ACTOR Patrick FitzSymons has cast himself in the most dramatic role of his life. The Belfast man is centre-stage in a looming court case against church and state agencies in the Republic allegedly involved in an illegal adoptions scandal. FitzSymons is one of the 126 people identified last year as having had their birth certificates and other documentation falsified, with the names of adoptive parents recorded as birth parents – and he is the first to go public.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said the scandal was “another chapter from the very dark history of our country” which had “robbed children, our fellow citizens, of their identity”. itzSymons, who is also a writer and producer and who has appeared in a number of top television series including Line Of Duty and Game Of Thrones, is on a mission to help ensure transparency and truth.
“I want no part of this seemingly ongoing conspiracy of shame and silence,” he tells me. “I want to live in a society that openly admits its past failings and makes whatever information it possesses promptly and freely available to those it concerns.”
The Republic’s Child And Family Agency, Tusla, has said the work involved in adoption information and tracing relatives is treated “with great sensitivity”. FitzSymons doesn’t agree.
The fact that his birth mother had attempted, in the last year of her life, to make contact with him was withheld from him, he alleges – and then he was also made aware of the existence of a biological sister, a woman who tragically went on to take her own life.
“I have no doubt that her adoption and issues related to her identity played a part in her mental deterioration,” he says. “The authorities could have made us aware of each other much earlier.
“Instead, all along, they told me what they wanted and when they wanted it.”
Fitzsymons’s birth mother was from Co Kerry; when her baby son was born out of wedlock she and his young father gave him up to the Dublin-based Catholic organisation St Patrick’s Guild, which arranged for his adoption by a childless couple in Northern Ireland, John FitzSymons and Patricia Bradley.
A 1963 graduate of Queen’s University Belfast (archaeology and ancient history) his first incarnation was as a singer/songwriter – with a group called The Rhythm Method – before stints as a corporate voice-over artist and a journalist with credits in the Sunday Life and the long-gone Belfast Review. From 1992 he worked mainly as a touring theatre actor, including the UK and the United States, but he also began to pick up work as a producer and presenter with UTV and BBC.
However, he also had a penchant for writing, which became a parallel career. In 2010 he returned to QUB to take an MA in Creative Writing, gaining a distinction. Two years later he was shortlisted for the PJ O’Connor radio drama aware for a play for RTE called Working For The Clampdown. Yet through all those years, and his entire childhood, FitzSymons had been celebrating his birthday on the wrong day.
“I had always been one day older than I thought I was,” he says. Regarding his adoption he adds: “My mother made the decision that I would be better with another couple because, I suppose, of the stigma of having ‘a bast**d’ child. It was deemed the right thing to place a child with a childless couple. It was seen as making people happy.”
Decades later it was a misunderstanding over a sentence in a letter which lead to him being told he was adopted.
“My adopted mother and I were forever falling out, partly about religion. She possibly felt she had not properly fulfilled her promise to bring me up as a Catholic – because that had been the only stipulation. Rather cryptically, in a letter, I had written something along the lines ‘if you want to talk to kids you should talk to people who have had kids of their own’. I can’t remember what the context of that was.
“But one evening I was just having a regular visit with her and she asked if I had ever had the intuition that I was adopted. I just said ‘no’ and she said: ‘There’s something I need to tell you’.
“Well, the bottom fell out of my world. She said it was only fair that I did know. Perhaps she had been planning to tell me anyway.”
Now 57, FitzSymons is an increasingly well-known figure in television. He played the character Reginald Lannister in Game of Thrones but also produced the biographical TV movie of Irish comedian Dave Allen, Dave Allen at Peace.
And, of course, he has starred in the massive hit Line of Duty, alongside fellow northern thespian Adrian Dunbar.His children’s books have included Vivienne And The Giant’s Boot and Joseph And The Rope Bridge (National Trust) and just three years ago, aged 54, he recieved the New Talent Award from NI Screen. Currently, FitzSymons is developing two feature-film scripts with NI Screen and is also a published poet, with work in journals including The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review and Open Ear.Yet there is no sense of self-promotion in his decision to talk publicly about his experiences.
“When I was contacted by Tusla last summer and told that I was one of the 126 it was clear to me, given the turmoil I and my family had endured over the past two decades, that I should stand up and be counted.
“But still I agonised about the possible consequences. My adoptive parents – both now dead – had loved me and provided for me as best they could. Would I want anything that might reflect badly on them? Of course not.
“My natural parents – my birth mother in particular – had endured the institutional shaming and disapproval of Ireland at that time to do what she thought to be the right thing.
“The children of my full blood sister – utterly blameless in every respect – had already been devastated by their mother’s suicide and on no account should have to suffer the opening of old wounds. “But I thought too of the pain that I and every single individual touched by these events had had to endure in silence – a silence born of the original conspiracy of church and state. No-one is allowed to talk, no-one is allowed to be honest.
“Documents can be forged and everyone must play their part so that the so-called ‘sins’ of all can be quietly erased. And I’m just one of 126.”
