigning of survivors and human rights experts, one aspect of that story got very little attention. For black or mixed-race people born or raised in mother and baby homes and industrial schools, the abuse they received was of a different nature than that meted out to their white-skinned inmates. Rosemary Adaser was one of those people and she came on the podcast to talk about her experience of systemic racism, physical and sexual abuse and the trauma of having a non-Irish heritage which meant she was, as she puts it, "at the bottom of the pecking order". Rosemary was dehumanised in these institutions, called a savage, demeaned and made to feel ashamed of her heritage, her Irish mother and Ghanaian father. It was only in her fifties and living in London that she began to look back at her past and at her Irish identity. In this powerful interview, she spoke to Roisin Ingle about why we need to tell the whole story of these institutions, and the people that were brutalised in them, if we are to fully understand our past.

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