Secrets and lies about illegal adoptions that our callous State persists with right to this day
Many are still being denied basic facts about their lives under the guise of data privacy, as adoptee Susan Kiernan explains here
THE State has learned some lessons in how to mistreat and deceive families at the centre of Ireland’s illegal adoption scandal. In the 1950s fear of God, reputational damage and the gardaí kept people from knowing their personal history.
Now it is the Irish State’s obsession with secrecy and its callous use of data laws that prevent people from getting simple information about their lives.
For this is not a scandal of dead establishment figures and near-forgotten Church figures masked in the mists of time – it continues today, participated in by State agencies and the Government itself.
Those at the centre of the adoption scandal tell the Irish Mail on Sunday they will support calls for a public inquiry.
Many await a report to be brought soon to Cabinet by Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman on this latest scandal of the treatment of children in Ireland.
Speaking to the Irish Mail on Sunday this week from her Killiney home, Susan Kiernan’s deep feelings about the trauma the Church put her birth mother through are palpable.
Her anguish at the black hole in her knowledge of her personal
‘A collector will call to see you at your work if 15 shillings is not paid’
history and the years spent fighting to fill it are also clear.
Seventy years ago there was no effort by the nuns – then the State’s representatives – to disguise their intimidation of Susan Kiernan’s birth mother.
A ‘Sister in Charge’ at the Sisters of Charity, outraged that Susan’s mother had failed to keep up small payments on a fee to have her baby adopted, sent a letter threatening to recoup the money forcefully.
In that letter, sent in 1950, the ‘Guards’ were spoken of. If the weekly sum of 15 shillings was not sent immediately it was said that the Sister’s ‘Collector will call to see you’ at her place of work, the department store Arnotts. But nobody wanted that of course as, in the words of the nun, ‘we want to safeguard your reputation’.
The appallingly cold, heartless letter, ends with the line, ‘We have not failed you, you have failed us.’
It is signed ‘Yours sincerely in JC.’
JC stands for Jesus Christ.
When Susan was 12, she was told by a school friend that she was adopted. When her parents died she sought to find her birth parents, but because she is one of the Irish citizens who we now know was illegally adopted, she came up against the closed doors.
Since the MoS revealed in 2015 that the son of State founder Éamon de Valera, Prof. Eamonn de Valera Jr, facilitated many illegal adoptions, the scale of the practice and the collusion of the State has gradually unfolded. A searing RTÉ Investigates documentary, compiled by journalist Aoife Hegarty, has once again brought the issue to the national consciousness this week.
The arrogance and heartlessness of the State all those years ago is reinforced. But when you look through the incomplete file that Susan and her daughter Lisa have been able to put together, and speak to the brave woman herself, what rises is cold anger at the official neglect and disrespect that continue today.
Whereas in the past, when the dark hand of the Church gave the spiritual acquiescence for people like de Valera Jr to participate in illegality in the open, now it is State secrecy that causes the pain.
Susan lays bare how Ireland’s Kafkaesque interpretation of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws, misguidedly designed by the EU to protect its citizens, are used by the Irish State to hurt us.
Mrs Kiernan has said that she supports an official inquiry, which the Catholic hierarchy has said it will back, into the practices that saw babies being taken from mother and baby homes and given to new parents without any proper records.
Through dogged persistence and innovative tactics, Susan and her daughter were able to obtain partial records. Many of the 125 others who were similarly placed with families without proper identities have no information.
‘I would support an inquiry, yes,’ says Susan, ‘it would help a lot of people.
‘So many people are still looking for information. When I think about my birth mother, and how she was hounded…’ she trails off.
She was adopted in 1949 by Phyllis and Jack Corr, the owners of a drapery shop in Dún Laoghaire.
Susan did not know she was adopted until one day when she was walking to the shops with a friend in Monkstown, Co. Dublin.
She says: ‘When I found out when I was about 10 or 11 and was walking with a friend. We were coming back from the shops in Monkstown at lunchtime and she said, “You know you’re adopted?” Now I didn’t, obviously, know I was adopted, and I was absolutely so shocked.’
She said in the community around Dalkey, where her family lived and Dún Laoghaire, ‘everybody except me’ knew of her adoption.
‘I was so upset I was crying and everything, and Reverend Mother took me into her office and rang Daddy.’
Her father picked her up from school and on the way home he said:
‘When I was 10 or 11 everyone knew I was adopted except me’
‘Look, we chose you – we wanted a baby. And we chose you. And here’s the words he used, “You’re the chosen one”.
Susan also discussed the revelation with her mother, who died soon afterwards. There was further confusion later when she went to apply for a passport. Phyllis and Jack Orr were named as her birth parents on her birth certificate.
It was as if no adoption had occurred.
The adoptions were officially revealed following the transfer of records from St Patrick’s Guild, a society run by the Sisters of Charity, to Tusla, the Child and Family Agency in 2016.
As far back as the 1990s, however, leaders from the St Patrick’s Guild had admitted that records of adoptees had been altered to conceal their real parentage.
Susan had been adopted from a smaller section of St Patrick’s Guild in Cabra, north Dublin.
Although it emerged in 2016 that records did exist, those like Susan, tracing their heritage, were told nothing. The Adoption Board wrote to her in 1998 saying: ‘We are unable to be of assistance to you as our records have been checked and we can find no trace of an adoption by the late Mr and Mrs Corr in respect of you’.
The letter adds: ‘Your birth was registered in their names and… you were never registered in your birth mother’s name.’
When the documents about Susan’s life were transferred to Tusla, she was not given access to them. Ultimately GDPR was cited.
However, in 2018 a social worker left Susan and her daughter Lisa in an office alone.
It was then that Lisa photographed Susan’s documents, which Tusla refused to give her, and she was
able to trace her birth mother. Of Tusla and other State organisations she has dealt with, Susan says: ‘To me, they’re useless’.
The full file was never handed over, as is the case with many other adoptees.
This leads to difficulties that don’t readily occur to those not in the situation that faces those who have no record of their past.
‘The medical history is probably one of the important things,’ says Susan. ‘But I’d like to know for
‘If a doctor asks, “Is there a record of this in the family?” I don’t know’
Lisa’s sake… if there’s anything that we should be aware of.
‘Say a doctor would ask the question, “Is there a history of twins in the family”. I don’t know. “Is there a history of this, that or the other in your family?” and you don’t know.’
Documents seen by RTÉ reveal that unmarried mothers were asked to pay a charge of £85 (€3,200 in today’s money) to pay for the care of their babies until they were adopted.
When Susan’s mother could not pay the fee, the St Patrick’s Guild began threatening to ‘send’ Susan back and calling Arnotts, her place of work, demanding the debt be repaid. That was when a visit from the ‘collector’ was threatened.
Now GDPR relieves the State of such threats. The State can just say nothing.