Things really did get better

Torn from his mum's arms as a newborn in a convent, D:Ream's Peter Cunnah tells of joy at finding a new family in his late 50s

- BY CRAIG MCLEAN

With D:Ream in 1995

Alone, afraid and far from home, Ann McCrea was pulled into the chapel by a nun. The 21-year-old was pushed to her knees, which must have hurt she'd only given birth a few days previously before the nun thrust a set of rosary beads at her and barked: "Pray for forgiveness, and for your sins of being a harlot.

As Ann clasped her hands, she could hear high heels clicking in the hallway. The nun, holding her before the altar, said: "That's for your sins. That's your child being taken away."

When a distraught Ann tried to struggle to her feet, the nun restrained her.

Six decades on, the baby - Peter Cunnah, the Northern Irish frontman of D:Ream, the band behind the New Labour anthem Things Can Only Get Better that was played after Tony Blair swept to power pauses and shakes his head.

"That system," he says.

He looks incredulous at the cruel punishment meted out in 1966 to his birth mother, who was unmarried and single, by nuns at mother-and-baby home Nazareth House, near Buncrana in Co Donegal. "And that's the least of it. Some of these women were worked until they miscarried," he says.

Also known as Magdalene laundries, the homes have become notorious for their historic mistreatment of young, pregnant women in staunchly Catholic Ireland. "In some of these places, they're finding bodies of babies buried in the grounds," Peter says.

At less than a week old, he was given up for adoption. Ann wouldn't see her son again for 25 years. When the pair finally met, they were overwhelmed by emotion. "I remember she said, 'You smoke other people's cigarettes?' recalls Peter. "And I went: 'Yeah.' 'You like spicy foods?' I went: 'Yeah...' It was a really emotional moment where I thought, 'Good God, she's got the measure of me, and she's not even started speaking with me."