Irish Examiner view: Let adoptees trace their true identity

'RTÉ Investigates: Ireland's illegal Adoptions' highlighted the extent of official sanction of illegal adoption and child trafficking

The National Maternity Hospital.

It would be all too easy to consign the issue of illegal adoptions in Ireland to the dustbin of history but the reality is that there are thousands of people — many but not all of them now elderly — whose lives are still blighted by being denied access to their birth and adoption records. For the past two decades, successive governments have promised to bring in legislation to this effect, but there has been little progress.

Pioneering investigative work into illegal adoptions has appeared over the past decade in the Irish Examiner, much of it written by campaigning journalist Conall Ó Fátharta. In 2015, his investigation revealed a murky world of trafficking in children from Tuam Mother and Baby Home to families in the United States, a scandal that was eclipsed by the horrors of mass graves discovered on the grounds of the home.

The RTÉ Investigates programme, Ireland’s Illegal Adoptions, broadcast last night, highlights the extent of official sanction of such adoptions, revealing that Éamon de Valera Jr, the son of the former President, arranged multiple illegal adoptions while a consultant gynaecologist at the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin. Over the course of several decades, Prof de Valera arranged for the children of unmarried mothers to be adopted by married couples, usually those who could not themselves conceive children. In one case, Prof de Valera Jr, who is deceased, facilitated the adoption of four children by one family over the space of five and a half years.

Those subject to forced and illegal adoption have been failed by the State for decades, most recently by the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes which concluded, against the weight of personal testimony, that it “found very little evidence that children were forcibly taken from their mothers”. It also concluded that the institutions it examined had “little to do with informal adoptions before legal adoption was introduced” in 1953.

It is estimated that 15% of children born in mother and baby homes were illegally adopted but that figure could be much higher if the number of adoptions brought about by coercion of the mother were to be included.

The Department of Children has confirmed that 151 cases of illegal birth registrations have been discovered at St Patrick’s Guild adoption home in Dublin, but it is likely that this practice occurred in other homes, and that the overall figure will be much higher. In any event, statistics do not tell the full story. They do not tell of the heartache suffered by those who, in later years, discovered they were not the biological child of the couple they knew as their parents. Many had no idea they had been adopted and their birth certificates falsified.

This continuing failure to recognise the hurt caused by illegal adoptions forms a continuum that perpetuates the wrongs of the past, right through to the present day and into the future. Conor O’Mahony, the State’s special rapporteur on child protection, has called for the immediate enactment of comprehensive adoption tracing legislation. That is the least the Government should do. We cannot change the past but we can, and should, try to bring some measure of peace and the hope of a brighter future to those affected.