Answer:
Tuohy was born on May 18th, 1936, the only and, by all accounts, adored child of a single mother, Mary, who had become pregnant while working in New York. They didn’t have much by way of material wealth, but until that moment, standing on the street with his unexpected bounty, he had known only love and joy. And then, in a glance, everything changed.
He heard a sound up the street. He looked towards it. And when he turned back, his mother was gone.
Seventy-eight years later, on July 11th this year, an Irish former Columban Fathers priest called Brian Boylan sat down in his home in Holloway, London, to write a letter to an acquaintance in Sandycove, Co Dublin, Margaret Brown.
“Dear Margaret,” he wrote. “I attended the funeral of an old Irish emigrant recently. He has no relatives in Ireland or England. The local authority (Islington Council) appointed me as his ‘next of kin’. I requested the man’s ashes and I have them in my house.”
Boylan had intended to spread the ashes in a graveyard in England or Ireland. “And then I thought of you and your friends in Sandycove,” he wrote.
He cried for two whole days. He pleaded for his mother. His cries went unheeded Brown is one of the founders of Friends of the Forgotten Irish, an organisation set up just over a decade ago. Every year, the organisers hold a coffee morning to raise money for Irish emigrants in London, funding a plaque in their memory on Carlisle pier in Dún Laoghaire, or donating to organisations like the community centre where Boylan volunteers, St Gabriel’s of Archway.
Now Boylan was writing to ask her another favour. “I know you and your friends are concerned about the welfare of Irish emigrants,” he went on. “The giving of this emigrant’s ashes to your care is, symbolically, an expression of your desire to support Irish emigrants and our wish to be reunited with our people at least in spirit.”
The “old Irish emigrant” was Joseph Tuohy.
The story of how the adored five-year-old was separated from his mother – and how he would struggle for the rest of his life with the after-effects of that separation, spending intervals homeless, and eventually dying alone in London – is shattering.
And it is also grimly familiar, resonant of the experiences of thousands of Irish women and children who were shamed, criminalised and emotionally brutalised because of a pregnancy that was deemed socially unacceptable.
The authorities were waiting for her an opportunity to take the boy away from his mother, Boylan – his friend of 40 years – believes. Tuohy’s mother “used to work on a farm. On one occasion, Joe was playing with the farmer’s son, and he slipped. It was an open fire, [and] he burned himself slightly.”
Tuohy’s mother was taken to court, and “obviously the judgment was that he would be sent to an orphanage”. The mother “couldn’t bear saying goodbye to her little son,” so she gave him the lemonade and biscuits and waited until he was distracted to walk away.
Explanation:
