Child’s play

Bairbre Ni Chaoimh believes one of the characters in Stolen Child – a play she co-wrote and directs – is “so representative of the New Ireland.” She’s a single woman who happens to be 39 “but could just as well be 19” who decides to have a baby on her own. But where drama enters the equation is the fact that this woman herself was adopted so the real subject of the play is the search for her biological mother and that woman’s life. The result is a ferociously funny and dark drama that also deliberately focuses on “a part of our history” that has been suppressed, according to Ni Caoimhe.

“Irish history as we learned it in school is all about battles and Land Acts and the Penal Laws and so on,” she says. “But you don’t learn the history of women and children in this country. Particularly the way women and children were controlled by the State, and by the Church. This was a very clever way of maintaining control over society. So this play is like a hidden slice of our history.”

Not only that, but Stolen Child – is also based, in part, on an actual incident – a fire that caused the deaths of 35 children at an industrial school in Cavan. The school was run by an enclosed order of nuns and this is where we really see just how savagely a religoius order could oppress and abuse children in the 1960s.

“During our research of Industrial schools in Ireland we came across so many people who had come through that system and heard about all the usual things those people suffered,” Bairbre says. “In other words, the neglect, the different types of humiliation, starvation, hardship, abuse. But because St. Joseph’s was run by an enclosed order of nuns it was even more severe.

“Those nuns really had turned their backs on the world. They wouldn’t watch TV, wouldn’t read newspapers, had very little communication with the world outside the convent. And they’d have very rigid restrictions on speaking. You wouldn’t even talk at meal-times and you couldn’t look someone in the eyes for fear you have immoral thoughts about them. You’d have to keep your head down and be very humble at all times.

“What was the State doing giving these nuns – who’d also obviously rejected the whole concept of marriage and children – 100 children to take care of? It’s absurd. So I decided that the 35 children who died in that fire deserved a memorial. So this is the mother’s side of the story in Stolen Child.”

Her daughter, on the other hand, is more a product of modern Ireland, upper middle-class and “has everything you could wish for,” Bairbre suggests. Apart from contact with her biological mother, obviously.

“Yes and to make that contact is a growing need in her life,” the author responds. “But she has so many choices, whether the mother has had no choices because of the childhood she had in the industrial school. So there are two parallel universes in the play. One is the mother’s and the other is the universe of the daughter where she is the very successful person, buying her apartment, deciding to do only what makes her happy, no religious hang-ups, no hang-ups of any kind. Their social mores are completely different from generations before. That, to me, is very much representative of modern Ireland. And their daughter’s life is a very interesting life, a very tangled life.”

Tangled is certainly the word when she hires a private detective to track down her mother, making for some of the funniest exchanges in the play. Add in unrequited love and an affair with a doctor and one wonders if Bairbre Ni Caomh realises that were she putting on this show, with all that sex, 40 years ago she’d be chased out of Ireland!

“I know I would be,” she says, laughing. “But what I find fascinating are the parallels. The mother, at the age of 20, became pregnant because of her lack of education in terms of sex education and her daughter could become pregnant at 39, despite having all the information. And, best of all, she can decide to keep a baby if she has one. That’s really how much things have changed.”