“We can’t fully comprehend how brave that must have been, to be pregnant, with no welfare state, no family.” After fleeing to Liverpool and having the nuns seize her child, Ethna was alone and traumatized in a foreign country. The family never learned exactly what she did in Dublin, but after four years there, she became pregnant unwed and had to make another escape. “Those windows and the gushing wind and the freezing lake…” said Tami, “I can’t imagine how scary it must have been.” Yet Ethna was not afraid to leave and join the workforce. Her mother – Tami’s great-grandmother – suffered from manic episodes in which she cranked the windows open so the house was freezing cold. When Tami’s mother complained about having to lay the table, Ethna said, “Bloody English, they’re all the same.” “You made me,” retorted her mother.ĭespite Ethna’s lifelong love of Ireland, her childhood there was difficult. “She rejected the state and Catholicism and the church but she never rejected being Irish”, Tami said.
Ireland’s abortion ban was still in place when Ethna died in 2016.īut Ethna loved Irishness itself. After starting a new family in London with Tami’s grandfather, Ethna would go on to enjoy many of the freedoms she had craved, but she never spoke of her early troubles until much later in life. Others, like Ethna and like the man she would later marry, were escaping Ireland’s puritanical church and state.
Most were economic migrants seeking employment in the wartime economy. She joined a huge influx of Irish immigrants to Britain at that time. She never saw her child again, but left the institution and made a new life for herself in England. Staying could have meant lifelong imprisonment in one of the notorious Magdalene asylums, where “fallen women” were forced into unpaid labor.Įthna reached a convent in Liverpool and gave birth, and the nuns soon gave her newborn daughter up for adoption. Four years later, she became pregnant outside marriage and departed on a ferry to Liverpool, likely to avoid the possible consequences of staying in Ireland.
Her grandmother was Kathleen Ethna Darcy (known as Ethna), who, in the early ‘40s, left Ballinamore aged 15 to seek work in Dublin.
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