The workload keeps on growing at Mother and Baby Homes Commission

The Mother and Baby Homes Commission was set up in 2015 and was due to make its final report next month. There is no end in sight, though, writes Conall Ó Fátharta.

The Mother and Baby Homes Commission is to carry out a geophysical survey at the site of the former Sean Ross Abbey institution in Tipperary. It is the first time that a physical examination is being done at a site other than Tuam and is a significant development. However, it has taken quite a time to get to this point.

The Mother and Baby Homes Commission has been up and running for four years. It first carried out a geophysical examination at Tuam in October 2015 — more than three years ago. In March, it will publish a “substantial report” on burial arrangements at other “major institutions”.

The report will also include “extensive technical reports” prepared in the course of the commission’s work on the site at Tuam.

However, survivors had expected the full and final report to be published next month. The news that the commission has received a 12-month extension in order to finish its work has understandably angered many survivors.

They were particularly annoyed that they had to learn about the request for an extension through the media and felt the news should have been relayed to them before now.

This is the second time the commission has requested an extension to the deadline for its final report. It was originally due to publish its report in February last year before seeking a one-year extension. The fact it has done so again should not surprise people. Although it has caused anger and hurt to survivors, the sheer scale of the task before the commission meant it was unlikely to hit this deadline.

In December 2017, the commission admitted, in its third interim report, that it had spent “considerable time” trying to establish the burial practices at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home. It wasn’t until February 2018 that it had moved on to examining burial practices at Bessborough, by which time it made a public appeal for information. The third report was clear that while the commission had gathered a “vast” amount of documentary material in relation to 11 of the 14 institutions, a huge amount of work remained to be done. It was unlikely this would have been completed in one year.

Despite survivors and a range of TDs requesting that the Government refuse the commission’s request, it was never likely to happen. If the Government did this, it would effectively be asking the commission to stop its work and publish an incomplete report. That would benefit no one.

Furthermore, we would be left with a highly peculiar scenario where a State inquiry, largely established because of the discovery of the Tuam babies, would be publishing its final report without knowing the details of what happened at that site or any other site for that matter.

There is also the fact that the issue of illegal registrations at St Patrick’s Guild has now been referred to the commission by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs (DCYA) — almost four years after the Irish Examiner queried the decision to exclude it in the first place when it was known to have been involved in such practices.

A separate scoping exercise into illegal birth registrations across all adoption agencies was also announced by the DCYA in May. It has now been delayed twice. It is unclear what, if any, co-operation is occurring between the commission and the agencies involved in the scoping exercise, namely Tusla and the Adoption Authority of Ireland (AAI). You can see how complicated this is starting to become for the State.

The commission’s fourth interim report, published yesterday, goes into even more detail about the scope and scale of the inquiry and the significant challenges it says it has come up against.

It outlines, once again, that it has had “difficulties” finding out more about the burial arrangements in a number of different institutions and that drafters of the commission’s terms of reference “are unlikely to have foreseen the extent of the problem and the amount of time and effort that has had to be given to this issue”.

It also appears that the process of seeking records under discovery from the Department of Health and DCYA was either delayed or didn’t happen until the commission was established.

For example, the report states that it has been provided with extensive material by the Department of Health and DCYA. However, the commission has only recently received the bulk of this material and further material is in the process of being provided.

The first tranche of discovery was delivered in March 2017 and consisted of over 12,000 pages. The second tranche was delivered in March 2018 and consisted of over 54,000 pages. Two further tranches were delivered in June 2018, consisting of approximately 36,000 pages.

The commission was then informed in November 2018 that a further 277 relevant files were available. It said it “does not yet know the extent of the material in these files but it is likely to run to many thousands of pages”.

It only received these files last month.

The report also reveals that the HSE has uncovered very little in terms of documentation, something which has “dismayed” the commission.

It is clear that the HSE does not have any system, much less a proper system, of storing and archiving material. In its third interim report, the commission expressed the view that the inability of the HSE to provide relevant material may be due to the change in structures over the years.

"However, it is difficult to understand how relatively recent documentation is not available,” states the report.

The commission is also still hearing evidence from a range of people. These include former residents, workers, and representatives of the authorities who ran the institutions. In cases where individuals are unable to give evidence in person, for whatever reason, the commission is making arrangements to have affidavits sworn.

It pointed out that this process is not yet complete and, particularly in respect of the authorities who ran the institutions, cannot be completed until all the documentary evidence has been analysed.

With respect to burials, the commission said that new information came to light in 2018 which is still being examined.

It pointed out that since the Government committed to a forensic excavation of the burial site at Tuam, a number of people have come forward with information about burial practices in a number of the institutions that are under investigation.

The commission is in the process of interviewing these people and checking the information being provided.

This is not the first time the commission has sought a time extension. In its first interim report, published in July 2016, it sought to extend the timeframe for the completion of its Confidential Committee report and its Social History report.

These were due to be submitted in August 2017 but the commission had asked for them to be submitted with the overall final report then promised for February 2018.

At the end of September 2016, the commission announced it was carrying out a test excavation at the site of the children’s burial ground for the Tuam Mother and Baby Home. Site work began in October and was expected to last five weeks.

On March 3, 2017, the commission confirmed that “significant quantities of human remains” had been discovered in at least 17 of the 20 underground chambers which were examined as part of the excavation works.

It would be another 20 months before the Government would commit to a full forensic exhumation of the remains.

Completed in September 2016, the commission’s second interim report wasn’t published by the DCYA until April 2017 — one month after the discovery in Tuam.

Running to 16 pages, the report has three main sections: On redress, its terms of reference, and on the issue of the false registration of births.

The Government’s key message from that report was that came in advance of its publication when certain sections of the media the Government’s view that it was “not possible” to implement its the report’s main recommendation, that the 2002 Residential Institutions Redress Scheme be reopened in order to compensate those who were in mother and baby homes as children.

The report stated that residents of mother and baby homes and, in particular, the Bethany home, had a “a strong case” that they should have been included in the 2002 scheme. Katherine Zappone, the children’s minister, repeated that this was not an option on the day the second interim report was published.

That report also featured a section on illegal birth registrations, which it titled “false registration of birth”.

The report noted that illegal adoptions cover a “wide variety of situations including actions taken (or not taken) prior to the adoption and illegality in the adoption orders made”. However, it makes no effort to highlight any of these. Instead, the focus of the section is on illegal birth registrations.

While the commission acknowledged that the false registration of a birth is a criminal offence, it speculated that those involved in such practices may have been engaging in a crime for what they thought were the right reasons.

“It is possible that such registrations were carried out for what were perceived to be good reasons (this does not change the fact that it was an offence). Formal legal adoption did not become available in Ireland until 1953,” states the report

There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that, prior to the availability of formal adoption, ‘adoptive’ parents may have falsely registered the birth in the belief that they were conferring legal status on the child.

This narrative, offered without anything other than “anecdotal evidence”, indicates that such activity was done by ordinary, well-meaning couples rather than being facilitated by any other power structure such as a religious order or, indeed, the State.

However, the opposite may also be the case; that these practices may have been facilitated for other, more nefarious reasons and perhaps for financial gain. However, this is not explored.

In December 2017, the commission published its third interim report. At four pages, its main purpose was to seek an extension to the deadline for submitting its final report to February 2019.

It pointed out that it will be “difficult to establish the facts” surrounding the burials of children who died in all of the homes the commission is investigating.

The report noted that while there are “detailed death records available” in relation to mother and baby homes, there are also “significant gaps” in the information available about the burials of babies who died in a number of the institutions it is examining.

The report states that it has been “very time-consuming” to collect and analyse information about entry and exit pathways for mothers and children; living conditions, mortality rates, postmortem practices, and vaccine trials in the institutions; and practices in relation to placement for fostering and adoption had proven to be “very time consuming”.

The commission said it had already collected a “vast range” of material relating to 11 of the 14 institutions under investigation and is electronically scanning or photocopying the relevant

records.

However, the report also revealed there is one institution for which records are “probably not available” and another whose records may be available but are “very difficult to extract from a larger collection of records”.

Orders for discovery had been served on the relevant religious congregations and State authorities. Extensive material had been provided at that point but it was clear that there was a significant amount of road left to travel.

The report states that the records of some of the various health authorities are proving “difficult to find” and it is “not clear if they have been lost or destroyed or simply that no one knows where they are”. According to yesterday’s update, this remains an issue.

All of which points to the enormous amount of work that was facing the commission in December 2017.

More than a year on, this workload has clearly only increased. The fact that the DCYA finally acknowledged the reality and scale of illegal adoptions and illegal registrations means that this issue now has to take a central role in any report the commission publishes.

The St Patrick’s Guild cases have been referred to it and the practice of illegal registrations was certainly not confined to one adoption agency.

This newspaper has also revealed even more egregious examples of births and identities being falsified.

Just last month, an Irish Examiner investigation revealed the case of Jackie Foley who as a teenager in 1974 was instructed by a nun at the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home to sign a false name on the consent form allowing for her newborn son to be adopted.

All of the paperwork that followed — including her son’s birth certificate and adoption order — were made out in bogus names.

In February last year, another Irish Examiner investigation revealed that children from the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home and another State-funded and accredited former adoption agency in Cork were buried in unmarked graves in a Cork City cemetery as late as 1990.

Tusla, which now hold the records, declined to say whether it had informed the commission of these deaths before the Irish Examiner revealed them.

Both the commission and DCYA declined to say whether or not all of the burials found would be investigated.

Four years on from its establishment, the commission’s workload may only be increasing.