The Secret Rose - Dean Walsh

An elderly lady has become concerned at the length of time that it has taken for her passport
renewal application to be processed. She is eventually asked to attend a meeting at the passport
office. At this meeting she is informed that a separate passport application has been submitted by
another lady. Both women are the same age and it would appear that they were born on the same
day in the same Dublin maternity hospital. The similarities do not end there. They have the exact
same name, and the same parents who lived at the same address.
The manager at the passport office asks the two women to meet in an effort to shed some light on
this mystery. When they come face to face there is a vague hint of recognition from one lady, but the other
is fully aware who the other is. It is over fifty years since they have laid eyes on each other.
By way of an explanation, one lady tells the other the story of her mother Kathleen Clancy, who came
to Dublin from Tipperary in 1940. She met and fell in love with a charming and charismatic man.
After a whirlwind romance she becomes pregnant by this man. He is however, not all that he seems.
He is the leader of the notorious 'Animal gang'. He is a dangerous criminal who soon after meeting Kathleen finds himself behind bars as a result of his participation in a brawl at a local racecourse.
Kathleen is in a terrible predicament. A pregnant, unmarried woman in the Republic of Ireland during the 1940's represented an affront to the all-powerful catholic church. State sponsored and church run institutions were set up to cater for 'fallen women' who were seen as a moral threat to Irish society. Alone and scared, Kathleen is forced to take measures to ensure that she and her child are not incarcerated in one of these awful places.