THREE Irish siblings who were abandoned as babies and discovered each other later in life say a fourth sibling could also have been left in Newry.
The remarkable story of the three ‘foundling’ siblings started in Belfast on January 16 1962, where an infant David McBride was found in the front seat of a car.
Wrapped up warmly in a tartan bag, a surprised woman brought him to her kitchen table before he was taken to a hospital in the city then on to a children’s home in Larne.
Three years later in May, John Dowling was left in a phone box in Drogheda where he was discovered by a local journalist.
Police then brought him to the Lourdes Hospital before he was adopted.
Another three years passed before Helen Ward was left as a baby in a phone box around 20 miles away in Dundalk, where a passing lorry driver brought her to Louth County Hospital and then to St Joseph’s Baby Home in Co Meath.
All three enjoyed happy upbringings with adopted families, but for decades they had no idea they weren’t alone or who their parents were.
After a DNA test, David and Helen first were first matched as full siblings in 2020 and had a joyful reunion that was profiled for ITV’s Long Lost Family programme.
It was revealed their Catholic mother, originally from Kerry, had been having a decades-long affair with a married Protestant shop owner and band leader from Dublin, who also had 14 children of his own.
The next twist came when John Dowling’s daughter Donna saw the ITV programme and immediately realised the similarities in her father’s story and how David’s walk and hands were similar.
Following a happy first meeting of all three siblings in Banbridge, they helped each other to piece together their backstory.
Their father had died in 1993, aged 82, while their mother (who was 17 years his junior) had died aged 90 around 2017.
Their children believe the societal taboos at the time, both the extra-marital affair and the religious divide, went some way to explaining why she would abandon her children which she had between the ages of 34 and 41.
Four of their father’s children from his marriage have since passed away, but the three siblings have got to know two others who had been aware of the extra-marital affair but not that it had resulted in children.
Speaking to RTÉ, the trio have since been told of a newspaper clipping about a baby who was abandoned in a phone box in Newry in 1963, which they suspect could be a fourth sibling.
David said: “We do think there’s a fourth, there was a baby found in 1963 in Newry. Again, the road from Dublin to Belfast and the circumstances of the baby being found and the background to it seem to fit in line with our three findings.
“So we do believe that this baby may be connected. It may not be connected but we have got a strong feeling.”
John said that although he had initially been reluctant to take a DNA test, he encouraged the potential fourth sibling to find out the truth.
“Take a chance. Take a leap of faith and maybe go and get in contact with us,” he said.
“It can be done in privacy, and maybe get DNA done and we can rule it out.”
Helen said: “It’s just to give another foundling an opportunity…we have found there have been so many barriers in front of us trying to get information.
“Whether we are part of their family or not, that conversation could either rule it out or we’ll welcome him in.”
Despite the trauma of the children being separated at birth in such circumstances, the siblings remain sympathetic towards their birth parents and the choices they faced at the time.
Helen said: “Sometimes I think it’s very hard to imagine how a mother, after having had a baby, because I was only two days old – would dress you in a beautiful handmade dress, wrap you up with a cardigan, wrap you up in a blanket…put you in a bag with a bottle beside you and put you in the end of a phone box…it is very hard to get your head around it. As a mother myself, I just cannot get over it.”
She added: “There was a lot of care and though put into where we are all placed. I was very close to Louth County Hospital, John was very close to the Lourdes in Drogheda and David was very close to a police station so they knew that somebody would find us and care for us pretty quickly.”
David commented: “I think we would have sympathy for her, the situation here is that our birth mother was obviously unmarried, she was a Catholic.
“Our father was married with quite a few children and was a Protestant. They met and fell in love and they broke all the taboos in the country at the time, the culture would not have accepted us as children.
“So it must have been a very difficult situation for both of them.”
Feeling they would have been shunned as children for their background, David noted that they had all been well fed and healthy by the time they were found.
“The only way they could (give us a good life) was to leave us in telephone boxes and a car, because at that time it was a criminal offence and they would have ended up going to prison.”
The siblings have now asked anyone with relevant information on the baby abandoned in Newry in 1963 to get in touch via email at Family3.info@gmail.com.
