When they broke up, Carmel didn’t tell Tom she was pregnant and when James was born, she put Vincent’s name on the birth certificate. But then she got hysterical.‘She went upstairs, closed the door and wouldn’t come out,’ James explained.Ī few days later, Carmel called James and broke the news that Maura’s father, Tom, was also his biological father.Ĭarmel and Tom had dated briefly in the 1980s. ‘She asked me who my girlfriend’s parents were – what their names were,’ James remembers. He visited Carmel and told her how he’d fallen in love with Maura, and they had a son. It was Christmas 2009 when James decided to try and mend fences with his mother. James hadn’t seen his father Vincent since he was 10, and his relationship with his mother Carmel was so strained, Maura hadn’t even met her. But the couple were about to discover a shocking secret. Two years later, James and Maura welcomed their son Mark into the world. ‘After a week it felt like we’d known each other forever.’ ‘I’d been in relationships before, but I just knew this was different,’ James told the Irish Mail. They experienced an instant attraction that soon grew deeper.
