Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business (15 page)

James Everett’s minimalist replies failed to satisfy another Labour TD, Maureen O’Carroll from North Dublin, who demanded to know the basic facts of the case. Everett’s reply, ‘I have already given that information,’ was simply untrue. He had revealed nothing.
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Not one to be deterred so easily, Mrs O’Carroll returned to the same matter a month later with a series of questions, this time to the proper authority, the Minister for External Affairs, and future Taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave. She wanted to know how many passports had been issued to ‘illegitimate’ children over one year of age so they could travel to America for adoption, and she wanted to know specifically how many had come from Croom Hospital in Limerick. Mrs O’Carroll also asked for the names and ages of all children removed from the State since the Adoption Act came into force, the dates of their removal and the institutions from which the removals were made.
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Her questions brought more information into the public domain than had been available before.

Liam Cosgrave said that in the period between the enactment of legal adoption on 1 January 1953 and the end of June 1956, 543 passports had been issued to ‘illegitimate’ children for travel to the United States. This, of course, was a very partial answer to the question that had been asked. The Minister could have added, had he wished to give a fuller picture, that his department knew of another 500 or so official child export cases preceding the legalisation of adoption, and was also aware of an extensive black market in babies, proceeding outside the official scheme. As was to be expected, he refused to name any of the children. But, quite arbitrarily, he also refused to name the institutions that had sent them overseas. He did, however, reveal that in the period in question, 26 children (almost 5% of the total) had been inmates of the Croom Hospital in Limerick.
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This seemed to confirm the impression given by Dr Mullins at the hospital, that what was going on there was a very substantial operation. The adverse publicity, however, seems to have brought the Croom operation to an end since the total number of children sent from there to America stopped short of 30.

It is revealing to note that those TDs who questioned the Government’s bona fides in this whole matter were in no way critical of the overriding fixation on matters of religion. Quite the reverse, in fact: they sought to challenge the Government on the grounds that it might not have been doing enough to protect the faith. Labour’s Dan Desmond, for example, wanted to know was the Minister satisfied ‘that these unfortunate little children are being better catered for in religious homes’ than they would be if they ended up ‘in the hands of. some nests in this country that in the past laid their hands on these unfortunate children?’
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The word ‘nests’ was a pejorative term used at the time to describe Protestant-run orphanages. The name came from a mother and baby home in Dublin called the Bird’s Nest which was suspected of proselytising. Cosgrave, of course, had no difficulty in putting Deputy Desmond’s concerns at rest: preserving the faith was top of the agenda.

Maureen O’Carroll also let it be known that she had ‘no objection to the transfer of these children to America as such,’ and went on to say that it was ‘quite probable that many of these children are getting an opportunity in life they could not and would not get here, that they can start a new life... [without] the stigma they normally have to bear.’ But it would be preferable, she said, if the American adopters had to reside for a time in Ireland ‘so that their whole moral character and religious outlook and ideas could be examined’.
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Donagh O’Malley, the Fianna Fáil TD from Limerick who had started the ball rolling, was concerned that their misgivings about foreign adoptions would be ‘splashed across many a paper, not only in Britain but in other countries, to the detriment of this nation’. But he went on to add his own sharp criticisms of the system. ‘I know, as everyone connected with Shannon Airport knows, that these children are going to very wealthy homes,’ he said. ‘The parents of these adopted children can afford to pay the passage of an employee... to take the child, or children, over there. Her first class return air fare is paid. Evidently these children are going to very good families.’ But, he added, ‘there are two sides to that’. The other side was, ‘Who is at the back of these arrangements? Who is the negotiating body? Who is carrying out the deals for these millionaires and semi-millionaires and very high Catholic Americans? Who is the liaison officer between America and this country? No one can find that out.’ Well, Liam Cosgrave certainly wasn’t going to reveal the controlling hand of John Charles McQuaid. And O’Malley left no one in any doubt that there was a racket in progress. ‘Money,’ he said, ‘is passing to the very close relatives of these children, in certain cases to the unfortunate mother. It is a temptation to such a mother if she is offered £100 or £150 in order to get her to consent.’ (Equivalent to €9,600 and €14,400 today. It is unlikely, however, that the unfortunate mothers were ever the main financial beneficiaries) O’Malley ended by calling for a ‘reinvestigation’ of ‘the whole system of adoption of children’.
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But Liam Cosgrave was having none of it. ‘I deprecate the type of publicity which this debate will attract,’ he retorted, adding, ‘it is wrong to suggest that there is anything in the nature of a traffic in the adoption of children.’ He went on to defend in vigorous terms the ‘very stringent’ rules and regulations imposed by his Department before passports were issued to children travelling abroad for adoption. Every case, he said, was subject to ‘very careful study’ and was investigated by ‘appropriate religious organisations in the adopting countries.’ He went on to say that ‘great care is taken to see that... the prospective adopting parents are suitable and proper people to be granted the custody of a child’
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– a claim that was flatly contradicted by a huge volume of evidence in Cosgrave’s own department. At the very moment when Cosgrave was pacifying the Dáil, his own officials were drafting their report for the Government, on Cosgrave’s own instructions, about the disturbing reality of the American adoptions. Not only did the officials themselves refer to a ‘baby traffic’, they admitted they were neither fully in control nor entirely happy with what was going on.

Cosgrave, of course, was determined to avoid bad publicity as his concluding remarks to the Dáil made clear. ‘It is significant,’ he said, ‘that the only comments on this have appeared in what we here call the yellow English Sunday newspapers, who avail of every, and any, opportunity to smear the name of this country. I do not propose to be a party to any such campaign and I hope that no Deputies in this House will lend themselves to it either.’
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The opposition was silenced and the matter was never again discussed in the Dáil.

*****

In the meantime another line of opposition had developed, this time from within the ranks of the Government itself, in the person of Health Minister, and future Chief Justice, Tom O’Higgins.

Under the 1953 Health Act, the Minister for Health was responsible for the welfare of orphaned, deserted, and destitute ‘illegitimate’ children who were accommodated at the expense of the health authorities in institutional homes. One such institution was the County Home in Longford, and in the summer of 1955 five of its young inmates had been sent to America for adoption. The matter came to light when the Longford County Manager was called upon to explain to county councillors why he had spent £10 (€960) on an outfit for one of the children. He told the council that sending the infants to America was ‘a great break’. The
Longford News
reported the story under the headline, ‘New Export Enterprise’.
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But when Health Minister O’Higgins found out, he was furious.

On 23 March 1956 – the very day Cosgrave raised the American adoption business at cabinet – O’Higgins wrote to the secretary of the Longford County Council telling him that local authorities had no business making arrangements for sending children in public care out of the state for adoption. His letter eventually found its way to Cos- grave’s Department where, for years past, the officials had been happily issuing adoption passports to children from local authority homes such as St Pat’s in Dublin and three provincial orphanages run by the Sacred Heart nuns. (Between them these four public institutions accounted for well over 1,000 of the children dispatched to the United States, or over half the total). So if O’Higgins was now taking exception to this practice, a fundamental conflict seemed unavoidable.

Sean Morrissey of the Department of External Affairs, took up the cudgels, and in a rather snooty letter to his opposite number at the Department of Health he complained about them breaking ranks and creating the impression of inconsistency and confusion on the part of the State. ‘As you are aware,’ Morrissey wrote, ‘the question of permitting Irish children to be taken abroad for adoption is one on which strong and divergent opinions are held and it would appear to be desirable that insofar as possible, Departmental action should be consistent’.
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But O’Higgins wasn’t to be put off so easily. His position was spelled out in a reply to Morrissey. ‘The Minister,’ the reply stated, ‘considers that public authorities should not place themselves in the position of agents for the sending of children abroad as such activities must inevitably damage the status of the public services, and are open to criticism on social and political grounds since they aggravate the decline of the population...’

‘It may be argued,’ the reply went on, ‘that the children sent abroad benefit materially and socially, but the expectation of betterment in another country must be presumed to apply to all emigration and it would be clearly indefensible that public authorities should engage, even in a small way, in organised emigration of children while public policy is directed towards a reduction of emigration generally.’ These were among the strongest and most critical words written on the subject by anyone in authority with any knowledge of what was happening. And the Minister for Health had more to say.

‘The correct course to be followed by public authorities who have custody of children is to increase their endeavours towards the improvement of the opportunities of such children to make a normal living in this country. The Minister. considers that such improvements would be much more desirable than any participation in arrangements for sending the children out of the country.’
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It was clear from the tone of these letters that there was considerable friction between Health and External Affairs, with Health adopting the moral and social high ground and suggesting that External Affairs was facilitating organised child emigration. And to rub it in, the letter from O’Hig- gins’ officials concluded by asking if the Minister for External Affairs had ‘considered the matter from the point of view of its effect on this country’s standing with the countries to which children are sent.’ In other words, the image of Ireland abroad was being tarnished by the policy of exporting ‘illegitimate’ children, and the Minister for External Affairs was responsible.

The mandarins at Iveagh House were clearly annoyed at Tom O’Higgins’ criticisms, but he was a cabinet minister and they had to respond. They introduced a new rule in the summer of 1956 which appeared to make concessions to his sensibilities: all future passport applications on behalf of children in public authority care intending to travel abroad for adoption would be directed to the Minister for Health so he could personally approve or disapprove each case as it arose. This seemed to put O’Higgins in the driving seat, but it was a move that would give the Health Minister a few headaches – and some experience of the intense pressure that could be brought to bear by the religious orders who ran the local authority homes and who were fuelling the overseas adoption traffic.

In a matter of months O’Higgins found himself overwhelmed with requests for passport clearances, and as the backlog grew, religious pressure mounted. It didn’t take long before O’Higgins’ officials were looking for a way of disengaging from the whole business.
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It was a humiliating climb-down, and as his officials made clear, it had been brought about entirely by O’Higgins being ‘placed in an embarrassing position
vis-à-vis
voluntary bodies and ecclesiastical authorities’. As a consequence, his officials now asked External Affairs to drop ‘the practice of referring these applications for the Minister’s consent’.
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The Minister for Health, for all his principled opposition to the export of Irish children, had not taken on the ‘ecclesiastical authorities’ or the ‘voluntary bodies’ – Archbishop McQuaid and the nuns. The Department of External Affairs agreed to let the Department of Health ‘escape from the position into which they have engineered themselves,’
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but only on the understanding that

O’Higgins had ‘modified his previous attitude’
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, which in reality meant abandoning his criticisms.

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After the ill-informed and inconsequential Dáil debate of March 1956, and the effective gutting of Tom O’Higgins a year later, the last remaining hope for a serious review of the American adoption issue was that the cabinet would receive the long-awaited policy statement from the Department of External Affairs. But it waited in vain. In March 1957, a full year after the statement was requested, a general election returned Fianna Fáil to power. O’Higgins was out of office. Cosgrave was succeeded by Frank Aiken. Work on various drafts of the statement continued but without urgency, and Father Cecil Barrett was even drafted in to assist in the writing of the document ‘on behalf of the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin’.
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As the matter dragged on into the 1960s, department officials came to the view that there was no longer any need to involve the Government since everything by then seemed to be running smoothly.
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The cabinet never discussed the matter; no government was ever officially aware of the numerous and serious problems that had been encountered.