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Fiction featuring Care Experience

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A Second Life

Dermot Bolger

2010

Following a car crash, for several seconds, Dublin photographer Sean Blake is clinically dead. He experiences the overwhelmingly powerful sensation of being drawn towards a blissful afterworld, to find his progress blocked by the haunting face of a man he only partially recognises. He plummets back to life into a world which, for him, has profoundly changed.
The pieces of his life seem not to fit anymore as he struggles, deeply traumatized, to adjust to this gift of a second life. Yet this is not the first time that he has been given a second life. At the age of six weeks he was taken from his mother, when as a young girl in rural Ireland, she was forced to give up her baby for adoption. Beginning the quest for his own identity, and struggling against a wall of official silence and a complex sense of guilt, Sean determines to find his natural mother, while continuing to search for the face that has haunted him since the crash. This leads him on a strange and absorbing journey through his various pasts, into archives, memories, dreams and startling confessions.

Children and young people in social care, and those who have left, are often subject to stigmatisation and discrimination. Being stigmatised and discriminated against can impact negatively on mental health and wellbeing not only during the care experience but often for many years after too. The project aims to contribute towards changing community attitudes towards care experienced people as a group. See glossary HERE


Website set up with support from The Welland Trust 

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