Parallel Story #12

Margaret Stephen & Sally Mulready OBE

Sudan & Ireland

This parallel story was put forward by Herstory and AkiDwA for Movement

Born and raised in Sudan, Margaret Stephen was separated from her mother as a teenager due to the outbreak of war and forced into marriage. Eventually reuniting with her family, she risked her life crossing the border into Uganda where she lived in a refugee camp for 14 years. There, along with a handful of other women, she fought for the right of Sudanese people to remain in the camp when officers were trying to force them to return to Sudan. Now in Ireland, Margaret is currently working toward the creation of campaigns to help the women of the refugee camp that she once found herself in. Born in St. Patrick’s Mother and Baby home in Ireland, Sally Mulready was separated from her mother when she was 4 to be raised in St. Philomena’s Home. Upon emigrating to the UK aged 16, she was able to receive an education and start a political career that would lead her to a seat on the Council of State in Ireland, advising President Michael D. Higgins. A co-founder of the Irish Women Survivors Network and past Director of the Irish Elderly Advice Network, Sally has spent decades working for Irish emigrants abroad and her community at large. Despite their tough starts to life, both Margaret and Sally have dedicated much of their time to the improvement of the lives of those around them.

Margaret’s story is first. To skip to Sally’s click here.

Margaret’s Story

TW; violence, assault, rape, exploitation

I was born in 1972 and grew up in Sudan. We lived on a farm and had a big family; two boys and four girls. When my father passed away when we were children, my uncle came and he took the eldest girl, my big sister, so at 8-years old I was left as the eldest child to my mother.

When war broke out in Sudan in 1983, I had to stop going to school. Shortly after, I was caught out in the town of my uncle and separated from my mother, and there was no way for me to get back to her. I was in a bad situation and I was married off to a soldier when I was 16. I was three or four months pregnant when my husband had to go off to fight and I was left on my own. There were no cars or transport anymore, so people were walking for about two weeks to get into town. My mother was telling people who were coming in to please find me and look after me. So, a few people found me, and I went with them back home and I had the baby with my mother beside me. Soon after, we had to go into the woods and cut wood to make a house because what we were living in wouldn’t have been classed as a house - you had to kneel to get through the door. We dug gold and sold it and for a while life wasn’t as bad.

In 1994, I was at the border of Uganda and Sudan. I had TB, and I was there for treatment with my son and younger brother. Then fighting broke out again and my mother joined us. By that time there were men with guns raping women, so I told my mother to take the children across the border to Uganda. If these men didn’t like you, they could throw you in jail and take the children away and this guy who had been harassing me was planning on taking the two kids. I told my mother I’d follow later. I had to swim in the Nile to cross into Uganda to join them. In 1998 I was reunited with my sisters after searching for them for a long time. We were so happy because at that time if you couldn’t find your relatives you just had to assume that they were dead.

I stayed in Uganda in a refugee camp for about 14 years. I got married to another man and he began the process of getting us to America, but it never happened because some people had stolen our form and went to America under our name. So, we went to Kampala and stayed on a street outside the office for a week with no food or water to try and get someone to sort out our problem. We filled out more forms, returned to the camp and then got a rejection letter. There was no interview or anything, just rejection. Then my husband disappeared. No one knew where he was. Then someone said they’d seen him on a bus going to Kenya. He disappeared forever; he never came back. So, I was left in the camp, just me and my son.

Life became worse for me then. Everyone knew I was alone and anyone passing by looking for sex or for a fight could break in and did. One day there was a man who was getting married and he asked me to contribute money to it and I said for what!? I said why should I contribute the money? No! And then I got beaten so badly that they had to take me to the hospital in an ambulance. Life was hard, I was cutting grass to sell for money, I was broken.

Then in and around the time that the civil war in Sudan ended, in 2005, the camp officers began saying that the Sudanese inhabitants had to go back! But we’d been in the camp so long that we didn’t have anyone back in Sudan anymore. Where were we going to go? So, me and three other women went to talk to the officers, but they would only speak to Congolese people, so we had to wait until they went for a break to talk to them. We talked to this woman called Vivian and I told her she had to listen to our problems. I had a big fight with her about it. She called the police and we told them people needed to listen to our problems. They rang the commander and then it went to the office in Kampala and after that a white man from Geneva came to interview us and I told him how long I was there, and about my husband, and that I couldn’t pay my son’s school fees anymore. I told him I couldn’t go back to Sudan because I had nobody there. So, after my big fight, they built an office in the camp. People didn’t have to go into the town to the office and sleep on the street for a few days anymore, they could just go to the office in the camp. That building is there today because of our fight.

Then I was going to go to Canada. We filled out a form and we got our letters and then a man who I knew from the camp came to me and he was saying ‘congratulations’ and I showed him my letter. I didn’t know then, but he stole my number and wrote his own letter to the office in Kampala and told them that I was his wife and that I was running away with his son! When I went for my interview, I waited on the bus for the man with the list of names to call out my name, but he never did, and I was so confused. After a lot of frustration, I found someone who could translate English and I told him my problem and he talked to someone and that’s when I heard about the letter the man from the camp had written. I told them that I knew him from the camp but that he was not in my family. We were sent back to the camp.

Sometime later, a woman came and said she knew all of this wasn’t my fault and that she’d help me. They were going to give me an interview to go to a new country, Ireland. I had never heard of Ireland, they told me it was near the UK, in the water and it was cold. Within six months from then everything was done, and I came to Ireland with my son. We got on a bus to Mayo and we were there for six weeks before we went to Kilkenny. Our whole group settled in Kilkenny where we were given English classes; I’ve been going for nearly four years now.

In Africa you don’t get any help from the government or the community. If you’re sick you die, but here, there are people who can help you. It can be difficult to find work in Ireland though, especially when you’re on your own like I was in the beginning. For five years I did work experience in Oxfam. Now I’m a housekeeper in a hotel. I was able to go back and see my mammy in 2018 and when I was leaving, she was sad and said she may never see me again. I told her I could come back any time. I told her I look after myself now and I could see her any time.

It's not all positive; I met a man when I was in the post office one time recently and he asked where I was from and when I was going back. I told him if I go back, I’ll let him know and that he can go with me. He was a middle-aged man. Most people know now though that people from Africa are people too. Our children are going to school together and they’re learning from each other.

Being a migrant changed my life. Back in Africa you work so hard just to find food and survive, and your mind gets blocked, but since I’ve come to Ireland, I’ve learned new things and my memories have begun to come back. I’ve done a lot of community work here in Kilkenny, but I really want to help the women in Uganda in those refugee camps. I feel like I can’t do too much because I’m trying to look after myself here with rent and food, but those women need help and that’s what I’m going to do.

Sally’s Story

TW; Mother & Baby Home

Growing up in Ireland

Sally was born in 1950 in Dublin, Ireland and because her mother, Sheila, was unwed, she spent the first four years of her life with her in St. Patrick’s Mother & Baby Home on the Navan Road. Sheila, desperate to remain with her baby, worked hard as a domestic servant there in return for her keep in the Home, until one day out of the blue she was told that Sally was going the following day, that they could no longer keep a growing child in the situation that she was in. When they transferred Sally to St. Philomena’s, run by the Daughters of Charity, it took some time to settle her, as she was traumatised by the separation from her mother whom she had been very close to. Sheila stayed in the area for as long as she could to be near her daughter, but eventually, when Sally was six, she left for England to find work.

Sally remembered St. Philomena’s as a ‘very comfortable place, but they had a nun in charge who was a very violent woman.’ The nuns looked after the children, physically, although ‘there wasn’t a lot of TLC. They weren’t naturally comforting or encouraging. They fed us well, made sure we looked well and sent us to school. I would say that, having buried, in the way young children are forced to do, the trauma of my separation from my mother, the first 4 years of my time in the industrial school had a lot of positives. The negatives were down to that one nun.’

It was normal practice for children to be transferred from St. Philomena’s to St. Mary’s, Lakeland when they reached the ages of 7 or 8[1], however this came as a complete shock to Sally and the girls in St. Philomena’s.

‘…all of a sudden one night, we were told that we were being transferred to a new institution. The fact that we were taken overnight was really shocking for us. We were taken by ambulances up to the next institution at St. Mary’s. Thirty of us were brought there together. They had a list with our names, and we were put into these different groups and it was a challenge then for who was the strongest, who was the fittest, who was in charge. I was born with one hand, so I immediately became the subject of attention. Even the nuns came to have a look…’

Emigration to England

Sally left institutional care on the 29 January 1966. Her mother was working as a waitress in England, so after a short stay with an aunt, Sally took the boat to join her there. Anticipating her arrival, Sheila had found a flat for the two of them in North London, but Sally found it difficult to live in just one room, having had lived in an institution for 16 years. With very little education, she discovered that she was quite unemployable in England so when her mother became a chief cook in a care home Sally went along with her to help out, ‘but a social worker spotted me and busied herself then with sorting me out. She took me to an employment agency, and they found me a job on the electricity board, and I worked there as a junior clerk for nine years.’

When Harold Wilson of the Labour Party became Prime Minister in 1964, he placed significant emphasis on the importance of education for all and luckily, Sally felt the benefit of that. ‘I basically got a national school education as an older teen and then took a few very menial exams and worked my way up – it took about eleven years - and then I eventually got a degree in history.’

Birmingham 6 Campaign and Political Work

Sally’s advocacy work began in the 1980s with the Birmingham Six. In 1975, six Irishmen living in Birmingham had been sentenced to life imprisonment following their false convictions for the Birmingham pub bombings of the previous year which had been attributed to the Provisional Irish Republican Army. After watching a documentary on the case, Sally became convinced of their innocence and worked with a handful of others to establish the first meeting of the London campaign, where she was elected Secretary. Their work complimented the campaigning being done by the wives of the men and numerous other individuals and groups. The campaign was ultimately successful and led to the eventual release of the men in 1991. Two years later, in 1993, Cruel Fate written by Sally and one the six men, Hugh Callaghan, was published detailing Hugh’s life and the circumstances which saw him arrested? Sally continued to support the men in the years that followed by campaigning for a change to Pension entitlements which allowed them, and all victims of miscarriages of justice, to access full State Pensions.

Sally’s political life did not end with the campaign. A member of the British Labour Party since 1980, she became an elected Labour Party Councillor in Chatham Ward in the London Borough of Hackney in 1997, and later, Speaker of Hackney from 2010 to 2011.

Another memorable time in Sally’s political life was when she was appointed to the Council of State by President Michael D. Higgins. The opportunity to be a member of the Council was a great honour and privilege. “I witnessed our President and heard him speak and address audiences with graceful elegance, conviction, always moving and carried out with great humour.” Along with such eminent people as Michael Farrell, Civil Rights Campaigner, Judge Catherine McGuiness, the President had a very progressive group of people on his Council of State. “I loved working with both of them.” Jack Lane, historian, says “Sally has been involved in the Irish Community for all her professional life and leaves a legacy that continues to give great benefit to that community through the many organisations and that she helped establish and sustain.”

The Irish Elderly Advice Network

Beyond politics, Sally became involved in community advocacy in the 1990s. By that time, it had become evident that there was a lot of poverty and destitution amongst the older Irish population living in private sector housing in London. Following the death of three elderly Irish people in their flats in Camden in 1993 (deaths that went unnoticed for some time), a group of elderly Irish women came together and established the Irish Elderly Advice Network (IEAN). After she left the electricity board, Sally got a job with the Islington council where she saw an advert for the IEAN –the purpose of the job was to seek out and devise a support network for elderly Irish people. She was the first member of staff hired. Initially only servicing people in the Camden area, the organisation has since grown to provide services nationwide. Sally spent the first three or four years developing the organisation and today the IEAN have 6,000 people on their mailing list. The essence of their work was, and still is, to provide advice, support, and empowerment to elderly Irish people. They also developed a choir which has been running for fifteen years and for which Sally has written numerous plays, the latest being The Nun’s Chorus which brings in her experience of living with nuns.

The Irish Women’s Survivor Network

In 1999, States of Fear[2]- a documentary produced by Mary Raftery which described the abuse suffered by children between 1930s - 1970s in the state childcare system of Ireland – aired, and everyone was talking about it. Because of the attention it got, the then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, made an apology to the survivors of Irish institutional care and once that apology was made it led to a redress scheme being proposed and a huge investigation in the form of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse which was established in 2000. Sally monitored the coverage of it:

‘…I rang up the relevant governmental Departments in Dublin to find out what plans they had for survivors not living in Ireland and I got a very watery, disinterested response – it was clear they hadn’t thought of survivors outside of Ireland. They told me initially that this investigation was not going to involve survivors living abroad and I told them that that can’t be and then with a number of other colleagues who had been in the institutions we fought for survivors from the UK to be accepted, and they agreed that it had to include everyone who was in the institutions…’

Along with other survivors, Sally helped set up the Irish Women’s Survivor Network in London in 2002. Her role was to monitor the government’s initiatives, plans and statements and report it back to the group. It was clear that survivors needed support networks and funding. It was obvious to Sally that they needed to employ professionals to support the work being done, so she managed to secure the Irish Government’s agreement for the creation of five Survivor Outreach Services around Britain so that they could provide advice and support to survivors and help them make their application to the redress board. Working alongside Sally through all of this, and ‘a true voice of support to the survivors’ was Phyllis Morgan. Both women had grown up together since their time in the Mother and Baby Home right through to St. Philomena’s and St. Mary’s.

These networks were survivor-run, and the one mistake Sally regrets making is that she feels she ‘should not have taken on a role that a civil servant could’ve done better. They would’ve had no pressure. They would’ve just been doing a job, whereas I was on the one hand a survivor looking for support the same as everyone else, but also, I was a kind of leader monitoring the work of survivors and monitoring what the Irish government were saying and what survivors wanted.’ When the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes and Certain Related Matters was published in January 2021, reflecting on her past mistake, Sally sent a letter to the relevant ministers with regard to this inquiry to advise them that they should appoint a support unit run by professionals as an advocacy service for survivors. From her own experience, she explained that there should be ‘a well-structured, independent unit set up that is able to give proper advice to survivors.’

A lifetime of organising, leading, and care for others has led Sally to touch the lives of so many people both in Britain and in Ireland. She has built a legacy of strength, warmth and vibrancy within the older Irish community in London. Through conversations with her family, it is clear that the profound sadness of her childhood separation from her mother was something that drove her to ever strive for love and for justice for those so consistently overlooked by those with power. Sally is seen by her husband, her four children and ten grandchildren as a constant source of love, support and kindness - and of outstanding courage. This is perhaps her most precious and enduring legacy.

Special thanks to Sally’s family who were a great help in putting her story together.

[1] The Journal, 11 Oct 2015. See: https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/mother-and-baby-home-st-patricks-2380868-Oct2015/ [accessed 6 May 2021].

[2] ‘Revealing a System of Abuse,’ RTÉ Archives, 2010. Accessed on 16 Feb. 2021: https://www.rte.ie/archives/category/society/2019/0424/1045440-mary-raftery-states-of-fear/.

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