Legacy of abuse alive and active - HSE adoption report

THE catalogue of horrors uncovered about institution after institution entrusted with the care of our most vulnerable infants, children, young girls, and women is so disturbing that it is hard to know how to react to another series of shocking revelations.

Our first, almost understandable, instinct might be to look away, but that would be another betrayal of those vulnerable, abandoned people made victims by a relentless and cruel system, a system run in the main by Catholic religious orders but endorsed by the State and operated in the full, unquestioning knowledge of this society.

Today’s details from a 2012 internal HSE report that an adoption agency — Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork — may have forged death records so children could “be brokered in clandestine adoption arrangements” suggests procedures that would be described as child trafficking today, arrangements that would mean extended jail terms for the organisers and recipients — vendors and purchasers — if they were charged and convicted.