Ms Rosemary Adaser:

As Carole said, we met about two years ago at meetings of the Irish Women Survivors' Support Network. I remember the very first time I went to one of those meetings. I was scared because it was a survivor network for Irish women, and I felt Irish but was scared that I would get the inevitable sidelong glances and "What are you doing here?" attitude. On that occasion they were very nice to me, but what was exciting was that at the grand old age of 56 I met two other mixed-race Irish women, Evon and Carole. I was born and bred in Ireland and left in my twenties, but that occasion two years ago was the first time I had ever met a mixed-race Irish woman with my history. My history - nobody else's - mine. We came together and thought "Well, hold on." Evon and Carole were equally surprised. They had not heard about me and I am actually older than they are. Not by much, of course; let us just keep it in proportion. They had never met me either. We kept going to these survivors' meetings and we would have coffees, and it kept coming around to "Tell us about yourself and where you were." I was gobsmacked when I realised that they were over in Sligo. I mean, who goes to Sligo as far as I am concerned? But then we found out that we had people in Mayo and Drogheda.

On a more serious note, what was really important was that when we shared our stories, we realised there was a common thread. We realised that it did not really matter if I was in Kilkenny or somebody else was in Drogheda because the pattern of behaviour towards and treatment of us was so consistent. We decided then to move on to the next stage. We used word of mouth and contacted the people we knew, who contacted the people they knew. We held a couple of meetings in London and a couple in Dublin. The biggest issue we identified was actually our isolation. I alluded to the fact that I had not met anybody like me before. It was the isolation that was so important.

When we came to Dublin it was so moving because it was the first time the members who are sitting in the Visitors' Gallery had come together as a community. They too had never met each other and it was the first time we had sat around a table and looked at each other, and we felt a connection. There was no "Where do you come from?" question. I looked upon my sisters and brothers, they looked upon me, and we did not have to say an awful lot, actually. We carried the same pain - that was what really struck us. At that meeting we recounted stories - for example, of the nuns showing films of missionaries going to see the savages. We remembered being told, "That is what you are." It was not about raising money and the good work they were doing but, "Look at that - they are savages, and that is what you are." This kind of insult that we grew up with from age zero to the day we left Ireland was so common for all of us. The attitude was as if we did not exist for them.

A couple of things that we realise, as a new community, is that we have never been accepted by Irish society. We have never felt safe in Ireland. That is really important. We are not confident of the same protections in law as other Irish people. We do not have the same rights to health, wealth and social capital as other Irish people. The vast majority of us have not fulfilled our true potential. There is such a commonality in our experiences. They are all racist, and that is basically what we are talking about. We confirmed that this racism was endemic throughout all the institutions attended by our community. It was quite an extraordinary revelation to us that the same pattern of behaviour towards us as infants, children and adults ran right across Irish society, starting in the institutions. There was a clear pattern which could only be explained under the internationally acknowledged concept of institutionalised racism.