Adoption Stories: What Happened Next

The series revisits some of the people we met in previous series to see how their lives have progressed. From disappointing DNA results to wrong information to being a secret, our people try again to find their blood relatives and be reunited with their natural parents, despite Irish adoption law withholding their birth files.

Geraldine McCarthy was adopted and when she approached her adoption agency to start a trace for her natural mother, she was told she had died. She found the family, who welcomed her warmly, but a DNA test proved they were not related; the nun in the adoption agency had found a woman with the same name as Geraldine's mother, but hadn't verified she was the right woman. In 2015, Geraldine did another DNA test with the family, to be doubly sure, and while this, too, was negative, it showed that she did have blood relatives, and not too far away, so the search for her mother was back on. Now, using the scant information from her DNA match, she has tracked down family members but they can't pinpoint her mother within their family. They are definitely related, but where is her mother?

Cliona Moore Cliona Moore was adopted and grew up in South Dublin. She imagined her natural parents would arrive and take her away, like in a fairy tale, and ran away - as far as the lane at the back of the house - so they could pick her up. After working around the world in the creative industry, she settled in Rosscarbery in Cork with the youngest of her three children, Isabella, after the death of her partner. It was then she decided to look for her natural mother and she contacted the adoption agency, which gave her non-identifying information about her parents. Using this, she trawled through the records in the General Register Office and found her birth cert and two women, either of whom may have been her mother, according to the information she had. Neither of them were.