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

by Mike Milotte

  Cosgrave, of course, was determined to avoid bad publicity as his concluding remarks to the Dáil made clear. ‘It is significant,’ he said, ‘that the only comments on this have appeared in what we here call the yellow English Sunday newspapers, who avail of every, and any, opportunity to smear the name of this country. I do not propose to be a party to any such campaign and I hope that no Deputies in this House will lend themselves to it either.’14 The opposition was silenced and the matter was never again discussed in the Dáil.

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  In the meantime another line of opposition had developed, this time from within the ranks of the Government itself, in the person of Health Minister, and future Chief Justice, Tom O’Higgins.

  Under the 1953 Health Act, the Minister for Health was responsible for the welfare of orphaned, deserted, and destitute ‘illegitimate’ children who were accommodated at the expense of the health authorities in institutional homes. One such institution was the County Home in Longford, and in the summer of 1955 five of its young inmates had been sent to America for adoption. The matter came to light when the Longford County Manager was called upon to explain to county councillors why he had spent £10 (€960) on an outfit for one of the children. He told the council that sending the infants to America was ‘a great break’. The Longford News reported the story under the headline, ‘New Export Enterprise’.15 But when Health Minister O’Higgins found out, he was furious.

  On 23 March 1956 – the very day Cosgrave raised the American adoption business at cabinet – O’Higgins wrote to the secretary of the Longford County Council telling him that local authorities had no business making arrangements for sending children in public care out of the state for adoption. His letter eventually found its way to Cos- grave’s Department where, for years past, the officials had been happily issuing adoption passports to children from local authority homes such as St Pat’s in Dublin and three provincial orphanages run by the Sacred Heart nuns. (Between them these four public institutions accounted for well over 1,000 of the children dispatched to the United States, or over half the total). So if O’Higgins was now taking exception to this practice, a fundamental conflict seemed unavoidable.

  Sean Morrissey of the Department of External Affairs, took up the cudgels, and in a rather snooty letter to his opposite number at the Department of Health he complained about them breaking ranks and creating the impression of inconsistency and confusion on the part of the State. ‘As you are aware,’ Morrissey wrote, ‘the question of permitting Irish children to be taken abroad for adoption is one on which strong and divergent opinions are held and it would appear to be desirable that insofar as possible, Departmental action should be consistent’.16

  But O’Higgins wasn’t to be put off so easily. His position was spelled out in a reply to Morrissey. ‘The Minister,’ the reply stated, ‘considers that public authorities should not place themselves in the position of agents for the sending of children abroad as such activities must inevitably damage the status of the public services, and are open to criticism on social and political grounds since they aggravate the decline of the population...’

  ‘It may be argued,’ the reply went on, ‘that the children sent abroad benefit materially and socially, but the expectation of betterment in another country must be presumed to apply to all emigration and it would be clearly indefensible that public authorities should engage, even in a small way, in organised emigration of children while public policy is directed towards a reduction of emigration generally.’ These were among the strongest and most critical words written on the subject by anyone in authority with any knowledge of what was happening. And the Minister for Health had more to say.

  ‘The correct course to be followed by public authorities who have custody of children is to increase their endeavours towards the improvement of the opportunities of such children to make a normal living in this country. The Minister. considers that such improvements would be much more desirable than any participation in arrangements for sending the children out of the country.’17

  It was clear from the tone of these letters that there was considerable friction between Health and External Affairs, with Health adopting the moral and social high ground and suggesting that External Affairs was facilitating organised child emigration. And to rub it in, the letter from O’Hig- gins’ officials concluded by asking if the Minister for External Affairs had ‘considered the matter from the point of view of its effect on this country’s standing with the countries to which children are sent.’ In other words, the image of Ireland abroad was being tarnished by the policy of exporting ‘illegitimate’ children, and the Minister for External Affairs was responsible.

  The mandarins at Iveagh House were clearly annoyed at Tom O’Higgins’ criticisms, but he was a cabinet minister and they had to respond. They introduced a new rule in the summer of 1956 which appeared to make concessions to his sensibilities: all future passport applications on behalf of children in public authority care intending to travel abroad for adoption would be directed to the Minister for Health so he could personally approve or disapprove each case as it arose. This seemed to put O’Higgins in the driving seat, but it was a move that would give the Health Minister a few headaches – and some experience of the intense pressure that could be brought to bear by the religious orders who ran the local authority homes and who were fuelling the overseas adoption traffic.

  In a matter of months O’Higgins found himself overwhelmed with requests for passport clearances, and as the backlog grew, religious pressure mounted. It didn’t take long before O’Higgins’ officials were looking for a way of disengaging from the whole business.18 It was a humiliating climb-down, and as his officials made clear, it had been brought about entirely by O’Higgins being ‘placed in an embarrassing position vis-à-vis voluntary bodies and ecclesiastical authorities’. As a consequence, his officials now asked External Affairs to drop ‘the practice of referring these applications for the Minister’s consent’.19

  The Minister for Health, for all his principled opposition to the export of Irish children, had not taken on the ‘ecclesiastical authorities’ or the ‘voluntary bodies’ – Archbishop McQuaid and the nuns. The Department of External Affairs agreed to let the Department of Health ‘escape from the position into which they have engineered themselves,’20 but only on the understanding that

  O’Higgins had ‘modified his previous attitude’21, which in reality meant abandoning his criticisms.

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  After the ill-informed and inconsequential Dáil debate of March 1956, and the effective gutting of Tom O’Higgins a year later, the last remaining hope for a serious review of the American adoption issue was that the cabinet would receive the long-awaited policy statement from the Department of External Affairs. But it waited in vain. In March 1957, a full year after the statement was requested, a general election returned Fianna Fáil to power. O’Higgins was out of office. Cosgrave was succeeded by Frank Aiken. Work on various drafts of the statement continued but without urgency, and Father Cecil Barrett was even drafted in to assist in the writing of the document ‘on behalf of the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin’.22 As the matter dragged on into the 1960s, department officials came to the view that there was no longer any need to involve the Government since everything by then seemed to be running smoothly.23 The cabinet never discussed the matter; no government was ever officially aware of the numerous and serious problems that had been encountered.

  The policy of exporting the country’s ‘illegitimate’ children had survived a sustained period of scrutiny and criticism, but only because the truth had been suppressed. McQuaid’s six-year-old domestic news blackout was still in force, so the public at large remained ignorant of the baby traffic. The threatening clamour in the Dáil had been stilled by a combination of partial answers, unjustified assurances and bullying assertions that questions on the subject were ‘anti-national’. Tom O’Higgins, the only critical voice in cabinet, had been silenced and chastened.
The disturbing revelations in the draft statement to the Government about what was really going on had been spiked.

  But the staff in the passport section of the Department of External Affairs could at least hope that, in the future, overseas adoptions would be safer under the new rules, which required all child placements in America to be handled by legally registered agencies. The Department of External Affairs had introduced this tougher regulation early in 1956 in response to Monsignor John O’Grady’s revelations about the inadequacies of Catholic Charities. But it was not until July 1957, 18 months later, that Archbishop McQuaid followed suit.

  The Archbishop’s delay in tightening up his requirements seemed inexcusable, especially since the risks facing Irish infants sent to America under the old regime had been made abundantly clear. It seems the reason for his hesitation was that he was trying to bring all the religious-run adoption societies into line so there could be a uniform approach to the issue. The fear now, as always, was that if they were left to their own devices, the nuns would be inclined to accept American applicants at face value and offer babies without asking too many hard questions, so as to keep the babies moving and the donations flowing. But in the wake of O’Grady’s revelations, McQuaid wanted procedures standardised. The bishops were contacted with a view to getting them to persuade the nuns in their dioceses to agree common practices for handling future American adoptions. It proved a long slow process, and it was not until early 1958 that Cecil Barrett was in a position to report that McQuaid’s requirements for would-be American adopters ‘have now been accepted and are being enforced by all the members of the Irish hierarchy’.24

  This should have marked a turning point in the whole affair. In theory it meant that all future intending adopters, whoever they were and wherever they came from, would need a thoroughgoing home study report from a professionally qualified social worker, employed by a legally registered child-placing agency, before they could get their hands on an Irish baby. In theory at least, professional standards should now have been uniformly applied to all transatlantic adoptions. But they had been a long time coming and even after their introduction disturbing cases persisted.

  By the summer of 1958, when the tougher regulations finally came into force, over 1,300 children had been sent to America, and that represented over 60% of the total that would be sent, so at best only a minority could ever benefit from the new regime. What was more, the vetting system that was put in place so late in the day was little different from what had been offered by the secular and highly professional US Children’s Bureau, and turned down, eight years earlier. And one fundamental problem had still not been addressed by anyone in authority in Ireland: Americans could still adopt Irish children without ever having to set foot in the country. The baby export business remained almost entirely mail-order.

  Perhaps it was an unlucky coincidence, but one of the hardest hitting reports ever published into mail-order adoptions was released in the United States at the very moment when the Catholic Church in Ireland thought it had cleaned up its act. In June 1958, two prominent and highly regarded organisations, the Child Welfare League of America and the US branch of International Social Service published A Study of Proxy Adoptions by Laurin Hyde and Virgina P. Hyde, leading experts in the field. The two organisations used the release of this report to mount a campaign for a change in US Federal law to ban the practice of adopting children from abroad unseen – as happened in the overwhelming majority of adoptions from Ireland. By permitting such adoptions, they said, US law had allowed ‘an often tragic mail-order baby business’ to develop, adding that the current lax system ‘has already produced many tragic consequences, including the death, beating and abandonment of children.’25 The Hyde study recorded cases of ‘physical abuse of children, breakdown of adoptive homes, adoption of children by persons who were unstable or mentally ill and placements of upset or emotionally disturbed children with persons unprepared or unable to help them.’ As proof of the laxity in American law governing foreign adoptions, the report cited the bizarre case of an Oregon farmer who had managed to import 600 children whom he placed with families of his own choice. And, regrettably, these concerns were far from academic.

  It was October 1958 – three months after Archbishop McQuaid thought he had at last established a regime that would safeguard children sent to the United States – when four-year-old Kieran McNulty was put on a plane at Shannon by the Sacred Heart nuns from the Bessboro home in Cork, and flown to his new adoptive parents in Chicago. On top of adjusting to his new and alien environment, the four-year-old had to adjust quickly to a new name as well, for now he was Kevin Murtaugh. ‘I remember bits and pieces of what it was like living at Bessboro,’ he said in later years, ‘things like the nuns hitting us, being called by a number – I was number 36.’26 It was hard to imagine how life in the United States could be any worse for Kevin, but it was. ‘Things went well for the first few years,’ he recalled. ‘Years later I would figure that it was because I was a novelty to have around.’ Kevin described his Irish- American father as ‘a mean drunk’. ‘When he grew tired of me, he began to beat me, and one of the most common things he would say to me when he was beating me up and knocking me down was, “Get up you son of a bitch and take it like a man.”’ Kevin had to pay towards his own education. ‘I had to get up at 3.45 every morning, Monday through Friday, and sell newspapers on a street corner.’ By comparison, he said, none of his adoptive parents’ four natural children had to work. ‘I always felt like an unwanted guest in their house, not a son.’

  One of the things Kevin’s adoptive father seemed to hold against him was the fact that his natural mother had been unmarried, a fallen woman whose offspring would carry her tainted genes. It was the ultimate irony. The Catholic Church insisted on placing all ‘its’ children with devout and practising Catholics – the very people who were most likely to disparage their adopted children’s natural mothers for their supposed moral laxity. As a leading Irish social worker noted in later years: ‘Since most children placed for adoption are conceived out of wedlock, attitudes [of adopting parents] to non-marital sex are very important as this has been shown to colour attitudes towards the children.’27 Professional social workers assessing would-be adopters look for broad-minded, non-judgmental parents, the opposite of what McQuaid seemed to want – and, in Kevin Murtaugh’s case, got. Kevin was made pay – physically and psychologically – for his natural mother’s supposed sexual sins.

  On his seventeenth birthday, for the first and last time, Kevin defended himself from his father’s blows, giving – he said – as good as he got. Next day he left home and joined the US Army, never to return to his adoptive parents’ home. He subsequently married a woman called Diane Camm, a nurse, but the marriage failed. Drugs were involved and Diane had gone off with another man. ‘During a period in which we were trying to reconcile our marriage,’ he told me, ‘we got into an argument and it turned violent. I ended up choking her to death.’ This was as far as Kevin went with his story, but court documents obtained subsequently show that strangling his wife was far from the end of it. After killing Diane, Kevin borrowed a neighbour’s chain-saw and dismembered her body. It was January 1977. At the age of 22, Kevin was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in jail. When he first contacted me he had already spent over 20 years in prison, years in which he said he had had extensive counselling. ‘The psychologists have all said they believe my problems go all the way back to prior to the adoption. I can see why I ended up in prison. No real stable family life; an abusive relationship with my father; the fear of abandonment; always being told I was unwanted; no one or no place to turn to with my problems; the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land, out of place. It all added up.’ In 2002, Kevin’s request for parole was rejected and he had to wait until 2007 to apply again. On that occasion he was refused once more and told it would be 2015 before he could re- apply.28 By then he will have served 38 years in jail.

  At this remov
e it is impossible to say if Kevin Murtaugh is simply engaged in a charade of self-exculpation. Certainly Diane Camm’s family think he is a master of deception. Yet research shows a very high over-representation of adopted people among those in trouble, of one sort or another, with the authorities. In one 1980s study from California, between 30 and 40% of people in residential treatment centres, juvenile detention facilities and reform schools were found to have been adopted, yet adopted people comprised less than 3% of the wider population. Symptoms that were described as ‘consistent’ among adopted people referred for treatment included impulsiveness, aggressiveness and provocativeness.29 For a very small subset of adopted people – especially in closed adoptions marred by denial and deception – the adoption experience has also been linked with extreme forms of anti-social behaviour in later life, including murder and even serial murder. New York’s most notorious serial killers – David Berkowitz, known as ‘Son of Sam’, and Joel Riflin, ‘The Ripper’, who between them killed 23 women – were both adopted as infants. Berkowitz’s biographer, psychiatrist

  David Abrahamsen, concluded that the ‘mystery of his origins’ and the feeling that he was ‘an accident, a mistake, never meant to be born – unwanted’, played a crucial role in turning him into a killer of young women.30 And although there are no official statistics on the subject, one American criminal lawyer, Paul Mones, has estimated that in cases of parricide – murder of one or both parents – adopted people outnumber non-adopted people by a factor of 15 or more.31 In one famous case in America, expert witnesses called by lawyers representing a 14-year-old adopted child, Patrick DeGelleke, whose parents died when he burned their house down, were allowed to introduce what they called the ‘Adopted Child Syndrome’ as a defence argument. One of the experts, David Kirschner, who has testified at numerous trials of adopted people charged with murder, argues that adopted people are at particular risk of extreme dissociation under stress, especially the stress of real or perceived rejection by family or friends.32