Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business

by Mike Milotte

  Over at St Pat’s on the Navan Road, Sister Monica was equally put out. She had nine children ready to go to America, and scheduled to travel in a week’s time. What was more, the prospective adopters had already parted with considerable sums of money to pay for the children’s and their escorts’ air fares, and for clothes and legal fees. Again, Archbishop McQuaid gave the go-ahead for all nine children to be sent off to the States as soon as Sister Monica produced the requisite religious proofs.18

  Archbishop McQuaid was clearly concerned over the publicity given to earlier baby shipments, and he now moved to halt publicity altogether. In the most recent case, photographs had been published of six children departing for America from the Navan Road. The New York Times carried a detailed report of the children’s arrival in the States:

  Six orphans from St Patrick’s Home in Dublin, Ireland, arrived yesterday – by coincidence – on St Patrick’s Day at New York International Airport, Idlewild, Queens, to meet their foster parents.

  The youngsters, wearing sprigs of shamrock, were accompanied on the trip aboard an American Clipper by Miss Nora O’Sullivan, 26 years old, a nurse from the orphanage. When greeted by their ‘new’ parents, it was difficult to tell whether the children of the adults were more excited.

  Francis Bergin, five years old, handed over a box of shamrocks and sang ‘Hail, Glorious, St Patrick,’ when he and Bernadette Smith, three, were introduced to Mr and Mrs John Halloran of Jamaica, Queens.

  Not all of the foster parents were of Irish descent. Philip Golletta of Astoria, Queens, and his wife, Lillian, were there to take charge of Joseph Maloney, three, and Mary Purcell, 10 months, the youngest child in the group.

  Mr and Mrs Albert Rees of the Bronx, adopted Angela Kane, three. Mr and Mrs William J. Gooth of Bayville, Long Island, will make a home for Patrick John Coll, five.19 Following these much-publicised cases, McQuaid’s secretary, Father Mangan, intervened directly with Pan American Airlines, whose public relations officer at Shannon was instructed to ‘close down on publicity’. Pan Am not only acceded to the order themselves but, if Mangan was right, also seem to have persuaded the main press agencies, Reuters, Associated Press and United Press to do likewise.20 It proved an effective ban since the American babies were scarcely mentioned again. The Archbishop did not like publicity because it made matters more difficult for him to control. Civil servants too, for their own reasons, were anxious to keep the whole business secret. As one official was to put it: ‘in this section we rather dislike publicity in these adoption cases for obvious reasons, e.g., a question in the Dáil.’21

  In the meantime, Father Cecil Barrett, on behalf of the Archbishop, had taken up the offer of help from Father Robert Brown and proceeded to open negotiations with US Catholic Charities’ boss, Monsignor John O’Grady, to see what could be done at the American end to safeguard the faith of Irish children.22 The matter was on the agenda when the Directors of Catholic Charities met in Washington DC on 19 May 1950. These eminent American churchmen were of the view that the policy of sending ‘illegitimate’ children abroad was being ‘fostered by the Irish Government’. They also noted the possibility of using Irish children ‘as a means of supplementing the dearth of children for adoption in the United States’, but postponed their decision on becoming officially involved.23

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  While Archbishop McQuaid and Cecil Barrett looked for the best arrangements to safeguard the faith, and Catholic Charities pondered the possibilities presented to them by an abundance of ‘illegitimate’ Irish children, the civil authorities back in Ireland were letting slip an opportunity to develop a professional, child-centred scheme for regulating and monitoring the American adoptions. This turned out to be a critical lapse since – with disastrous consequences for unknown numbers of Irish infants – Catholic Charities could not in many cases (as we shall see) guarantee the children’s welfare, whatever about their religion.

  On 23 May 1950, just days after the indecisive Catholic Charities conference, the Irish embassy in Washington sent a set of proposals to the Department of External Affairs in Dublin for the secular management of the American adoptions.24 In effect, this was a belated response to the concerns and proposals that had been raised by Health Minister Noel Browne almost six months earlier. What the Washington embassy suggested was a link-up between the Irish authorities and the American Children’s Bureau, the professional non-denominational welfare agency that investigated the suitability of most US couples before they could adopt American children. The Children’s Bureau had also vetted many of the couples who adopted European war orphans. What was more, the Bureau was part of the federal social security administration, covering the entire United States and applying uniform regulations and procedures – something that could not be said of the decentralised and irregular Catholic Charities branches.

  But for the religious, like Father Brown, the Children’s Bureau was totally unacceptable. Brown had complained to the Irish embassy in Washington that while Bureau staff had the ‘power to enquire into the religious background’ of adopters, ‘in practice they often tend to disregard this aspect.’25 Brown continued to push Catholic Charities as a better option, but the Irish diplomats in Washington still kept their lines open to the Children’s Bureau. With the active involvement of the US State Department, a senior Irish diplomat held a top level meeting with a consultant from the Children’s Bureau in June 1950. The consultant told him that the Bureau ‘would be able and willing to afford every assistance in investigating candidates wishing to adopt children, and making reports on all the relevant aspects including that of religious background.’26

  It was the clearest offer yet of a full and proper adoption vetting service for ensuring decent homes and suitable parents for the hundreds of Irish children being sent by the nuns to America. Given that no one was proposing to put a permanent stop to the business, this was as much as could be hoped for. But the Department of External Affairs back in Dublin was wary of getting involved at this level. ‘Our policy should be to keep out of the adoption procedure as much as possible,’ one official advised.27 Another concurred: ‘We would lay ourselves open to criticism were we to assist foreigners to remove children from this country.’28 Nothing further was done with the offer from the Children’s Bureau. The same thinking prevented the Department from dealing directly with Catholic Charities but that didn’t mean the State was neutral between the two organisations, one secular, the other religious.

  Catholic Charities’ national secretary, Monsignor John O’Grady, had sought Department sponsorship for a high level meeting in Dublin in August 1950 on ‘processing’ the Irish-US adoptions. O’Grady’s proposal, however, was turned down. Joe Horan, the official then initiating Department policy on foreign adoptions (and a future senior diplomat), was of the view that they couldn’t sponsor such a meeting as it ‘would be an overt act on our part, giving recognition to this so-called processing of orphans for export.’29 O’Grady’s request was described as ‘very delicate’ because there was ‘considerable danger of public criticism if official backing seemed to be available for this traffic.’30 Civil servants like Horan feared that their Minister, and through him the Government, would be censured for encouraging emigration in general and the export of ‘illegitimate’ children in particular.

  Consequently, O’Grady’s request for a Department- sponsored conference was politely refused on the grounds that ‘the Irish Government cannot see its way to take part in arrangements designed to facilitate the removal of Irish children from this country,’31 but unlike the secular American Children’s Bureau, which was simply given the cold shoulder, O’Grady was encouraged to take the matter up with Archbishop McQuaid. The Department of External Affairs clearly felt they could not agree to any course of action on the American adoption issue without McQuaid’s prior approval. As Assistant Secretary Brendan Gallagher put it: ‘We shall have to be careful not to do anything which would embarrass the Archbishop.’32 The way things were going there
wasn’t much danger of that happening.

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  As the summer of 1950 drew to a close, McQuaid’s ban on baby exports was still in force. Father Cecil Barrett, his main adviser, later admitted to having reservations about lifting it. ‘I have never been in favour of sending Irish children to America for adoption,’ Barrett wrote to McQuaid’s secretary, Father Chris Mangan. ‘In my view, public opinion would be aroused against any large scale extra-territorial placement of children.’33 Barrett and McQuaid would have preferred an Irish solution through fostering and informal adoptions, but there simply were not enough families willing to provide Catholic homes for all the country’s ‘illegitimate’ children. And the numbers of children in care of the nuns was constantly growing. As a result, the nuns began to pressurise McQuaid to lift the American ban.

  Sister Frances Elizabeth at St Patrick’s Guild gave a graphic account of the effects of the ban in a letter to McQuaid’s secretary, Mangan. She pointed out that the Guild was overwhelmed with unmarried mothers seeking homes for their children, but they had run out of foster parents, and a huge backlog was building up. ‘Girls are flocking here daily,’ Sister Frances wrote, ‘some of them in great distress… Many of them will become disheartened, no doubt, and who can be sure the children will be safe… Our work is practically at a standstill and many babies, born or expected, are in grave danger.’ The Archbishop would be in no doubt as to want she meant by ‘danger’, and it had nothing to do with the state of the babies’ health. Unmarried Catholic mothers, desperate to find homes for their children, might resort to one of the Protestant fostering societies for help. That was the danger. To frustrate the proselytisers, Sister Frances begged the Archbishop to reopen the American outlet immediately. ‘The Americans have been a sad loss to our children,’ she wrote, ‘and we think with longing of those grand Catholic homes which offered such love and security to our little babes.’34

  Had there been legal adoption in Ireland greater numbers of Irish Catholic couples might have been encouraged to take children from the ‘orphanages’, but McQuaid himself had frustrated all attempts to bring in legal adoption. It wasn’t that he opposed such a measure in principle. He was just unconvinced that the law could guarantee the future faith of adopted Catholic children.35 With no legal adoption in sight and with a permanent shortage of foster parents, the pressure to find new outlets for ‘illegitimate’ children was becoming unbearable.

  McQuaid and O’Grady finally got together in Dublin in September 1950. O’Grady told McQuaid that he personally ‘was not in favour of these American adoptions of Irish children’ but he agreed that if certain conditions, as laid down by McQuaid, were fulfilled, then Catholic Charities might co-operate by vetting American applicants for Irish children.36 To satisfy McQuaid, would-be American adopters had to fulfil certain conditions and these were reproduced as a one-page leaflet which would be sent to all Americans seeking an Irish baby. The leaflet read:

  1. The prospective adopting parents must have a written recommendation from the director of Catholic Charities of the Diocese in which they live.

  2. The prospective adopting parents must supply for inspection their Baptismal certificates and their Marriage certificates.

  3. The prospective adopting parents must have a written recommendation from the Parish Priest of their Parish.

  4. The prospective adopting parents must submit a statement of their material circumstances, with a guarantee as to their income, so as to ensure a good home and good prospects in life for the adopted child.

  5. The prospective adopting parents must submit medical certificates stating their ages, that they are in good health, physical and mental, and that they are not deliberately shirking natural parenthood.

  6. The prospective adopting parents must swear an affidavit to the effect that they are Catholics, that they guarantee to rear the adopted child as a Catholic, that they undertake to educate the adopted child, during the whole course of its schooling, in Catholic schools, that, if in the future the child is sent to a University, it will be sent to a Catholic University, that they undertake to keep the adopted child permanently and not to hand it over to any other party or parties.37

  The conditions set by the Archbishop, with minor variations, were to regulate the American adoptions for the foreseeable future. They are notable for their almost single- minded concentration on matters of faith, on the provision of proofs of Catholicism and undertakings regarding the future religious upbringing of the child. Even the medical proofs required by the Archbishop included certification that the couple were not ‘shirking natural parenthood’ – a euphemism for using contraceptives. Mixed marriage adoptions, of course, were so completely out of the question that they did not even need to be mentioned.

  The Church’s overwhelming concern for preserving the faith was no more nor less than was to be expected, particularly in the pre-Vatican II era, when Catholicism was held to be the only true Christian doctrine, the ‘one true faith’, and when it was believed that a child ‘lost to Protestants’ was doomed. The affidavit swearing to bring the child up a Catholic was the key document in the McQuaid package, yet it is difficult to imagine that it could carry much legal force. Persuading an American court to hear a case on such a matter would have been difficult enough, even if the Archbishop were in a position to discover that the terms of such an affidavit had been broken in the first place. And if he did so discover, it is hard to imagine that he would take the errant parents to court and seek the child’s return to the nuns in Ireland, possibly years down the road.

  In comparison to the minutely detailed religious and financial proofs required by McQuaid, the method of establishing a couple’s suitability as parents was somewhat imprecise. What McQuaid asked for was a ‘recommendation’ from Catholic Charities, but he laid down no standards of his own in this regard, content, it seems, to trust the entire process to the Americans. But when the Diocesan Directors of Catholic Charities met for their national conference in November 1950, they expressed great reluctance to get involved. They did not favour the transatlantic adoptions at all, and only agreed to co-operate because nothing could be done to stop the importations. O’Grady told the conference, ‘I should make it clear once more that we are not trying to encourage people to bring Irish children into this country. We are simply trying to do what we can to protect the faith of the children when people insist on bringing them in.’38 A couple approved by Catholic Charities would be approved primarily as good Catholics. But was a two-paragraph letter from a priest an adequate recommendation, or was a full social worker’s report required? These matters were left vague.

  And there was another problem, for while Catholic Charities might recommend a couple as ‘suitable’ adopters on the basis of their religion and material wealth, they had no way of recommending them as parents for a particular Irish child about whom they knew nothing and in whose selection they would play no part. McQuaid cannot have been ignorant of the pitfalls of his scheme since his closest adviser, Cecil Barrett, knew precisely what contemporary adoption theory said was required for a successful adoption – including very close matching of child and parents, something that was totally impossible in the Irish-American mail-order adoption scenario.

  Nevertheless, the half-hearted agreement from Catholic Charities made it possible to reopen the door for Americans to again take children from the two main Dublin ‘orphanages’. From now on the standard procedure required the American couple to write to the orphanage of their choice, enclosing all the religious and financial proofs. The nuns would then forward the papers to Chris Mangan, McQuaid’s secretary, who might consult Cecil Barrett if there were any obvious peculiarities, such as if the applicant were a single male, an elderly couple, or a couple with very many children already. When Mangan was satisfied all was in order, he put the papers before the Archbishop for formal approval, and if McQuaid said yes, the nuns proceeded to apply for a passport for the child they had selected for the successful co
uple. That at least was the theory, but it didn’t always work like that. Loopholes were found.

  While the Church authorities – on both sides of the Atlantic – had been quick to identify their concerns and take the steps they thought best to protect the faith, the civil authorities in Dublin had simply marked time as they awaited Archbishop McQuaid’s final decision. Peter Berry, of the Department of Justice, gave a candid explanation for official inactivity. ‘We might’, he wrote, ‘lay ourselves open to accusations from high places that we were facilitating the adoption of a child by a person not of the religion in which the child was being reared... Very delicate questions might arise and it was felt that Departments of State should keep clear.’39 But ‘keeping clear’ meant abdicating civil responsibility for the social welfare of minors, something that could not simply be equated with their religious welfare.

  McQuaid had finally laid his cards on the table, putting it up to the State to play its hand, something it did only after the Department of External Affairs received a copy of McQuaid’s new requirements from Sister Frances Elizabeth of St Patrick’s Guild. ‘Very satisfactory’ was how McQuaid’s scheme was described within the Department.40 Copies of McQuaid’s regulations were sent to Irish diplomats in the United States with a request that they be treated as ‘confidential, private and secret, and not… used officially under any circumstances.’41 At the same time, however, Irish diplomatic staff in America were told that the Department had ‘independently’ reached the same conclusion as the Archbishop.

  In practice this meant passports would be issued only to children whose intending adopters had been endorsed by Catholic Charities; who had sworn affidavits saying they would rear and educate the child a Catholic; who had produced proofs of religious devotion and, ultimately, who had provided ‘clear certificates from their doctor that they are not avoiding natural parentage’.42 In other words, the State’s ‘independently’ crafted conditions mirrored McQuaid’s requirements in every detail, right down to precluding people who practiced artificial contraception. Joe Horan, who was now personally handling each application for an ‘adoption passport’, even took it upon himself to advise the religious superiors of ‘various Catholic institutions throughout the country… that the Conference of Catholic Charities is at their disposal.’43 For an official body that did not want to be seen to be promoting child exports, the Department of External Affairs was certainly doing a great deal behind the scenes to ensure the smoothest possible passage for children whose dispatch across the Atlantic was approved by the Archbishop.