![]() ![]() Ireland’s abortion ban was still in place when Ethna died in 2016.īut Ethna loved Irishness itself. After starting a new family in London with Tami’s grandfather, Ethna would go on to enjoy many of the freedoms she had craved, but she never spoke of her early troubles until much later in life. Others, like Ethna and like the man she would later marry, were escaping Ireland’s puritanical church and state. Most were economic migrants seeking employment in the wartime economy. She joined a huge influx of Irish immigrants to Britain at that time. She never saw her child again, but left the institution and made a new life for herself in England. ![]() ![]() Staying could have meant lifelong imprisonment in one of the notorious Magdalene asylums, where “fallen women” were forced into unpaid labor.Įthna reached a convent in Liverpool and gave birth, and the nuns soon gave her newborn daughter up for adoption. Four years later, she became pregnant outside marriage and departed on a ferry to Liverpool, likely to avoid the possible consequences of staying in Ireland. Her grandmother was Kathleen Ethna Darcy (known as Ethna), who, in the early ‘40s, left Ballinamore aged 15 to seek work in Dublin.
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