Those who told powerful stories of their illegal adoptions deserve a sea change in our public policy
:: Why is Ireland still an outlier on tracing laws, asks Joan Burton
IHAVE a long personal history with St Patrick’s Guild, the adoption agency at the centre of Wednesday night’s RTÉ Investigates programme about traded babies and robbed identities. One contributor spoke of the fortress mentality exhibited when he sought information about his personal history. I can testify myself that his choice of the word fortress was apt and accurate.
The programme devoted a whole 90 minutes to illegal adoptions, but never lost its hold. Aoife Hegarty’s research was exhaustive in scope and created a documentary that will cause as much of a stir as previous exposés of the shameful litany of abuses in our society.
I found it to be emotionally draining as an extraordinary bunch of men and women told their stories of personal identities thieved through cavalier and illegal alterations of birth certificates to facilitate private adoptions. The secrets, the lies, the abuse of truth, were laid bare. Kafka couldn’t have scripted what was done to the babies as children and adults, the birth mothers, and the adoptive parents.
All of the stories were there. The ghost-like nun feeding the baby in an old film. The children who were sent to America. The baby whose parents had her before marriage but thanks to ancestry tracing (and not the nuns) found out her parents had married and gone on to have other children – her secret siblings. The adopted brothers and sisters where none of the children were ever told that they were adopted.
This programme will remain as a perfect example of oral history told with extraordinary eloquence. I was moved by how articulate each and every one of them was.
It cannot have been easy for the witnesses to relive their experiences for the camera and to tell us how they discovered, often late in life, that the parents they knew were not their biological parents at all.
They packed a powerful punch by their composed testimonies and must have left many viewers shattered by the revelations of how pillars of Church and State colluded without regard for either law or justice.
I have a long personal history with St Patrick’s Guild so a lot of the film was strangely familiar – the cold, forbidding institutional buildings and offices, the long corridors and tables, and the resolute “No, go away” from the nuns to entirely reasonable requests for information.
Later, as a TD, I came across some similar experiences to my own as individual constituents sought my assistance about adoption records, unaware that I had my own history so like their own. Like me, they also faced obstruction and downright lies.
I recall pleading the case of one woman to a disdainful monsignor of the Dublin Diocese who sneeringly remarked that I should keep well away from such people as they only wanted money.
I was fascinated by the revelation about money in one case on the programme. The sum of £85 was mentioned as the expected offering in the late 1940s.
In my own search I was told that £100 was the sum to be paid “to the nuns”. Statisticians calculate that this sum is equivalent to about €3,500 today.
The RTÉ investigation covers just one specific feature of Ireland’s adoption scandal and the persistent refusal, unique among modern societies, to accede to the requests of adopted people to full access to personal records.
Why does Ireland remain an outlier when so many other parliaments have passed information and tracing laws?
I prepared a bill two years ago to deal with the group of people affected by the egregious illegal adoptions covered in the programme.
It could readily be taken up now as a preliminary step to a wider tracing law.
Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman needs to be aware of the deep emotions that are awoken by this topic among tens of thousands of Irish people and that feeling will simply not go away.
It was revealing how the European GDPR law was used by Tusla to add another obstruction to tracing requests. Now Mr O’Gorman says that this interpretation of GDPR can be turned on its head and instead become the magic bullet that demolishes all obstructions. He’d better be right and right soon because the clamour for reform and action will not go away.
Political scientists now use a phrase ‘State capture’ to describe how private interests can corrupt the State’s policymaking to advance their vested interests.
We could see that in operation in Wednesday night’s programme as Church interests dominated – personified by a silent De Valera kissing the ring of the terrifying John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin.
The famous English novel Middlemarch ends with a remark that the greater good of the world is dependent on the deeds of people who faithfully lived good hidden lives.
The people who told their stories so well on Wednesday night added immensely to the public good of Ireland.
They can best be rewarded by a sea change in public policy that cannot now come too soon to rectify the deep-seated injustices revealed in this remarkable programme.