Andrew Pierce told David Hennessy about his book Finding Margaret which details his search for his Irish birth mother.
Andrew Pierce is a columnist, consultant editor for the Daily Mail and television presenter on GB News.
He is a regular on Good Morning Britain and also appears on Jeremy Vine.
In the book Finding Margaret: Solving the Mystery of my Birth Mother, he details the search for his Irish birth.
Adopted into the Pierce family in Swindon as a boy of nearly three, Andrew had originally been named as Patrick James Connolly.
It was as he approached 50 years of age that Andrew resolved to find his birth mother and, with the help of journalistic friends Jane Moore and Amanda Platell, he would track her down and find her living in the Bromsgrove suburb of Birmingham.
It took almost half a century but he met the woman who brought him into the world, Margaret Lennon (nee Connolly) from Mayo.
They would meet once at a British Home Stores in Birmingham but a second such meeting would never occur with Andrew and Margaret making arrangements time after time and Margaret failing to show.
The next time he would spend time with Margaret would be as she spent time in a care home suffering with dementia. She would then pass away in 2021 and it was thanks to COVID that Andrew was able to attend the funeral thanks to face masks as he would not have intruded on that day for her other children who, of course, knew nothing of him.
The mystery of the identity of his birth father remains.
Although Margaret told the orphanage his father was James ‘Jimmy Coffey’ a pipe layer from Galway who was killed in a road accident when Andrew was weeks old, Margaret told him nothing in their one meeting about who his father was, saying she could not remember anything.
Andrew has since travelled to Ireland and met his blood relative and there are plans to seek to answer the questions around his father.
He has also made contact with Margaret’s other children, his half siblings.
How do you look back on the whole experience of this journey that certainly had its highs and lows?
“I’m glad I did it.
“You live with it.
“It nags away at you.
“Even though I had a fantastically happy childhood with my family, there was always something different about me.
“I was always quite extrovert.
“I was the one who was always on stage at school but complete contrast to my brother and two sisters.
“And although I was happy I often wondered on my birthday, ‘I wonder if she’s thinking about me’.
“And I think she was calling to me right from the beginning because my first newspaper job was the Gloucester Echo in Cheltenham, the orphanage was in Cheltenham.
“And my second job was in Birmingham and at the time I was on the Birmingham Mail, I didn’t know it but Margaret lived in Birmingham.
“It was as if she was calling me.
“I’d assumed, because I was born in Bristol, that she lived in the Bristol area but clearly, even then, Margaret was covering her tracks the whole time.
“She was a nurse in Birmingham.
“She had the baby- Patrick, me- in Bristol.
“She put me in an orphanage in Cheltenham and then she went back to her life in Birmingham.
“There was an orphanage in Birmingham.
“She could have had me in the orphanage in Birmingham.
“It would have been easier to see me but people might have seen her going in and out and she was always worried that people would find out so I’d always had it in the back of my mind, ‘Who is she?’
“But it was my dad that swung it for me before he disappeared into dementia.
“He’d say to me, ‘You should try and find her because I think she loved you because she used to visit you in the orphanage’.
“So she didn’t just dump me in the orphanage and never saw me again.
“She’d visit when she could, I don’t know how often and it would have been quite a performance because she was a nurse.
“She had no car so she was going on the bus or the train.
“She was visiting me until I was two and a half and then it must have been a terrible wrench to give me up.
“But she met somebody- another Patrick, decides to get married and I think she made the right decision, it was her chance of happiness.
“So thinking about what Dad had said, as I got closer to my 50th I thought, ‘If I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it’.
“So I decided to try and find her thinking she’d been 16 or 17 when she had me.
“Imagine my amazement when I discover from the file that she was about 29.
“It’s clearly a lie.
“You can’t be about 29.
“You’re either 29 or you’re not.
“And as I looked at it, I was with Amanda, and I said, ‘This isn’t right’.
“And the social worker said right at the beginning, ‘This is a very complicated file’.
“Why? She didn’t want to be found.
“And of course then I discovered that Margaret was just a few weeks from her 35th birthday when she had me.
“I’m glad I did it.
“I wanted to know what she looked like.
“When I saw her walking past the taxi, and I knew it was her, I just instinctively knew it was her.
“And I thought, ‘Oh my God’.
“I was 48.
“It was the first time I’d ever seen my flesh and blood.
“It’s a really strange feeling.
“I wanted to reach out of the taxi and touch her.
“And I thought, ‘God, I’ve got her cheekbones’.
“And I remember thinking, ‘Am I going to turn this woman’s life upside down?’
“I hope not but I think I did, I think I really did.
“I think she’d probably have preferred it if I’d never darkened her door.
“She didn’t want her children to know.
“She was paranoid about it.
“She said to me, ‘You’re a product of sin. It’s so shameful’.
“And if she was still alive, I wouldn’t have written this book.
“If my mum was still alive, Betty, who adopted me, I wouldn’t have written this book.
“My only regret, in truth, is if I’ve caused any distress to her family.
“They had just no idea.
“And I think Anne, the daughter in particular, was sad because she thought, ‘Why didn’t mum unburden it? Why did she keep that a secret for so long? Why didn’t she share it with me?’
“I think she was hurt in that respect but hurt that her mum didn’t feel she could share it.
“But I did say to Anne, ‘Don’t love your mum any less. She’s the same woman. She just chose not to share it for whatever reasons. Don’t love her any less because she was clearly a remarkable woman’.
“I mean, quite a woman.
“But since the book came out, I’ve been to Carrigeen, Baltinglass.
“That’s where Margaret’s brother Johnny lived.
“She was brought up on this very poor, small holding in County Mayo and in the 50s, because so many people were leaving Ireland, the government gave Margaret’s family a farm in Carrigeen and they have still got it.
“Margaret’s brother Johnny farmed it and it’s now farmed by his son, Sean.
“And they heard about the book and they said, ‘Here’s cousin Andrew’.
“And I got my first St Patrick’s Day card ever from them.
“And I got a Christmas card, ‘to cousin Andrew’, and they’re absolutely over the moon about it.
“And a couple of times in the adoption file she sent money for my board and lodge, as I recall it was something like 10 shillings every two weeks, and she sent it from the farm in Carrigeen and it just says, ‘Connolly, Carrigeen, Baltinglass’ which was how we found Margaret in the first place.
“Jane Moore, who’s on The Sun, who’s on Loose Women, she just got completely stuck and then she remembered, ‘farm, Carrigeen, Baltinglass’.
“So she looked for a farming association in Carrigeen, Baltinglass.
“There was one and the contact was a man called Sean Connolly.
“What were the chances? My cousin.”
You have got a whole Irish family. Do you feel Irish now? Or did you always?
“I did.
“All I knew about my early life was mum and dad always told me I was adopted and I knew I was Patrick James.
“I didn’t know I was Connolly.
“If I’d asked, they’d have told me but I didn’t ask.
“I never saw my birth certificate until I was in my 30s.
“But I felt Irish and I don’t know why I felt Irish.
“As I got older I just thought, ‘She’s definitely Irish’.
“So Patrick was my name.
“And then when I saw my name Connolly, when I found my birth certificate when I was in my early 30s I thought, ‘She’s so Irish’ and I think without a doubt, my birth father, we don’t know who he is yet, is Irish too.”
It is still in some doubt who your father is, is your feeling that it is Jimmy Coffey who Margaret named as your father and who had died from an accident?
“I think it’s Coffey.
“I’ve met the Coffey family and we’re going to do a DNA test.
“Now, they’re confused.
“They don’t think I look like Jimmy Coffey who was the one who was killed in the crash who Margaret said was my father.”
Someone said you look more like his brother Patrick Coffey, isn’t that right?
“I was at the lunch and one of them just lent across and went, ‘Jimmy Coffey is not your father’.
“I said, ‘Why do you say that?’
“He said, ‘Because my dad is your father. You are the image of my father’.
“So whether DNA would be able to establish whether it’s Jimmy or Patrick Coffey but that would that be why she called me Patrick.
“And they tell the story that their father was engaged to a girl and he took the ring off her and married the woman who was to be their mother, was the woman he took the ring off of Margaret?”
The shame is Margaret couldn’t or wouldn’t give you answers when you asked her..
“She knew.
“She knew everything about her marriage to Patrick Lennon.
“She knew about her children but she just couldn’t remember anything about Cheltenham.
“And I remember looking her in the eye and saying, ‘Who’s James Coffey?’
“She didn’t miss a beat, ‘Who?’
“Tried Jimmy Coffey, ‘Who?’
“I said, ‘Margaret, you told the nuns he was my father..’
“’Did I now? I can’t remember’.
“If she’d been 17, she done a knee trembler, she might not remember the fella’s name but she conceived me, I think, when she was 34.
“She was a qualified nurse.
“She knew who he was and I think fell madly in love with him, whoever he was.
“Maybe was married.
“Maybe he was a doctor or maybe he broke her heart and ran off with another woman.”
Many people have written to Andrew with their theories or suspicions about who his father is or is not.
“But all of them want me to have a DNA test to resolve it which I will do.”
The revelation for me was the place your mother gave birth, St Raphael’s.
It seemed to be along the same lines as an Irish mother and baby home or Magdalene Laundry but in England. I didn’t know such things existed..
“It was just shock after shock.
“God only knows what went on in that home.
“Something terrible.
“I had to find St. Raphael’s. And there it was.
“And I thought, ‘Oh my God’.
“Having watched Philomena, which I found very hard to watch and this was after I’d found Margaret and there’s that scene when the little boy is taken away and the mother’s in the laundry, it was just horrible for me because I suspect one day Margaret went to feed me in a mother and baby home and I’d just gone.
“That’s probably what happened to her.
“These are the questions I’d wanted her to answer.
“It was laundry and they made the mothers go to church every Sunday, heavily pregnant, so the world could see that they were women of shame.
“Just cruel, isn’t it?
“But people say, why am I still a Catholic?
“Well just because some nuns acted very badly doesn’t make everything I was brought up to believe any different.
“But I was lucky.
“I was only in the home for five weeks and then maybe Margaret saw how terrible it was and got me into the orphanage.
“And I think I’ve been fair to the nuns.
“And I’ve been fair to Margaret.
“Some people think, ‘How could you be so nice to your mother?’ particularly as I went to see her three or four times in Birmingham, she didn’t show up and that was crucifying.
“I mean, it was so hard.
“First time it happened Jane Moore said, ‘There must be a genuine reason, for her not to have turned up would be cruel.
“And then when it happens a second, third, fourth time, she’d just done her Catholic duty and she couldn’t face seeing me again.
“I kept saying to her, Just say you don’t want to see me again’.
“’I’ll see you’.
“’I’ll see you’.
“She had such a lovely Irish accent.
“She said, ‘You’ve got questions to ask and you’re entitled to answers’.”
Did you feel rejected again by her repeated no shows?
“It did feel like that actually and that’s when this priest said to me, ‘We’ve got to find Patrick’.
“I said, ‘Well, I haven’t been Patrick for many years’.
“He said, ‘No, Patrick is still tucked away inside’.
“I hadn’t thought about it.
“She walked away from Patrick when he was two and a half.
“How did that little boy ever relate to that, the lady he is calling mummy: Suddenly she’s gone.
“And did the nuns say ‘she never loved you’? ‘She didn’t care’.
“Maybe they did.
“Maybe they didn’t.
“And then a new couple come into your life.
“It took me ages to call my dad dad.
“I used to call him man for months apparently.
“So Patrick’s rejected and then she rejects me again and that’s when I took this therapy.”
It brought back the memories and the nightmares, didn’t it?
“It did bring back the nightmares and particularly that one of this sort of ethereal woman- You can’t see her- pushing a pram.
“And you can’t see the child but it was definitely Patrick in there.
“And I think it was Margaret looking for somewhere for us to live.
“But the nanny goat is the big one.
“I’d forgotten about the nanny goat but I remember I used to wake up in a cold sweats screaming the house down.
“We only had a tiny little house.
“My parents were in that little box room I used to share with my brother within seconds.
“And all I could see was this sort of colour glass and a nanny goat staring down at me.
“It was the paschal lamb but somehow, as a child, as a little boy in the orphanage- It must have been stained glass windows in the dormitory or something- it represented, manifested something evil and terrible and scary.
“And of course night time in the dormitory was pretty scary and if you wet the bed, and I wet the bed all the time, you were in big trouble.
“I had to have this therapy.”
You said something there and it’s in the book as well. You spoke about Patrick or someone else. It’s that how you feel: You are Andrew and you have left Patrick behind?
“I’ve got to get out of it.
“I always speak of Patrick as a third person because that was the point of the therapy.
“I had to link Patrick and Andrew together.
“Now I’m quite reconciled to the fact Andrew is Patrick and Patrick is Andrew.”
Was there also catharsis in the writing of the book?
“Absolutely, much more than I ever thought.
“Sometimes I had to stop and sometimes I sobbed.
“When I did the audio recording of the book, there was a couple of times where I had to stop because it was making me cry and it wasn’t self pity.
“It was probably tears for Patrick but also regret that Margaret hadn’t been more forthcoming.
“The sad thing is we could have been mates.
“I didn’t want another mum.
“I didn’t need another mum but I just wanted to be able to talk to her about things.
“The morning of my civil partnership, my mum said to Amanda, ‘Has Andrew ever tried to find his birth mother?’
“(She could have said), ‘Not only has he tried to find her. He found her and I knocked on the bloody door’.
“But of course she did the right thing. She lied.
“And when I told my sister that I found Margaret, she started bawling her eyes out.
“And I said, ‘You pissed off? Are you disappointed?’
“She said, ‘No, I’m just glad you didn’t tell mum’.”
Have you forgiven yourself, if forgiveness is necessary, for, as you put it in the book, breaking a teenage promise to your adopted mother?
“I have and it was a big promise to mum.
“I think she would have quite understood why I did it.
“She’d have been secretly quite pleased that there was no relationship between me and Margaret.
“What I learned most of all writing the book was, if I needed it, I had the best mum and dad ever.
“They couldn’t be replaced.
“And I’m sorry if I caused Margaret grief and distress at the end.
“I probably did a bit but there are consequences, aren’t there, in everything we do and she did say to Amanda at the time, ‘I’ll see him because it’s his right’.”
And have you forgiven Margaret for being evasive like she was? Again maybe forgiveness isn’t the right word, have you made peace with it?
“I’ve made peace with it.
“I don’t need to forgive her because I understand why she did it.
“I think she just wanted to avoid the great emotional churn, to start all that again.
“She’d dealt with it.
“She’d buried it.
“I’d reopened it.
“It was very painful for her.
“It must have been.
“It must be painful enough to give a baby away at five weeks, to give a toddler away at two and a half years who can talk and walk and speak and hold your hand must be impossible.
“I’m at peace with what Margaret did.
“I think the book’s been great in that respect.
“I think it’s brought a lot of comfort to kids like me.
“I say to all of them, ‘Do it. Don’t wait ‘til you’re 50’.”
That was going to be next question. I bet you would encourage anyone in the same situation as you were to go and look for your blood but I bet there would be a but. Would you say, ‘Do it but be prepared’?
“It’s not like that television programme that Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell do.
“It doesn’t always end in saccharine and sweetness and light.
“You’ve got to be prepared for some bumps along the road.
“You have also got to be prepared that you get the door slammed shut in your face as we did the first time so be prepared for that and also be prepared for the fact that, because it will be the mother you want to find, she may be doing it just out of a sense of duty and isn’t going to give much away.”
Andrew spent some precious time with his mother in her care home when she was suffering from dementia.
“I had some lovely times with her.
“She lost her fear and her terror and you could see the connection.
“I don’t know if she knew I was her son.
“I think she did know but I think it was probably lost in the dementia.”
Do you feel like her son despite not ever getting to really know her?
“No, I’m Betty and George’s son.
“I’ll always call Margaret my birth mother. and I correct people when they say, ‘Your mum’.
“I say, ‘No, no, no. Betty was my mum’.
“And I’ve had to correct (my half brother) Peter a couple of times. Said, ‘Well, that was your mother. My mother was Betty, she was my birth mother.”
I asked you about feeling Irish, did Ireland feel like home when you travelled there, I’m talking prior to having knowledge of your family there..
“I went to Dublin and I thought, ‘Was I born here? Am I from this place?’
“I thought, ‘It’s the motherland’.
“I always could just feel it instinctively and I thought, ‘I’m Patrick for a reason’ and this was long before I knew I was a Connolly.
“And now I feel 100% Irish, I’m going to start celebrating St Patrick’s Day.
“I stayed in Westport and I thought, ‘I’m home’.
“And we landed at Knock Airport. I thought, ‘I’m home’.
“And of course I went to the shrine at Knock.
“Margaret would have gone to that shrine.
“Of course she would.
“And I thought, I’m walking in my family’s footsteps for the first time.
“Incredible feeling.
“I don’t do football but if England was in the World Cup, I’d always want England to win but I wouldn’t mind if Ireland did alright.
“And I used to cheer when Johnny Logan won the Eurovision Song Contest and my mother said, ‘Why do you want him to win?’
“And I’d say, ‘Oh nothing’.
“Because I never, ever wanted to say anything about that to arouse suspicion that I was interested but I used to always be pleased when Johnny Logan won.
“Clannad was always one of my favourite bands.
“Chris De Burgh.
“Was it subconscious?
“Michael Flatley took me out and got me drunk a couple years ago.
“He said, ‘You’re as Irish as I am’.
“I’m part of your clan now.”
Finding Margaret: Solving the Mystery of my Birth Mother by Andrew Pierce is out on paperback from Biteback Publishing.
For more information about Andrew, click here.
