Fallen

Description

When Michael Connolly was a child in the 1970s, his mother told him about all the things that happened to her in that place. All that the nuns had done. The doctors encouraged her to talk, and talk she did.

She even tried to tell the public. She wrote letters to the newspapers. She made signs and picketed Mass.

The good pious parishioners silenced her. The doctors told her she was delusional. Her husband didn’t post her letters.

Her son didn’t believe her. Three decades later, still caught in the guilt from that time, Michael sits watching the news about the mother and baby homes unfolding, and realises, with his mother long gone, that she had been telling the truth all those years ago. Fallen is a stark and beautifully written account of the impact on one family of a shameful chapter in modern Irish