The BC Irish Studies Program is proud to host the Boston premier of Margo Harkin’s documentary Stolen (2023), a “powerful and unflinching” (Irish Times) film featuring the accounts of women who had the misfortune to fall pregnant out of wedlock and “the horrendous treatment” meted out to those “who didn’t conform to the Catholic ideal of womanhood,” (Irish Independent). Over 80,000 unmarried mothers were incarcerated in mother and baby institutions run by nuns from 1922 to 1998. Most were cruelly separated from their babies after birth. Many of the children were adopted in Ireland or sent to the United States – rendered untraceable and unaware of their birth story. Others were fostered out as cheap farm labor from the age of six, often in circumstances abysmally devoid of care and love. At least 9,000 infants died in these institutions, a rate that, on occasion, was five times the national average infant mortality rate. Harkin’s film exposes the shocking details of a scandal that sparked a government inquiry and Report (2021). “This is the story of misogyny at a national level,”(Irish Examiner).

Following the movie, James Smith (Boston College) will moderate a Q&A session with Margo Harkin (director), film contributors Sarah-Anne Buckley (University of Galway, Co-Director of the Tuam Oral History Project) and Máiréad Enright (University of Birmingham), and Clair Wills (Cambridge University).

Copies of Clair Wills’ book, Missing Persons: or, My Grandmother’s Secret, will be available for purchase.

Stolen (2023) is a Besom / Wildfire co-production.

For more information, email irish.studies@bc.edu

Co-sponsored by BC Irish-Studies, the Institution for Liberal Arts, Jesuit Institute, English and History Departments, Film Studies, BC Law School Graduate and Global Programs, the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, and the Medical Humanities Program.

The event is free and open to the public.