Adoption files to be reviewed: A story of collusion and trafficking

One of the reasons we cannot escape our past is that we do not always recognise it as it was.

We often use denial as a refuge from discomfiting truths. Another is that our culture, our civil and religious bureaucracies, and, all too often, our politicians, in a position to counter comforting myth with colder fact, shy away from unearthing the rawest stories, especially those involving vulnerable children.

In the context of yesterday’s welcome announcement from Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone that files on illegal adoption registrations from St Patrick’s Guild would be reviewed, the adjective “vulnerable” means children born outside of marriage or in poverty whose mothers were neither in a position to or given an opportunity to keep them.

If this was a typically Irish situation, so too was the contemporary stonewalling of the Department of Children and Youth Affairs, which, until Ms Zappone decided otherwise, acted as judge and jury in this case.

The department has for years stymied efforts by Irish Examiner reporter Conall Ó Fátharta to get to the heart of this awful story.

Yesterday’s announcement vindicates that persistence but it leaves questions that, in a worthwhile democracy, must be answered: What secrets was the department trying to conceal and who might it have being trying to protect?

Any temptation not to press the issue cannot stand as the hundreds of illegally registered adoptions — that figure may just be the tip of the iceberg — would, in today’s vernacular, be described as people trafficking.

That religious institutions and the State colluded in this makes it all the more shocking. That financial transactions may have been involved adds another layer of sleaze to an already grubby story.

Those concerns look at the story from just one perspective. Another is that parents who raised children from adoption agencies but did not tell their children that they were not their natural parents now find themselves on the horns of a particularly sharp dilemma.

This is a poor reward for people, the great majority of whom had nothing but the highest and most generous intentions.

It is yet another indication of how tightly the code of omerta grips official Ireland that despite all of this information being known, an investigation was not opened before yesterday.

One of Ms Zappone’s predecessors, Frances Fitzgerald, told the Dáil she “had no plans to initiate an audit of all [adoption] files”.

Justice Minster Charlie Flanagan has twice insisted that all adoptions since 1952 were carried out legally, though there has never been an investigation to establish the veracity or otherwise of that claim.

In some ways, the details are, at this stage, almost irrelevant. That is not to minimise the trauma imposed on mothers and children taken for adoption or, potentially, adoptive parents, but that it took a relative outsider — Ms Zappone — to do what should have been done years ago adds another damning subplot to this tragic story.

Last Friday was a watershed moment for Catholicism. How long will it be before the mandarins who instinctively pull the curtains across so many scandals like this have theirs?