Tristan parents may have to pay for upkeep

THE Government will seek to compel the adoptive parents of a young boy whom they left in an Indonesian orphanage to pay for his maintenance and upkeep over the past two years.

Four-year-old Tristan Dowse was adopted by Irishman Joe Dowse and his Azerbaijani wife, Lala, in 2001 when he was two months old. The couple returned the child to the orphanage in Indonesia two years later on the grounds that the adoption was “not working out”. They claimed that they had had difficulties bonding with Tristan, then aged two.

The case first came into the public domain in April this year, though it subsequently emerged that Irish authorities had been aware of it for over a year.