Adoption campaigners have said the long-delayed scoping exercise into illegal registrations is a “cosmetic” exercise as it is not looking at illegal adoptions.

The long-delayed report into illegal birth registrations will be submitted to children's minister Katherine Zappone before Easter.

The former adoption agency at the centre of the illegal adoptions scandal has gone into voluntary liquidation — just months after hundreds of illegal birth registrations were found in its files.

A memo will go to the Government “in the coming weeks” outlining how to deal with the infant remains found at the site of the former mother and baby home in Tuam.

The Adoption Authority (AAI) sent three reports on illegal birth registrations — including a spreadsheet of 90 cases — to the Department of Children in 2015, three years before the St Patrick’s Guild scandal.

TRESSA Reeves never asked for anything for herself. All she ever wanted was for her son to be told the truth of who he was, writes Conall Ó Fátharta. It was a selfless act of a woman and a mother. A woman and mother ignored year after year by every State agency she asked to help her.

Thousands of people may come forward to sue the State and religious orders over forced and illegal adoptions following the settlement of a high-profile case in the High Court.

It’s an insult to give children a birth certificate which records two parents who can’t have physically engendered them, writes Victoria White

A mother and son separated through an illegal adoption from St Patrick’s Guild will end a four-year battle with the State and the guild in the High Court next month.

Despite protesting otherwise, the State knew about the practice of illegal adoption for years, with Tressa Reeves gathering evidence of her son’s illegal registration in 1997 and the authorities informed in 2001, writes Conall Ó Fátharta.

The Adoption Authority of Ireland (AAI) reported at least one case of an illegal birth registration to the DPP and gardaí as far back as 2002.

Former Tánaiste Joan Burton has called for the Government to lift the veil of secrecy on birth details and adoptions to allow people access their personal histories.

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Tusla has raised concerns about a further 748 adoption cases from St Patrick’s Guild which contain evidence of names being changed, cash payments and other “irregularities”.

Leo Varadkar has claimed that “what’s different” about the latest revelations in relation to St Patrick’s Guild is that this is the first time we have found “documentary evidence” of such cases.

Any audit of adoption records needs to examine all forms of illegal adoption and not just illegal birth registrations.

The revelation that potentially thousands of people may have had their births falsified so they could be illegally adopted may have profound legal consequences — including for inheritance rights.

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Adoption campaigners want an immediate inquiry into the scale of illegal adoptions — a call they have repeatedly made for years.

Tusla was recording illegal adoptions and birth registrations in 2016 — two years before the agency’s revelation that it had uncovered unlawful registrations at St Patrick’s Guild.

A full trawl of hundreds of thousands of records, rather than a sample exercise, is needed to establish the facts in the illegal adoptions scandal, says Independents4-Change TD Clare Daly.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has described the illegal adoption scandal as another ‘dark chapter’ in our history, which needs to be handled with the utmost sensitivity.

A scoping exercise into hundreds of thousands of the State’s adoption records may reveal thousands of people who have no idea they were illegally adopted.

The Irish Examiner first wrote about Tressa Reeves in 2010. Her case sparked the first-ever audit of records by the then Adoption Board and highlighted again Ireland’s murky adoption history.

Finally there will be a sample audit of all records held by the State, writes Conall Ó Fátharta.

The number of child protection and welfare referrals lodged with Tusla last year rose 9% to 47,399, according to the Child and Family Agency’s annual report.

More than 13,000 files from St Patrick’s Guild adoption agency have transferred to Tusla, the Child and Family Agency — almost three years after the agency ceased to operate.

The Mother and Baby Homes Commission has yet to decide whether to ask for an extension of its remit to examine other institutions.

 

The Government excluded an adoption agency from the mother-and-baby home inquiry despite being told almost two years ago that it had knowledge of “several hundred” illegal birth registrations.

Adoption campaigners are concerned that tens of thousands of unmarried women and girls whose children were forcibly or illegally adopted will be excluded from the upcoming mother and baby homes inquiry.

The Government was “conscious of the danger” of offering redress for Magdalene survivors just months before setting up the McAleese inquiry to investigate the issue.

Nearly a quarter of the babies born to Irish mothers and exported to the US for adoption were born at the Sean Ross Abbey, Co Tipperary, the convent at the centre of the film Philomena.

No full-scale audit has ever been carried out into tens of thousands of files given to the State by the religious orders which ran Ireland’s mother-and-baby homes.

Amidst the tsunami of speculation about the whereabouts of the bodies of almost 800 children from the former Tuam mother-and-baby home, some sceptics have settled on the belief that 796 bodies could not be contained in this small plot of land.

The Government has again been urged to open an independent inquiry into the level of illegal adoptions carried out in Ireland going back decades.

A religious-run adoption agency, which facilitated illegal adoptions and exported more than 500 “illegitimate” children, is withdrawing its tracing and information service.

The Adoption Authority was alerted to the activities of a Monaghan GP —recently exposed as arranging illegal adoptions in the 1970s — as far back as 2005.

A major report on illegal practices in intercountry adoption has cited the Irish case of Tressa Reeves as a documented example of illegal adoption.

The Adoption Authority has said it has “no plans” to inspect all the files held by accredited adoption agencies, despite evidence that some have arranged illegal adoptions.

THE first ever audit of the Adoption Authority’s records has uncovered approximately 50 cases of illegal adoptions.

TRESSA REEVES, whose son was illegally adopted and registered as the natural child of the adoptive parents, says she has received no assistance from the Adoption Authority more than a year after her case was exposed.