Survival, family secrets, and the search to belong

0:00The Mario Rosenstock podcast. Thanks to HUM. Finance made easy when you shop tech, electrical, appliances, kitchens and much more. Flexify Europe Limited, trading as HUM is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Coming up on this episode of the Mario Rosenstock podcast. My memory is of reaching out to grasp a cable and then everything seemed to freeze and then I fell. I just went, poosh. After what turned out to be about 500 feet, my movement slowed down and I slalom to the side of the gully and I came to a stop. Just me and this, you know, remote mountain. I just lay there. I was getting cold.

0:43I was hypothermic. I sort of said, well, if I do get out of here, some things are going to have to change.

0:57Paul Cullen is one of Ireland's best known journalists, having spent more than 30 years at the Irish Times covering health, politics, education and public affairs. But despite having a successful career and happy family, Paul always felt like an outsider, like he didn't really belong anywhere. Paul was adopted at the age of three, which is quite late for an adoption, and he knew nothing about his parents, why they had sent him into institutional care as a baby, and what happened to him during those first three years of his life. As he lay injured in the snow after falling off Germany's highest mountain, Paul knew that if he survived the fall, he had no choice but to face up to all these questions and to find the answers.

1:34What happened next is a fascinating story of discovery captured in Paul's recently published memoir called Outsider. Paul uses all of the investigative skills he had built over a career in journalism to discover where he was born, who his birth parents were, what had happened that had led to his adoption, and some of the key characters that played such an important role in his life along the way. This is also a story about a certain time in Ireland, and indeed in England, when the adoption system was quite complex and hard to penetrate, and the impact that that system had on countless adopted children like Paul over the decades.

2:06Paul joined me in studio recently and shared his full story in such an open and honest way and it makes for a fascinating episode of the Mario Rosenstock podcast. So I knew nothing about those first three years of my life and it didn't take much reading into the literature of psychology to realise that they are the format of years. And I didn't know where I was, who I was with, whether I was properly cared for and whether I was loved. We all want to be loved. Some of them were sort of Mills and Boonish. My real father was a doctor and my real mother was a great beauty and Ayres was a love that was never matched, but it was ill-fated.

2:42The powers that be wouldn't let them be together. It was very tragic. And then another time, she would tell me that my parents were somebody else and they died in a car crash. So it was... Fantasising. Yeah, yeah, and it was inconsistent. I'm going to get a second chance here in life. So what am I going to do with this second chance? Obviously, I'm going to be a good father, a good husband, a good citizen, but this is going to be my project. I'm going to find out more about who I am. the better to know about where I'm going to go. It was Father's Day recently and my 19-year-old gave me a card and, well, I won't repeat the words but they made me cry and, you know, I cry regularly.

3:20I'm in compensation mode. I'm playing catch-up mode, really. My full conversation with Paul Cullen is coming up in just a few minutes' time but speaking of memoirs, Joe Duffy, formerly of RTE's Liveline, is about to publish his. That's going to be fruity. As you might imagine, every broadcaster wants to be the first to interview him. We've got exclusive access to Joe's voicemails. Good afternoon to you. You've reached Joe Duffy. Go on, leave a message. Leave a message. Go on, go on, go on, go on. Talk to Joe. Talk to Joe. Go on. Joe, how are you? It's Patrick Kielty here. You've probably seen that I'm going to be back on the late, late this season.

3:55I do owe you a big thanks, by the way. Getting rid of your massive salary allowed old Kevin Backhurst to throw in a nice few more pingings to me. That's the only way they could convince me to fly over and do that god-awful show of shite. Anyway, I want to be your first. I want to deflower you on the late, late couch when that juicy, juicy memoir of yours comes out. Is there any index? Is there an index? Is Paddy guilty in it? What about it? We'll make the whole show Joe Duffy special. You'll have the full seven and a half hours of the show. We'll have your interview. We'll have the audience full of whingers.

4:32We'll brush shields on to do a comedy set And invite Stockton's wing on to play your old theme tune In and out every week Call me Hi Joe, it's Mary McCallaghan here You're probably getting all sorts of calls from your former RTE colleagues About doing the first interview for your book But let's face it, we always had a special bonjo, didn't we? Very special, remember when I'd sneak into your studio before you started Doing Lifeline in the afternoons to calm you down? I was your fluffer I'd massage your shoulders and stroke your jowls And whisper sweet nothings in your ear Like go on, go on, go on 51551 Go on 51551 Wash your hands, wash your hands You weren't long relaxing and settling down For yourself to talk to Mary And Clontarf and what not Come on Joe, let's get it on on Sunday With Miriam, let me be your first How are you?

5:24Ray Darcy here If I still had a show, I'd be asking you to be on it Joe But I don't because of those RTE executive bastards. I'm going to say it, bastards. So, would you do my podcast? I'm living near enough Montrose. I have built a little canteen in the back garden, just like the one in RTE. Jenny serving out chips and beans. A little green room as well. Downstairs bathroom, used to be. I've marayed Farrell, dishing out the wine and the finger food. Like I say, it's not RTE, but it's as close as you're going to get until those bastards fired me. Bastards, bastards, bastards. Give me a call. Yeah, hi Joe.

5:58it's Pat Kenny here. Just wanted to confirm that you received a letter from my solicitor about that salacious chapter you were planning to include about me in your seedy memoirs, about how I used to prowl the corridors of Montrose like a randy peacock and work my charm on my fans and followers alike, using all of the amazing physical attributes that God gave me to captivate and, nay I say, delight everyone within a ten-yard radius of my aura. As you will see, the letter contains a legal order that you must include that chapter in its entirety, every last detail. They simply must know about the power of that.

6:45And brand new comedy every week on the Mario Rosenstock podcast. And of course, if you want to get in touch with me, it's MarioRosenstock at gmail.com. I read them all and I get back to most of them. Any suggestions at all? Suggestions for new comedy characters I haven't noticed and might do? Suggestions for sketches? Suggestions for guests that you'd like to hear on this podcast? Who could I chat to that would make you interested in? And of course, you are the most important element of that podcast. Get in touch with me. We don't charge for the podcast. So just tell one other person if you can, if you enjoy this about the podcast.

7:17and the reason we don't charge anybody is because we have sponsors and sponsors are great and our best sponsor is Hum. Thanks to Hum for partnering up with the Mario Rosenstock podcast. Hum is a great company, a finance company who provide flexible payment solutions for customers of some of Ireland's most popular retailers. They can help you make your purchases and pay back bite-sized, easy payments. They couldn't be easier to deal with. Festival season is here. You've seen it. We're going to festivals practically every weekend at this stage and if you're in the market for tents, outdoor speakers, tech or fitness gear to get you all set up.

7:48Hum has got you covered. Thank you, Hum. Thank you for getting involved in the Mario Rosenstock podcast. So let's meet my special guest on this episode, journalist and author Paul Cullen. As I mentioned earlier, by the time Paul came to write his fascinating memoir, he'd spent decades in print journalism at a national level. So I started by asking him a bit about his earlier career. I started in the Irish Times. I was lucky enough to get a job there after a few years of freelancing as a journalist and I was the education correspondent. and later then I I was a thing called a development correspondent which meant I covered developing world issues from Ireland it was probably the most interesting job actually because I spent a lot of it in Africa covering the developing world yeah often developing you know development stories but but frequently disasters you know the aftermath of the the genocide in Rwanda floods in Mozambique famine in South Sudan, everywhere.

8:50It's interesting now from the point of view of the USA being completely cancelled now by Trump. Yeah, but you know, I have to say from covering it, I grew sceptical over a number of years. I saw the waste. Oh God. You know, I'd go to a small village and somebody had shown me this lovely well that had been built and there'd be a piece of machinery going there and say, well, it's broken. hasn't worked since. You know, the Swedes came along, they put that in and then they disappeared and we don't have any replacement parts. Or you'd meet, you'd meet then some very well-paid aid workers, particularly for the EU or UN organisations.

9:30And it stuck in the craw, you know, that people were being so well-paid in countries that were so well-paid. In administrative. Yeah. And I came around to thinking and it became popular after I finished doing the job that the phrase was trade, not aid. And actually that trading within the world is probably the way to take people out of poverty rather than aid. There is a place for aid, and the concern was after, you know, the earthquake I was in in Turkey or the floods that happened in Mozambique. But I think it's also around people's self-respect as well. Too often it was too patronizing. there was a mismatch too often they were overlapping I was on I was on the tarmac at the airport in Mozambique and there had the floods there had killed a thousand people and they commanded worldwide attention so a bunch of charities in the US Christian charities and I'm just saying this by way of example but they had sent over a plane load of shoes and boots because they figured that's what people need now the shoe size of Midwestern US farmers is considerably larger than the feet size of anybody who was likely to use them in Mozambique.

10:53So there was this shoe mountain on the tarmac. Of unused shoes. Well, back to the extent, what are we going to do with them? I'm sure they probably found a use for them or people may do. It's like the stories of the t-shirts that we throw away and where do they end up and do people really want them? Yeah. They really want to be carrying, you know, sort of Mayo for Sam t-shirts Yeah, yeah. So, you know, there are a lot of questions around there and you can't automatically assume that aid works or that charity works. No, and that's been... That's to prove it works. I suppose we've all been exposed to that since even Live Aid even in, you know, back 40 years ago when we were...

11:32Everybody was wondering will this money actually get to the place it belongs, you know? Yeah, yeah. But you also wrote another book with a little help from my friends. Yeah, so then I came back to Ireland and I ended up covering the, what's, it seems like ancient history now, but Planning Tribunal, which was an investigation into planning corruption mostly around Dublin, which I'm sure you remember well. It was very lengthy. It was very entertaining, especially for people like you because it was filled with a cast of characters. Yeah, Gogur T. Yes. Bailey. Bailey. And Sean Gilmartin. Tom Gilmartin.

12:14Tom Gilmartin. Justice Flood, the diminutive Justice Flood. Bertie. Bertie. Liam Lawler. Liam Lawler. Endless, endlessly went on. So it was box office at the time for entertainment. Unfortunately, in terms of deciding what actually happened, it just took years. It went on and I spent five, six, seven years there and I wrote a book. And I actually remember... Dunlop. Yeah, Frank Dunlop. Yes, he was a former government press secretary who was on the take, I think we can safely say that. But I wrote the book about it and then I said, maybe I should wait till the tribunal reports, you know, just for it to be sure, you know, rather than publishing now.

12:56And I said, no, no, I'll go ahead with it. And it's just as well because it took 15 years for the report to come out. And then it got filleted in various court actions so that many of its findings are being quashed. Yeah. Now, it did get, the revenue rate got a lot of money from developers and other people on the foot of it but it was kind of a again it was kind of a mixed outcome I remember Liam Lawler being a huge character in Gift Grub and of course especially the way he used to talk about himself in the third person all the time he used to openly talk outside the tribunal about Liam Lawler will answer the questions when Liam Lawler Liam Lawler is good and ready but Liam Lawler is not ready and all these reporters looking around going where's Liam Lawler?

13:43Are you not Liam Lawler? They were really strange. The hubris. Very hard to explain. Modern day politicians seem relatively colourless. And benign. And benign? Yeah these were big dinosaur beasts. These were the beasts in the well try it sometime. You know I have a house in Brussels. I have a house in Mayo. I have a house in Dublin. Housekeeper, cars throw it all in. Sure Ed would know it over there. She's all over the place in Mayo. Try it sometime. And these were characters. They were. They were larger than life. They were. Now, but the reason you're here is, let's go back, because in 2017, you went on, did you go on a skiing holiday?

14:19No, it was a meet old school friends get together in Munich. We have a school friend and he's lived there most of his life. And so a bunch of us got together to renew our friendship and I was my suggestion that we go walking in the mountains. So off we went walking in the mountains. But it had snowed very heavily, the night before. It was October, so it was early snow for the Alps. How many of you went walking in the mountains? There was four of us. Four of you? Hiking? Yeah, hiking. Snowboots? Mountain boots. Mountain boots? Yeah, yeah. And did it start snowing or did you get cold? No, no, it was a beautiful day.

14:56It was a fantastic day. It was great to be alive. Blue skies, jagged peaks, mountain peaks, snow on them. Absolutely, you know, pristine, alpine scenery. but we were climbing Zugspitze which is the highest mountain in Germany it's about 3000 metres so it's a long slog you start very early 4 o 'clock in the morning or 5 o 'clock in the morning and it takes all day and as you're climbing it's getting colder and the snow was getting deeper and this is not the wilderness because there are big restaurants on these mountains as anybody's been there there's a restaurant on top and there's a restaurant on the plateau just below the final climb and so that restaurant I got to it and then myself and another friend the two of them two of my friends were tired and they took the cable car up to the top they were in a restaurant above could see what was happening and myself and my other friend we ploughed on but it was the end of the day temperatures were dropping and the snow was becoming icy and perhaps I didn't pay attention to that as much as I should have And?

16:02Well just under the top under that 3000 metres the wind whipped up tiredness took place and while there are steel cables that you can hold on to assist you they were buried in the snow and that was freezing so you couldn't move them so between one thing or another I my memory is of reaching out to grasp a cable and then everything seemed to freeze and then I fell just went down top cat like scraping the surface of the snow So it's a kind of sheer slope, like worse than a black ski slope. And down I went and on and on. And at one point I slowed down and I thought, oh my God, at least, you know, I'll sort this out.

16:53And then I just went over a lip and I flipped over my back and I had a rucksack on with a camera on it, which wasn't in a case, which was really rough. And down I went again, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. I obviously don't remember much but I was conscious right through it and then after what turned out to be about 500 feet my movement slowed down and I slalom to the side of the gully and I came to a stop just me and this remote mountain So you had had a long and terrible fall Yeah, I'd gone thud, thud, thud, thud, thud down I was conscious I wiggled my toes they were okay I sort of moved my head it was okay but I didn't feel well in the middle of my body and it is something wrong you know You could feel maybe that things were broken?

17:45Yeah yes I intuited that yeah Did you think you did you have a feeling that you were gone or falling? I suppose it went it happened too quickly but I did think yeah you know this is it I thought, this is it. And then, of course, I thought the opposite then. I got a rush of adrenaline thinking, I made it. I'm still going to live here. I am going to live. And half of me is in Germany and half of me is in Austria. And you know what they have here? They have helicopters. So I lay there. I tried to get a whistle out of the rucksack and my phone was dead. Nothing, you know, I was too far away. But I just lay there and thought.

18:28I was getting cold. I was hypothermic. I suppose I was conscious it was coming in and out but I sort of said well if I do get out of here some things are going to have to change so I just waited and after maybe it was 20 minutes something like that I heard the word of you know like there wasn't the ride of the Valkyries you know like Wagner but I'll take it it was a helicopter and it rose up from below above me hovered over me guys must have been surveying what the situation was Your body was quite broken wasn't it? It was a collapsed lung Yeah I was broken my back yeah broken my sternum and collapsed lung and various other things yeah In the book that we're going to talk about you mentioned you relinquished hope Yeah You felt I was Yeah I thought you were kind of maybe fading in and out of consciousness Yeah Maybe I think I'm very very scant reading of the things that have happened in cold but there's a thing where people can get really cold and they fall into a kind of a warmth that they feel it's kind of a nice thing apparently this is a bit morbid apparently it's one of the nicest ways to die to freeze because after the initial discomfort extreme discomfort you fall into a kind of a euphoric I think your body releases some form of dopamine That describes the way I felt Yeah you were getting happy Yeah I was fading away but feeling okay about it probably.

20:02And then Daniel, the mountain rescue guy, just winched himself down and he said, as I was writing the book, he says, my name is Daniel and I'm going to rescue you. Yeah. So, and I can't remember whether it was, he must have pulled me up to the vertical, which is probably dangerous in my situation. Yes. Can't really remember, but. I wouldn't be blaming him now. I wouldn't be blaming him now, Paul. I was certainly not. I think he gave me a big hug. There was two men on the end of a rope and then the helicopter goes up and then we're just floating through the air. So in a way though, the reason we're talking about this is because it was a turning point.

20:38During this little period where you were relinquished hope, you were lying on a mountain, you were fading in and out of consciousness, you had time to think and I suppose you started thinking about your past and about where you came from and about your origins as a person and about how you were born, where you were brought up, what happened. And, of course, the key ingredient of this is? That I'm adopted. Yeah. Yeah. First line of your book. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, that's my sense of difference. Everybody has a sense of difference. Yeah. But mine is probably built on that, although it was buried for a long time.

21:19Yeah. Because I didn't really want to know about that fact. And I think it had been rising up within me. Yes. I went through middle life. But the accident and my consideration were afterwards, so I spent two weeks in the hospital in Germany. Resolved you? Yeah, I said, listen, you know, I'm going to get a second chance here in life. So what am I going to do with this second chance? So obviously I'm going to be a good father, good husband, a good citizen. But this is going to be my project. I'm going to find out more about who I am. The better to know about where I'm going to go. so that started and I suppose to do this you would use your investigative as a journalist to drive this forward and to find out a bit more about your early life because as you describe it for somebody who's adopted it's the very early years is a jigsaw without pieces with pieces missing it's a book without some pages missing with some pages missing.

22:24And that, I suppose, also represents a metaphorical hole in your existence, in your vacuum. A thing that you always wonder about, that you doubt about. A thing that, I suppose, causes you to wonder about the fundaments of your identity. You kind of know a lot about yourself, but you kind of wonder, who am I really? And it wasn't just that I was adopted as well. It was also that I was adopted late. so I was three by the time I was formally adopted so I knew nothing about those first three years of my life and it didn't take much reading into the literature of psychology to realise that they are the formative years of anybody's upbringing all the millions of brain cells that you add every day all the beginnings of your relations to other people and whether you relate to them normally or not and I didn't know where I was, who I was with whether I was properly cared for and whether I was loved I suppose we all want to be loved yeah and I to use the word loved is interesting because I suppose the love that's given to you or not given to you at an extremely early age is developmentally important yeah even though we don't know it and constancy of care caregiving there were a few clues now for example when I arrived I grew up in the suburbs of Dublin and in a three-bed semi and some of the neighbours were there on the day I arrived with my adoptive parents and I was in poor physical condition.

23:56That's what I was told later on. So when I arrived out of wherever I had been, my body was raw. I was wearing sandals that had been varnished, re-varnished to make better use of them. And this is the 1960s. People weren't wealthy. But there were some clues there that would give you cause for concern about how was I cared for. I didn't know whether I'd been looked after by one person or 50 people, whether I'd been in one house or home or moved around. Well, let's get to that. But for the moment, you were adopted by two people, Mary and Pat. Tell me about them. Yeah, Mary and Pat. Mary, a homemaker.

24:35Pat, a painter and decorator. His family is originally from the North Strand. Hers from the canal. Family of butchers. Why did they want to adopt you? So that's one of the things that's in the book then that Mary, who was a dominant partner in the relationship, had suffered some measure of tragedy in her life. she came from a very large family and had a hard enough existence but for a short time in her childhood she was taken and given to an uncle who treated her very well he was a very wealthy man and man around town and she would ride in this horse and carriage but then he died suddenly and she was put back into the family I think she felt that there was a taste of a better life there that had been whipped away from her but more seriously then Patrick and Mary got married in the late 40s and that's obviously long before I was around but at some point in the 1950s after a number of years she was pregnant and she was coming back from mass on a Sunday and Patrick was out working as he did as a painter and director you had to work in the summer and a motorbike left the road and went on the pavement where she was and knocked her down.

25:55She lost a child and she never had a child of her own so I suppose I was compensation for that or a replacement for that they were I suppose as far as I can read they were different as people he was what might be described as a conflict avoider we've seen them in Irish households for years you know the elf fella doesn't want to know about it lay me out of it I don't want to know I want to read the paper now and just see what the horses are on the box and she's the one with the driving the house and she's the one with the maybe more animated personality maybe even And the way you describe Mary is she had her own personal issues with kind of personality issues.

26:35She had she had a I think she had a burning ambition from that childhood experience of seeing how things could be, how much better things could be. But she didn't have the tools to pursue it herself. She left school at 12. So a lot of her energy was funneled into me as an only child and an adopted child. And Patrick was his function was the breadwinner. as you say he was something of a cypher a very reserved man a loving man all the same and yeah they they you know I got a I got a good run early run in life from them wasn't perfect Mary's frustrations sometimes bubbled over and I was the recipient of them described in the book well like she she would very she would veer from being overly protective, ridiculously so, to, you know, not minding if I went off hitchhiking across Europe or something as a teenager, which I think no parent would allow these days.

27:40But she was paranoid about, both my parents were very insecure that I might be taken away from them, even though the law was once you're formally adopted, that's it. It was an irreversible process, but they never escaped their insecurity about that. And so my mother imagined fantasies that my birth mother was in some way stalking them or outside the house in a car, watching, watching all the time. She told you stories, made up stories. Yeah. Changed her stories about who your mother and father might have been. What kind of things did you do? Yeah, of course, you know, some of them were sort of Mills and Boonish.

28:20You know that my real father was a doctor and my real mother was great beauty. And theirs was a love that was never matched in the land that they lived in. But it was ill-fated and the powers that be wouldn't let them be together. It was very tragic. And then another time she would tell me that my parents were somebody else. They died in a car crash. So it was... Fantasizing. Yeah, yeah. And it was inconsistent. I understand that. We all do a little bit. Yeah. But that was the only information I had at that time about where I came from. So I sort of said, listen, I don't want to know about any of this.

28:59This is where I am. And then by the time I was a teenager and a bit of a truculent teenager, I just said, you know what, I just want to see my way through this and then go out into the adult world and make my own life. Did you feel like you were their son? I mean, you know what I'm asking. You must have wondered when you look around in school going, he's their son. She's their daughter. Am I their daughter? Is it the same? Yeah, I didn't process those feelings too much. The way they came to the surface really was when my mother would say something absurd. So she was quite a small woman. So you see, I'm a tall person.

29:37I grew to be a tall person quite soon enough. And, you know, my mother would stop. She would talk to everybody on the street. She was character. And she would say, God, isn't he the spit of me? I'd be towering over her going slightly red and wishing the moment would pass God love her you know and she kept doing that when I was 25 so so yeah I think that's when I was conscious otherwise I just put it away But did they did they love you as far as did they love you as far as Undemonstratively Undemonstratively Which is typical which is very Irish Yeah but I felt that love I think Yeah There were times when my mother flipped and she said things which can't be unsaid you know like I wish we'd ever taken you in things like that that hurts that hurts yeah yeah it's like the ultimate one when kids do it to each other brothers and sisters yes you know when when we've done it we've all done it well you don't you might know but we've all done it yeah yeah for those you're the outsider but we've all done it and when we're three or four we all go you were no you were adopted we all do it should I walk out now No, we do it.

30:48We do it, Paul. We all say it. You know, it's the ultimate insult. Yeah, yeah. So part of the, like in the book, part of the discoveries are made about, for example, that incident where she lost a child. And it puts it in the context. It doesn't excuse some of those things, but it helped me understand some of the frustrations that were behind her actions. yeah so she made up stories about your your birth your origin story whatever I call it but then through this book then you you find out what had happened to you and you were born in England yeah I knew that I knew I was born in England but that's all I knew yeah what else did I know yeah just the fact that I was born in England really and then there was all this mishmash of made up stories But the rest was missing.