Comedian Dara O Briain has opened up about being adopted and finally finding his birth mother.
Growing up in Bray, Co Wicklow, he said he has a “fantastic relationship” with his parents and was very happy growing up.
He explains: “I come from an unbelievably content family background.
“Being adopted [for me] is a state of knowing you’re adopted, then it not being mentioned for ages. And then at a point in later life going, ‘hang on, am I adopted?’
“I remember my father coming to London for lunch, and we had one of those conversations where you just clear the decks on everything. I told him, ‘I seem to remember knowing this’, and he said, ‘yeah, but it’s not a secret. I quit telling you because, you know, why would you keep saying it?’
“They were very supportive, it gets mentioned, but why would you bring it up all the time?”
Speaking publicly about his adoption for this first time on Wednesday night, he said he felt that he wanted to let his birth mother know how he turned out.
Speaking to Pat Leahy as part of the Irish Times Winter Nights Festival, he said: “Maybe [my birth mother] might want to know how it turned out. And maybe it’s our responsibility to go, ‘that worked out … I did end up in a stable home, and you should be grand about that.
“The search is unnecessarily hard.
“Start-of-life documentation, which concerns their lives – adopted people do not have the right yet to automatically get that.”
Eventually, he managed to find his own birth certificate.
He continued: “I remember getting [my] birth cert and folding it and thinking, I do not want to open it.
“I wanted to find a quiet moment to open this document. I remember finding it and reading it for the first time. It’s an elemental piece of paper. It’s a huge document to get in your hand.
“I wasn’t crying or anything like that, but it was still ... that this other person is me.”
Since then, Dara has made contact with his birth mother and actually met her, along with some of his biological siblings.
He adds: “I talked to my birth mother about it today, and I said, ‘look, did you want this?’ and she said, ‘there was no choice in this’.
“The whole thing was built on shame and expediency and a feeling of, just get this done.”
After the damning Mother and Baby Homes report was published earlier this month, Dara shared the front page of the Irish Examiner with the names of all the babies who tragically died at Bessborough.
He said: “Many will have seen this today, but, one of the greatest, and most shocking front pages I’ve ever seen.
“All the children who died in Bessborough Mother and Baby Home; from the foundation of the State in 1922, all the way to, unbelievably, 1994. A desperate stain on our history.”
