"I WAS nine years old. I was in a home in Dublin. I had lived there since I was eight months old. One day all the girls were lined up in the grounds. The social worker came in with a woman and just said, who would you like? The woman just picked me out."
The speaker was one of the many thousands of children who found themselves in a child care system which accorded them little in the way of rights up to quite late in the 1970s.
She "hadn't a clue" that she was going to be fostered. She had to leave the convent home the day after the woman picked her out. Her views did not come into it. Her reaction, she says, was one of fright.
Fortunately for her the couple who fostered her "were very good to me".
Although it is common to refer to the children in the Irish care system at the time as orphans almost every one of them had parents still living.
But they were, legally, "illegitimate", born to single women and hidden away in a society which could not bear the spectacle of an unmarried woman rearing her own child.
"The policy was they were given false names when they arrived and were told not to tell any of the other inmates who they were," said one woman who is involved in support groups for birth mothers. She gave up her own daughter under great pressure.
"When my daughter was a couple of days old, she was christened and a nun in the nursing home told me she would put such and such down on the baptismal cert so that nobody would be able to trace me.
"I have met my daughter now. We have a relationship going. But I would love to go back in time with the knowledge I now have and keep her."
The refusal by adoption societies to give people access to the information which they hold on their origins is a common problem faced by people tracing their families
One solicitor talked of anguish felt by people who know that the information is there but who cannot get access to it.
"Thousands of people in this country are screaming with the pain," he said.
Set procedures should be introduced to make sure a genuine attempt is made by adoption societies to help people and a national contact register should be established, he believes.