Adoptions aftermath

The mother-and-baby homes scandal may force the Government to address the issue of forced and illegal adoptions which the State has avoided dealing with for decades, writes Conall Ó Fátharta.

ANY inquiry into what happened in Ireland’s mother-and-baby homes will raise the ugly spectre numerous governments have wished to avoid — forced and illegal adoptions.

It has been enlightening to see politicians and various sections of the media express disgust and horror that deaths occurred in mother-and-baby homes, when such details have been known for years.

The details around forced and illegal adoptions arranged and facilitated by mother-and-baby homes have also been known for years.

However, any talk of investigating how these institutions arranged adoptions has been curiously absent from any Government statements.

Ireland’s history of adoption and the spectre of decades of forced and illegal adoptions is the elephant in the room in any discussion of mother-and-baby homes.

It is the dirty little secret that consecutive governments have avoided for decades — and it is yet another State scandal.

Just last year, Australia offered a State apology to women who lost their children through its forced adoption policies. It offered its apology on the back of an investigation that found adoption rates among unmarried mothers hit 60% in the late 1960s.

By contrast, in Ireland, the corresponding figure for 1967 was 97%.

Adoption rates for unmarried women did not fall below 60% at any point between 1962 and 1974.

Yet, fast forward three decades and we have a Government studiously avoiding the use of the phrase “forced adoption” or “illegal adoption”.

In fact, earlier this year, then children’s minister Frances Fitzgerald categorically stated that every adoption carried out by the State since 1952 was done in line with the legislation of the day. She also batted back any comparisons with Australia, pointing out that the State apology offered there was due to government policies at the time in that country.

Yet a quote from her predecessor as minister for justice in 1974, Fine Gael’s Paddy Cooney, shows that forced adoption was publicly and actively supported by the Government of the day: “I think we are all agreed that the consensus opinion in our society is to the effect that adoption is better for the illegitimate baby than to be cared for by its mother.”

Ms Fitzgerald’s view that every adoption carried out by the State was in line with the law is curious. The only way of proving such a claim is by carrying out an audit of the tens of thousands of adoption files from mother-and-baby homes that are in the possession of the State — something she routinely declined to do as minister.

The Adoption Rights Alliance, as well as this newspaper, is aware of and has reported on numerous documented cases where formal adoption orders were granted without the consent of the mother, where documents were falsified, and where the parents of the children were married.

Illegal adoptions and the falsification of records were not only facilitated by religious agencies, but also by people in the medical profession.

While an audit would be one step on the road to shedding some light on our adoption history, legislating to offer adopted people and natural parents even the most basic rights in terms of tracing and information would represent a monumental milestone.

It has been promised as “a priority” by every Government since 1997, yet in 2014, we are still waiting for a heads of bill despite all the promises.

Despite academics regularly stating that it is possible to legislate for tracing rights, for this Government, it has been “complex.”

The official line trotted out ad nauseam by every children’s minister since the mid-1990s is that there are complex constitutional barriers to legislation arising from a 1998 Supreme Court ruling.

This found that the natural mother’s constitutional right to privacy had to be balanced against the child’s constitutional right to identity. Both domestically and internationally, the judgment was criticised by legal experts for its assumption that natural parents who had given up a child for adoption would not wish to be contacted by their now-adult child, and that all natural mothers were presumed to have wished their identities to have remained a secret.

The presumption that all mothers were guaranteed confidentiality by the State when they were giving up their child for adoption is often trotted out by politicians. No evidence of such a guarantee has ever been provided by the State or any adoption agency.

The current plans for tracing and legislation seem to favour putting the current guidelines on a statutory footing. These guidelines have failed adopted people and natural parents for years.

Adopted people and natural parents have no right to copies of all material held in their files, nor have adopted people a right to their medical histories. Natural mothers do not even have the right to read their own adoption files.

Such rights are taken for granted in other countries. For example, the right to birth records has existed in Scotland since 1930, England and Wales since 1976, the North since 1987, and New Zealand since 1991.

The reality is that, by offering full tracing rights and fully open adoption records, the State will open itself up to another apology, and yet more compensation to women who have suffered in silence for decades.

Adoption Rights Alliance presented a 131-page dossier to Ms Fitzgerald in 2011, outlining all of the issues making headlines now. It also called for a full-scale inquiry into the operation mother-and-baby homes, vaccine trials, and forced and illegal adoptions.

Maybe now the Government will listen.