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

by Mike Milotte

  Finally, sometime before the baby’s first birthday, the nuns got their way. Maureen’s mother admitted defeat and agreed to let her baby be offered for adoption. ‘But only on condition,’ she said, ‘that they send me news of how she was doing from time to time, and the occasional photograph.’ None of these were ever sent to her despite the fact that Jim and Dorothy Rowe wrote regular letters to the nuns, full of news about the baby’s progress along with lots of photographs.

  Learning so much about her origins was a life-changing experience for Maureen. ‘To find out the truth, to discover that you were wanted, that you were loved and that your mother only parted with you under awful circumstances, that was a life-changing experience for me. It was such a boost to my self-esteem. And to see that I look like her, this is a wonderful experience because when you are adopted you don’t look like anyone. Suddenly you know you came from somewhere, that you belonged somewhere, that you have a real past, you didn’t just appear from nowhere. That’s all so important for adopted people, that if you’re not adopted you just can’t understand it. But no one should have the right to keep it from you.’

  There was a final piece of the jigsaw missing: Jan, Maureen’s birth father. She discussed with her mother whether or not she should look for him, and her mother encouraged her to do so. But where would she begin? Telephone directories are a useful starting point, but even though his surname would have been uncommon in America it was probably quite ordinary in Holland. By chance Maureen just happened to have computer access to all listed telephone numbers in Canada and she just keyed in her father’s name one day to see what turned up. There were a couple of entries for the same surname, but none had ‘J’ as a first initial. She tried one anyway and after a convoluted conversation about family trees with the man on the other end of the line, she discovered that she was talking to Jan’s brother. It was a staggering coincidence, a chance in a million. She told him why she wanted to contact Jan, and he promised to come back to her soon with information. A couple of days later he called with a telephone number. Jan was in Cape Town, South Africa.

  ‘I called him straight away and he answered the phone. I just came out and said it: “You had a baby in Ireland.” Well, he said straight back, “yes I did have a baby, is it you? Are you Marion?” He said the same name, he remembered the name. He was so excited, he seemed so happy. “I’ve thought about you all these years,” he said. “Where have you been? What have you been doing?” He just couldn’t believe that I had done the search and I had found him. He was so accepting and so excited.’

  Next time Maureen called Jan it was on his birthday. ‘He told me then he had tried to get in to see me but the nuns just slammed the door in his face. He said he was so sorry now that he had accepted their right to do that, he hadn’t fought them, just turned round and went away again. He explained that being divorced there was no way things could have worked out in Ireland. He had no rights. He wasn’t allowed to see me. He wasn’t asked about my future. Now, he’s old and he never had that opportunity.’ Jan finally visited Maureen in America in late 1996, spending five weeks with her and her family. ‘He was so open about it all,’ Maureen said, ‘but also so angry about the way we had all been treated by the Church.’

  Maureen may be one of the lucky ones. Not only has she found her mother and her father, but she has come through her experiences remarkably intact and the reunions have proved amicable. But she has strong feelings about the obstacles that were put in the way of her tracing her mother. ‘I don’t think any priest or any nun has the right to keep records secret that could help reunite people. If mothers – or fathers for that matter – don’t want the contact, let them say so themselves: “sorry, I just can’t cope with you in my life right now”, not have someone else say it for them. And it’s even worse when the people telling you, “no, we can’t put you together” are the same people who pulled you apart in the first place.’

  14. Deny Till They Die

  ‘It must be borne in mind that no official records exist of Irish children who were sent abroad for adoption in the past... No information is kept on Irish children who were adopted under the laws of foreign countries.’

  Austin Currie, Minister of State for Children’s Policy

  Dáil Éireann, 5 March 1996

  ‘... there are up to 1,500 detailed adoption files which... contain the names and dates of birth of the children concerned, the names of their birth mothers, the names and details of their adoptive parents...’

  Dick Spring, Minister for Foreign Affairs,

  Waterford, 7 March 1996

  By the early 1960s the American adoption business had gone into decline, although it would be the early 1970s before it stopped altogether. The figures that chart its descent are quite dramatic. Between 1949, when records began, and 1961 – a period of 12 years – approximately 150 children were sent to the United States on average each year. But over the next 12 years up to 1973, the average was just 30 a year.

  In the early 1960s, ironically as its adoption workload declined, the Department of External Affairs tried to extricate itself from responsibility for the American baby traffic by having the whole business shifted onto the shoulders of the Adoption Board. But Peter Berry, Secretary General in the Department of Justice, which then had responsibility for the Board, opposed the idea, and although his reasons were never made clear it could simply have been that, like many others, he had little faith in the Board’s ability to do a proper job. Having failed to pass responsibility in that direction, one passport official came up with a startling plan for disposing of all ‘illegitimate’ children from the State.

  Early in 1962, the official calculated that approximately 550 ‘illegitimate’ children a year were ‘surplus’ to domestic demand. US adoptions, he said, would take about 150 of these annually, but that meant the number of children dependent on institutional care would be growing at a rate of 400 a year. The official proposed a coordinated campaign involving the Department, Archbishop McQuaid and Catholic Charities to clear the orphanages of these ‘unwanted children’ by advertising their availability in the States and making ‘a positive effort... to have them all adopted.’1

  But when the official discussed the matter with McQuaid’s adoption advisor, Cecil Barrett, by then a Monsignor, he discovered that the figures he had been working on were very out of date. ‘Adoptions within the country are proceeding so satisfactorily,’ the passport officer then noted, ‘that neither St Patrick’s Guild nor the nuns at Navan Road have any children available for adoption abroad.’2

  Times were changing. Major social and cultural shifts were underway in Irish society as a whole, and it was these, rather than any decision on the part of the nuns to actually stop the traffic, that were responsible for the decline in child exports in the 1960s. With the advance of urbanisation in Ireland, adoption was becoming more popular – even fashionable. In 1967, for example, 97 out of every 100 children born in Ireland to unmarried mothers were adopted within the State. The average yearly figure for the 1950s had been 56 Irish adoptions per hundred ‘illegitimate’ births. But the other side of this equation also needs to be noted: when the small number of continuing US adoptions is factored in, we are left with the fact that fewer than two out of every 100 unmarried mothers kept their children, indicating the extent to which these young women still felt compelled – and in many cases were compelled – to give up their babies. As Irish adoptions increased further, the American traffic declined at a pace. Again, the figures are quite dramatic. Between 1949 and 1961, an average of 12 out of every 100 ‘illegitimate’ children born each year were sent to America. From 1962 until 1973 the yearly average was just 2 per hundred.

  And by the 1970s another significant factor had come into play: the payment of state benefits to single mothers. As the number of children born each year to unmarried women soared – virtually doubling between 1964 (1,292) and 1974 (2,515), Irish society was at last forced to come to terms with its own reality. The singl
e mother’s allowance had the effect of enabling more women to keep their children rather than giving them up for adoption. It was no coincidence that the number of adoptions within Ireland itself peaked in 1975 when 1,287 ‘illegitimate’ children were adopted. Although church pressure continued to be applied to many unmarried young mothers to give their babies up for adoption through the 1980s and into the ’90s, the number of babies available for adoption continued to decline. An additional factor was the legalisation of abortion in Britain in 1967, which enabled a growing number of Irish women to terminate unwanted pregnancies by travelling to the UK. And as fewer and fewer Irish children became available for adoption, and as Ireland became a wealthier society, more and more childless Irish couples turned to other, less developed or poorer countries in search of children to adopt, turning the situation that had prevailed in the 1950s and 60s on its head. From exporting babies, Ireland has become a net importer of children. Inter-country adoption, the new name for baby exports, is supposed to be tightly regulated under the umbrella of the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children. But as Ireland’s own sorry history in this area shows, rules are made to be broken and unscrupulous operators will always find ways to procure babies from unfortunate mothers on the one hand, and locate people with deep pockets to acquire them on the other. Issues such as these have arisen in just about every country where Irish people have adopted children in recent years, countries like Russia, China, and Vietnam where critical matters – such as informed and freely given maternal consent, and the extent of corruption among public officials – continue to provoke concerns. So much so, in fact, that at the time of writing in 2011, the Adoption Authority’s website carried a stark and frequently repeated warning that if they find evidence of cash payments for babies adopted abroad they will refuse to recognise the adoption in Irish law. Yet from some would-be inter-country adopters, there have been loud and persistent demands for a relaxation in Ireland’s now thoroughgoing process of assessment for those who want to become adoptive parents. Again, Ireland’s own experience shows, tragically, that it is when the tests of suitability are lax or poorly enforced that child welfare is most at risk. Unfortunately there are plenty who would still deny the lessons of history.

  Meanwhile, as Ireland’s own child export programme faded out, and as many of those who were involved moved on or died, memories dimmed. Dust settled on the files. It had become a non-subject. A whole new generation of Irish citizens grew up in a radically changing society, oblivious to this episode in their nation’s history, an episode which most of them – with more progressive attitudes to women’s rights, contraception, sexual relationships, single motherhood, and child welfare – would find shameful. But it was not a story that would stay buried forever. Too many people had been hurt, too many powerful human emotions denied. Yet when the long-suppressed saga finally did begin to emerge, in a confused and incomplete way in the spring of 1996 – quarter of a century after the baby traffic ceased – the nuns who had organised it kept quiet while the State, which had facilitated it, kicked for touch.

  The tale of Ireland’s infant diaspora began to emerge only in the wake of other disturbing revelations about the treatment of children in days gone by. Given the endless flow in the intervening years of clerical abuse stories and stories of the systematic brutalisation of children in religious-run institutions, coupled with all the tribunals of inquiry and harrowing official reports, it can be difficult to remember just how new and utterly sensational it all was in the mid 1990s. There was a deeply controversial television documentary, Dear Daughter, on the appalling abuse of children by nuns in a Dublin orphanage at Goldenbridge. That programme itself had come after the first tentative revelations of clerical child sex abuse which in turn followed the scandals of Bishop Eamon Casey and Father Michael Cleary who had secretly fathered children. But the subject of the Church and sex was a minefield for those in power. After all, a Government had fallen in November 1994 over the botched handling of an extradition warrant for the paedophile priest Brendan Smyth.

  Against the backdrop of these faith-shattering episodes, former Aer Lingus employee, Anne Phelan, phoned a morning radio chat show and told of her encounters in the early 1950s with American military personnel who openly talked of buying children from Irish orphanages.3 This was just the beginning. Pat Kilmurray phoned to say he used to take American couples around the orphanages in his taxi so they could inspect the babies on offer.4 Rosemary Walsh, who had worked in the visa department of the American embassy, recalled the special days that were set aside each month to deal with around 20 children at a time who were going to the States to be adopted, all brought in by nuns. And she remembered, too, the ‘fabulous wealth’ of the American adopters, as seen in their affidavits.5

  It was becoming apparent that this was something more than a few chance cases here and there. It had the appearance of something organised, something large scale.

  Yet no one seemed to have an overview. No one could say – or, more accurately, was prepared to say – when it began or when it ended. No one seemed to know how many children were involved, or the circumstances in which they were taken from the country. Who had been behind it? Was money a primary consideration? Where did all the children come from and where did they end up? Had it been legal?

  The emerging, if still utterly confused story took a more sinister turn when Maggie Butler, who had been sent to America by St Patrick’s Guild in 1951, revealed that after years of searching for her natural mother, she had discovered that her mother’s name had been falsified on birth records, making it impossible for Maggie to find her.6 And what was more, the nuns, who she believed knew her mother’s true identity, had misled her and would give her no help. We know now, of course, that falsifying birth records and lying about it in later years were common practice among the baby exporters, but when Maggie Butler first spoke about her experience she wasn’t always believed.

  Then came the first firm proof that substantial numbers of children were involved in the American adoptions: Nora Gibbons, then senior social worker with the child welfare organisation Barnardos, revealed that they were already dealing with around 200 Irish-born people sent to the US for adoption who were trying to unravel the secret of their origins. Many of them, Gibbons said, were finding it impossible to discover anything because of falsified birth records.7 The State’s own Adoption Board put out a statement admitting that it was aware of this problem, which, it said, was faced not only by those sent to America but by unknown numbers of children adopted within Ireland as well. And some adoption societies had colluded in it.8

  All this emerged in a matter of days, and although the pieces of the jigsaw were slowly falling into place, to complete the picture and make sense of it all some sort of authoritative statement was needed from those in possession of the facts. The opportunity for the State to tell what it knew came when the matter was raised in the Dáil on 5 March 1996. But what came out was not illumination but simply more confusion. Alan Shatter, then a backbench TD on the Government side and an expert in family law, had asked the obvious questions: How many children were sent abroad? What agencies or individuals were involved? What records had been kept? Was the natural mother’s consent obtained in all cases?9 Shatter went on to demand a formal inquiry into the whole affair, ‘for the sake of many hundreds, if not thousands of children who were effectively exiled from the State in which they were born’.

  But when Austin Currie, Junior Minister responsible for the care of children, rose to reply, it was clear he was already on the defensive. He was here, he said, to deal with ‘allegations’. Contradicting the public mood of astonishment over the emerging revelations, Currie said the former practice of exporting children to America had been ‘well known’, although the exact number involved was not.10 ‘It must be borne in mind,’ Currie said, ‘that no official records exist of Irish children who were sent abroad for adoption in the past as no such records were required to be kept by public authorities.’ This wa
s an astonishing statement, a seeming assertion that the State had no responsibility for what had happened, no duty of care towards thousands of its own infant citizens.

  Austin Currie’s statement contained no words of regret, no sentiments that would bring comfort to those, like Pat Thuillier or Mary Geraghty, who had suffered so much. Currie said he was considering a contact register to help people adopted within Ireland, but be doubted if it was possible to extend it to those adopted in the United States.

  The Junior Minister went on to deny Shatter’s demand for an inquiry and in the process issued a rebuke to those who asked critical questions. ‘Given the dearth of information regarding arrangements that were made some 30 or 40 years ago,’ Currie said, ‘I do not see how it would be practicable at this stage to conduct an investigation into a practice which was widely known at the time and which does not appear to have been considered unacceptable.’ The implication seemed to be that if it was acceptable then, it could not be queried now. It was a cold, if not chilling performance.

  Austin Currie, however, had misled the Dáil on two counts, no doubt unintentionally. Many people did find the practice of exporting ‘illegitimate’ children unacceptable, including people in authority at the time. And there were records – individual records for every single infant who was given an ‘adoption passport’, as well as voluminous official files relating to Church and State involvement in the whole affair.