Paul Redmond was born in Castlepollard Mother and Baby Home in December 1964. His 20 year old single mother was from a well off background and her family paid for private care. She named him Jude after the patron saint of lost causes. They were transferred to Saint Patrick’s Mother and Baby Home when Jude was 13 days old and his mother had to hand him over to the Mother Superior and then leave. He never saw her again. Jude was brought to the home’s notorious wards where over 500 babies were often left alone for several hours at a time and neglected. Jude was adopted 4 days later on mid winter’s day into a warm and loving family and named Paul Redmond. He uses Jude as his middle name to honour his natural mother and his own fractured past. Educated at Oatland’s College CBS in south Dublin, Redmond began actively searching for his natural mother when he was 15 years old and he finally had a 40 minute phone call with her 33 years later. He received very few answers and it was made clear that any further phone calls would not be welcome. Redmond met up with other adoptees on social media in 2011 and co-organised a visit to Castlepollard for 7 former residents. It is the first known visit by a group of survivors to their former Mother and Baby Home. Deeply affected by his visit to the Angel’s Plot, Redmond says he ‘arrived as a timid adoptee and left as an angry bastard determined to find answers and justice.’ He is an obsessive researcher and has uncovered vast amounts of evidence about the conditions and history of the nine Mother and Baby Homes and wider network of the forced separation of single mothers and their babies since 1700. In 2013, he wrote and published the first report into the Homes highlighting the cruelty and mortality rates while calling for a public inquiry. In May 2014, Redmond was tipped off in advance by his friend and fellow researcher Catherine Corless that her list of the 800 babies buried in the Tuam Angel’s Plot was about to be published in the Mail on Sunday by Alison O’Reilly. Redmond realised immediately that the story of the Tuam 800 was going global because of the colossal Mail website and he offered all his research to the paper. He formed an instant bond and partnership with the Mail’s chief reporter Neil Michael and a further eight banner headlines followed. Redmond was the first to use the controversial word ‘holocaust’ during the media storm that followed. The Tuam story instantly widened to cover all the Homes and his research was the basis for the majority of the reporting that followed in Ireland and abroad about the entire network of Homes and the horrific infant mortality rates. Redmond was also the originator and driving force to re-label his community as ‘survivors’ instead of ‘adoptees’. As the chairperson of the survivor umbrella group, the ‘‘Coalition of Mother And Baby home Survivors (CMABS), he was part of a small team of Catholics, protestants, adoptees and natural mothers, that lobbied ministers and TD's extensively for a public Inquiry for many years. The Government gave in to the global media and public demands and, announced an Inquiry within 3 weeks of the Tuam 800 story. Redmond continues to protest and lobby for the inquiry to be widened to include all the 100,000 single mothers who lost their babies to forced separation and adoption. He is chuffed to have been personally named and attacked by the President of the Catholic League in America as well as David Quinn of the Iona Institute in Ireland. His interests included reading, politics, history, anthropology, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Biblical history, JFK, chess, Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, Star Wars. He loves music and live concerts, and collects records by the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Elvis Costello, Horslips and the Two Tone label among others. Redmond is married to his beloved Siobhan and they have 2 beautiful children, Molly and Gavin; and a King Charles named Elvis. They live in Greystones, County Wicklow.
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