In 2018, TUSLA told the Department of Children and Youth Affairs that there were at least 126 children illegally adopted through the St Patrick’s Guild Adoption Society. A review which was subsequently commissioned by the Department found that a potential 20,000 adoption records could represent cases of illegal birth registration.
Illegal Adoptions, or ‘Illegal Birth Registrations’ largely relate to instances where a person was born to one mother, but their birth was registered to another – the woman who would raise the baby – thus the name of the birth mother was not recorded on the person’s birth certificate. This practice was and remains illegal. It has caused an enormous amount of hurt to many people up and down the country, who grew up to believe that they were the biological son or daughter of the couple who reared them until such time as the secret was revealed – perhaps on the ‘adoptive’ parents’ death beds, or due to a family member taking a DNA test. I’ve spoken to victims of this illegal practice who told of how overnight, their perceptions of who they were, of their lives, of their families were shattered, and their identity utterly lost.
Some details in the personal stories are extremely difficult. In some cases women who were not pregnant faked pregnancies as part of the illegal adoption process – through the use of cushions beneath their clothes, and fake pregnancy appointments with a Gynecologist. One such Gynecologist was Prof. Eamonn De Valera Jr, the son of the former President & Taoiseach. Professor De Valera was notorious for facilitating illegal adoptions.
This week, the government have published a report by the Special Rapporteur on Child Protection, Conor O’Mahony. The report, which interestingly is dated to September 2021, is available here: https://equalityie-newsroom.prgloo.com/resources/lb0wn-byfy1-haudq-m2nnn-78ik8. A very professional job by Professor O’Mahony, and certainly worth a read. The report deals with ways in which the State could respond to the issue of illegal adoptions.
This article does not serve to report on this report, nor will I make any proposals about how the State should respond to the issue. Over the past number of years I have committed myself to determining when the State knew about this scandal, and why nothing has been done about it sooner.
I work for a politician – Peadar Tóibín TD, the leader of the political party Aontú. My interest in the issue was sparked when a whistleblower, working for the State, contacted our office, and made a number of disclosures on the issue of illegal birth registrations. The whistleblower said, among other things, that the Department has always been reluctant to look into or investigate this matter. They said that an attitude of cover-up still existed, that the Department has known about the issue for years prior to 2018, and that the terms of reference for the MBHCOI – the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation were deliberately set to exclude mention of illegal adoptions and that officials had refused to share illegal adoption files with Ministers.
This individual said that an attitude exists in the Department whereby unmarried women who found themselves pregnant in years gone by are still being considered ‘guilty’, and to some extent viewed as deserving of the plight they endured in Mother and Baby Homes. This whistleblower shall remain anonymous in this article, but what I will say is that they were able to prove to me that they were who they said they were, and that they were working for who they said they were working for.
Naturally I began probing the issue, by way of parliamentary questions. The Minister did not deny the allegations when they were raised in parliament. The Irish Times Newspaper reported on the story here:
My boss, Deputy Tóibín and I submitted a series of Written Parliamentary Questions on the topic in the days and weeks and months that followed. The Minister’s attempts not to answer the questions lead me to believe, all the more, the allegations made by the whistleblower.
We asked the Minister when the government became aware of the issue of illegal adoptions, and were constantly told that the first they knew of it was in 2018. I then requested copies of departmental records dating to the 1990s which I suspected would relate to the issue of illegal adoptions. What happened next was most bizarre. The Minister for Children said that the files in question were not held by his department, and that they were held in the Department of Health. He said this on the 10th March 2021.
You will note from the response above that the Covid-19 situation is used as an excuse – the pandemic made it, the Minister said, “extremely difficult to access physical files”. You will also note that the review into the practice was published the day prior – the 9th March 2021. It is interesting that the report was published by the Department just four days after RTE Investigates ran a program on the matter despite the report sitting on the Minister’s desk since May 2019!
We then asked the Minister if he would express his opinion on statements made by the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Sale of Children, in which she had called for an inquiry into illegal adoptions in Ireland. As you can see below he does not answer the question, and states that records on illegal adoption “may simply not exist”.
Since the files I was seeking were not held by the Department of Children, I decided to submit the question instead to the Minister for Health, who of course advised me that it was not his responsibility, and that if I wanted access to the files I should ask the Minister for Children…
So back I went again to the Minister for Children, tail between my legs, like a teenager who has been told, by their father, that they can go to the disco if their mother says its okay. The excuses just weren’t washing with me – first we were told by the Minister for Children that he didn’t have the files and that they were with the Department of Health. Then we were told by the Minister for Health that we should ask the Minister for Children about it. We were told that the files were somewhere between both departments in the process of being transferred. We were told that Covid-19 meant that they couldn’t get at the files, and now we were being told that the files didn’t exist? Not a chance.
I confess that my imagination did conjure up images of a big arctic truck carrying files, getting stuck underneath a bridge half it’s size, in the middle of Dublin, or boxes in a basement which were so sticky with Covid-19, germs and cobwebs that the Department officials couldn’t physically open them. These images faded though, when I learned that both Departments share the same address – the Larry Goodman-owned Miesian Plaza on Baggot Street. So there was no need for a truck, and there was no basement. The only feasible explanation is that boxes of illegal adoption files were left on the corridor between both Departments for twelve months, and that Stephen Donnelly asked Roderick O’Gorman each morning “What’s in those boxes?”, before both shrugged their shoulders and entered their respective offices. I mean, either that or else one or both Ministers were lying to us?
I was getting frustrated, but I wasn’t giving up. By November the Minister for Children had conceded to the existence of one solitary record, which he said “broadly resembles the description”. He wasn’t going to release the record just yet though, because, you know… ehm…. GDPR. He also said the record didn’t make specific reference to illegal adoptions. This of course is true, the record doesn’t contain the words ‘illegal adoptions’, it merely contains detailed descriptions of illegal practices and illegal adoptions.
In February 2022, some eleven months since we first asked the question, we asked it again, just to see where we stood. At this point the Minister was still looking into the GDPR ramifications of releasing the file.
Finally, on Wednesday 9th March 2022, Minister O’Gorman released the documents, all 31 pages of records to us via email. The records are damning. The fact is the government knew about the practice of illegal adoptions, as early as 1996. The date of these records – letters to the Department of Health – show that the government knew about the issue, some 22 years prior to the date upon which they maintain they first became aware of them.
Five days after releasing the documents to me, the Minister for Children published the report from the Special Rapporteur on Child Protection- he published this report yesterday. The report is dated 30th September 2021. The report recommends a State Inquiry into the matter and confirms that the government knew about it all along. An RTE Investigates program will air on the matter tomorrow, Wednesday. Whether any ensuing State Inquiry will focus on establishing when the government knew about the issue and scrutinise the government’s actions from the moment they became aware of this illegal activity in 1996, remains to be seen.
I have this morning emailed copies of the documents released to us, to over 500 journalists in the country. I hope this blog has given some insight into how difficult it is to extract information from government departments. Very often in this country things don’t change until after RTE Investigates air an exposé.
If any whistleblower, or any affected person wishes to make a comment, please feel free to email me at lukesilke98@gmail.com.
lukesilke98@gmail.com
Luke Peter Silke 