"MARY is dead."
The woman who spoke these words had been trying, in the late 1970s, to find out what had happened to the child she gave up for adoption.
For two years she had reared her child in a mother and baby home run by nuns in Navan Road in Dublin. Then Mary was taken away from her to Temple Hill in Blackrock run by the Irish Sisters of Charity. Two years later, the child was adopted by a 60 year old woman through St Patrick's Guild.
To today's eyes, the practice of making women rear their children for two years before taking them away from them was exceptionally cruel and some have never recovered from the experience.
What makes this woman's story doubly cruel is that Mary was not dead but was looking for her mother. Mary's search ended last December - but by then her mother was dead. She blames St Patrick's Guild for giving her misleading information which led her down all the wrong paths in her search.
In the 1960s, she says, St Patrick's Guild told her that her mother was from Donegal and her father from Westmeath. In the 1970s, she was told her mother was from Cavan and that they did not know where her father was from.
She was also told - incorrectly - that her mother was 28 when Mary was born.
This led to years of searching for the wrong woman of the wrong age.
She does not know who exactly told her mother she was dead, whether it was the nuns in Navan Road, Temple Hill or St Patrick's Guild.
Mary heard about it in the past couple of weeks from a friend of her mother's who remembers her coming home crying for her dead child whom she was to mourn for more than a decade.
Last year, St Patrick's Guild finally handed Maura (not her real name) the medical record which, 30 years earlier, they had denied they had. The record, from Temple Street Hospital, contains information on a simple operation she had as a baby. "My foster mother told me I had an operation when I was about two and that I might never be able to have children. We went back to the agency and asked if they had any record of the operation. They said no, we have no medical record on you."
As a young woman about to marry in 1966, it was clearly important to her to know if the operation would affect her ability to have a baby. What baffles and angers her about the withholding of the record (which The Irish Times has seen) at the time is that it contains nothing which could have identified her mother.
The matter had also caused bad feeling between herself and her foster mother because she had assumed, on the basis of what St Patrick's Guild had told her, that her foster mother had lied about the operation.
Maura was given other information which changed over the years. "I was told my parents were married and that my mother was seven months pregnant. For years on and off we went looking for this married couple and their cert. We found out years later they weren't married at all."
Later, she was given a wrong year of death for her mother and grieved at the wrong grave. She now knows that her mother died a few years before she finally contacted the family.
Of the ever changing information she was given she says: "They deprived me of meeting my mother. I don't think I was treated with respect. I would prefer if they simply said it's confidential and your mother gave you up and that's the end of the story."
Susan (not her real name) remembers asking St Patrick's Guild what part of Ireland her mother was from. "They said they couldn't tell me because it might identify her," she recalls.
She was given different versions of what her mother had done for a living. "First she was a shopkeeper, then she was a housekeeper, then something else."
She says St Patrick's Guild told her that her mother had once said she would commit suicide if her child contacted her, but she does not believe this is necessarily so.
"We are all mature adults. We could meet in a room anywhere. At this stage I think I am entitled to know some things. I would like to know about the natural father, for instance."
Other adoptees have also told The Irish Times of being given information by St Patrick's Guild which cost them years of time in searching for the wrong person.