"I HAVE been told I have no full brothers and sisters and that she is married to a man other than my father."
Tony O Dubhlchain (31) was adopted when he was seven months old and has spent two years trying to get in touch with his birth mother.
The adoption society, St Patrick's Guild, says it has contacted his birth mother but she does not wish to talk to him.
He believes he should be able to contact her himself and that he, and all adoptees, should have the information to enable them to do that.
Instead, "I am treated like an adult child", he says of the laws that prevent the release of such information to people such as himself.
He was born on August 29th, 1965, at St Rita's Nursing Home on Sandford Road in south Dublin. At that time almost every child born outside marriage was given up for adoption.
The social pressures on women to give up their children was so intense that they cannot be said to have had any real choice in the matter.
"I was adopted at about seven months old from Temple Hill in Blackrock which was run by the Sisters of Charity."
The adoption order was not finalised for a further eight months. He does not know the reason for the delay and wonders if it was due to a reluctance on the part of his birth mother to have him adopted.
I was the second child the family adopted. There were three of us, two girls and myself, and I was the middle one in age.
When he was 18 he moved to England and has spent the past six years working in the Spanish tourism industry. Over the years the need to find his birth mother grew and became so intense that he came to Ireland to try to make contact.
"I contacted St Patrick's Guild two years ago. Then I went in and said who I was and said: `Can you tell me who I am?'
"The social worker went downstairs and came back five minutes later and gave me a few details, date of birth, baptism, medical treatment in Temple Hill.
"She said she would try to contact my natural mother. On the following Monday morning she was on the phone with the news that my natural mother had rung that morning to say she didn't want to meet me. I felt yet again I had been rejected. It caused me great misery.
"Fifteen months later I decided I should come back and insist she get in touch again. The reaction of my natural birth mother was that she never wanted St Patrick's Guild to contact her again."
Sister Gabriel, of St Patrick's Guild, said Tony's case had been dealt with "as fully as it could be". Asked if a letter from Tony could be forwarded to his mother she said that "that depends on consent on both sides".
Tony has not stopped searching and has been down many false paths since then. He remembers standing outside what he thought was his birth mother's house, unable to make himself knock on the door, discovering later that the woman he had traced was the mother of another man with a similar name and the same age as himself. He had been so sure she was his mother that when he found the address in the General Register Office he cried.
He believes he has tracked, down his original birth certificate but cannot be sure if the names on it are genuine as it is known that the names on some birth certificates are false.
He will return to Spain soon work for a while and then come back to begin the search again. His hope is that his birth mother will see his photograph in The Irish Times and make contact with him through the paper.
What if he never finds her? "I will," he says. "There's no such thing as won't."