Children may have been ‘illegally’ adopted abroad

Irish children may have been illegally adopted from mother and baby homes by US and British couples after signatures from their birth mothers were "blatantly forged" by unknown officials.

Former RTÉ journalist Mike Milotte, who began investigating the scandal in 1997, raised the issue again after fresh concerns over what exactly occurred inside the now-closed Catholic Church-run facilities.

Speaking to RTÉ yesterday, Mr Milotte, author of Banished Babies, said he is aware of a large number of cases where “something very suspicious” was occurring among children who were sent to the US and Britain — often to families who had been turned down for adoptions in their own countries and who were paying religious groups for the Irish opportunity.

Mr Milotte said that while no child could be adopted by a family outside of Ireland without documents showing its birth mother had given consent to a passport and to the adoption itself, there are incidents where the signatures were “blatantly forged”.

Describing the system of adoptions to the US via religious groups in Ireland as “almost exclusively a mail-order business”, he said the recipient families would rarely come to this country and would instead be shown a photograph to see if the child was “suitable”.

Mr Milotte said “hundreds” of children were sent abroad in this way before structures were put in place to ensure they went to safe homes across the Atlantic.

However, even after oversights were implemented, the group tasked with overseeing them — Catholic Charities, which was chosen by Archbishop John Charles McQuaid over the secular Children’s Bureau of America — warned Church officials and the Department of Foreign Affairs it did not have enough resources to perform “vigorous” checks.

Calling for the issue to be included in any investigation into Ireland’s now-closed mother-and-baby homes, Mr Milotte said there are “voluminous files about this in the national archives”.

The Irish Examiner has reported in depth on the issue of illegal adoptions of children whose mothers gave birth outside of marriage.