Read Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business Online
Authors: Mike Milotte
Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business
Praise for
Banished Babies
‘A brilliant exposé of the shabby history of sectarian cruelty to unmarried women who became pregnant in Ireland in the 1950s’
Susan McKay,
Sunday Tribune
‘This book would make your blood boil... one of the finest pieces of journalism this reader has come across for many a day. The author, Mike Milotte, has done his profession proud.’
Padraig O’Morain,
The Irish Times
‘A salutary story, too long untold, and another nail in the coffin of Dev’s mythical mystical Ireland.’
The Big Issue
‘An astonishing story, meticulously told – and an excellent piece of journalism.’
An Phoblacht
This book is dedicated to the memory of my friend and colleague, Mary Raftery who did so much to expose clerical crimes against defenceless children, and to Rachel, Saoirse, Caoimhe and Mallaidh.
Banished Babies
Banished Babies
The secret history of
Ireland’s baby export business
Updated and Expanded Edition
Mike Milotte
BANISHED BABIES
This edition published 2012 by
by New Island
2 Brookside
Dundrum Road
Dublin 14
First published in 1997 by New Island
Copyright © Mike Milotte, 2012
The author has asserted his moral rights.
PRINT ISBN 978-1-8484-0133-4
EPUB ISBN 978-1-84840-372-7
MOBI ISBN 978-1-84840-373-4
All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.
British Library Cataloguing Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
New Island received financial assistance from
The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), Dublin, Ireland.
Contents
Note on the Updated and Expanded Edition
Prologue: A Surprise for the Wife
Prologue: The Adoption Triangle
10. Jim and Dorothy: No Price too High
12. Mary, Michael and Kevin: Legitimate Error?
13. Maureen: Seek and Ye Shall Find (But Don’t Hold Your Breath)
Acknowledgements
Most of the personal stories featured in the first edition of
Banished Babies
were drawn from interviews originally conducted by the author for an RTÉ
Prime Time
documentary,
The Secret Baby Trail.
Thanks to RTÉ, I was able to reuse that material in full for this book, although RTÉ bears no responsibility for its contents. New stories based on further interviews and correspondence have been added to this second edition. An enormous debt of gratitude is due to all who were willing to share with me those aspects of their private lives that have made this book possible.
As the bulk of the historical material in this book comes from State papers, with the addition of further information from the archives of the late Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, it has remained unchanged from the first edition. I am grateful to Caitriona Crowe of the National Archive for making the official papers so accessible, and to David Sheehy for providing copies of the McQuaid papers.
For the first edition I utilised information about the racial and commercial nature of adoption in America that was kindly provided by Professor Patricia Williams of Columbia University. For the second edition I have had the benefit of further documentary material provided by Marie
Hechter in New York. In addition, I have drawn freely on articles by Conall Ó Fátharta in the
Irish Examiner
in the summer of 2011 which deal authoritatively with the most recent developments in the wider area of adoption.Others who deserve thanks for their invaluable practical help in the production of this new edition include: Ita Collins, Jim Jackman, Susan Lohan, Claire McGetterick, Grainne Mason, and Mari Steed. And I remain grateful to Anne, Enda, Kevin, Fran, Maggie, Mary, Nora and Therese who taught me much about the complexities of adoption.
Finally, thanks to Edwin Higel and Conor Graham at New Island Books for the enthusiasm they have shown for this expanded and updated second edition.
Note on the Updated and Expanded Edition
When this book was first published in 1997, it revealed – for the first time – the extent to which Church and State had stood side by side in organising the banishment of thousands of babies and toddlers – the country’s most vulnerable citizens – from the land of their birth. But it also proved that, far from imagining themselves to be sending these hapless children to a land of milk and honey in the United States, those responsible – clerical and lay – had abundant evidence that many of the children they dispatched across the Atlantic were sent to people whose suitability as adoptive parents had not been sufficiently investigated, if investigated at all, or who had even been rejected previously as adoptive parents by America’s own child welfare authorities. The book also revealed that successive Irish governments were fully aware of a substantial and lucrative – but entirely illegal – black market in Irish babies, running in parallel with the ‘official’ American export programme. Yet, throughout the 1950s, when the great bulk of Ireland’s baby exports took place, the official response was not to seek out and rescue the children who had been put at risk, but was rather to do nothing – other than conceal the truth and hope it never entered the public domain. Child welfare mattered less than ensuring there was no bad publicity.
Although the first edition of
Banished Babies
enjoyed a wide readership, this aspect of the story failed to win general acknowledgement or arouse widespread concern. Outrage over the Church’s abuse of children in other areas of Irish life did not stretch to adoption practices. Adoption was seen as something separate, not part of the continuum of abuse and domination. I suspect that the reason for that has much to do with public perceptions of adoption in general. The prevailing attitude among the public at large was – and probably still is – that adoption is primarily an act of kindness by selfless individuals towards unfortunate children. While there can be no doubt that this is often the case, for the greater part adoption is simply the means by which people who are unable to produce their own children legally acquire those produced by others. That of course does not preclude the provision of a loving and caring home for the children involved
per se,
but it is, nevertheless, a very different starting point. When the needs of those who want children outweigh the needs of the children themselves, that is when the whole process is much more likely to turn out badly. Adoption must always raise concerns about the circumstances in which the natural parents gave their children up for adoption, especially when – which is usually the case – the adopters command greater resources and wield more authority than those whose children they are acquiring. Issues such as informed consent and financial duress are constantly present. And whatever the outcome of individual adoptions, adopted children and their natural mothers – each victims of a traumatic loss – are expected by the rest of society to display gratitude to their supposed benefactors for the rest of their lives.
Given the somewhat naïve view of adoption as intrinsically child-centred, and therefore, by definition, ‘good’, the attitude towards the sending of thousands of children to America for adoption remained one of broad acceptance based on the notion that it must have all been done in the best interests of the children involved. Who, after all, could dispute that life with well-heeled American adopters was preferable to life in an Irish religious-run institution?
Superficially this might appear to be a convincing argument. But when its surface is scratched, when its sentimentality is pared away and when its ‘taken for granted’ view of the world is challenged – as it is by this book – a different reality emerges. Yet despite the revelations in this book, there were no calls for an investigation into the fate of the children concerned, no demands that those responsible in the great institutions of Church and State be held to account for their blatant negligence. The State has never acknowledged that, in its desire to accommodate the Catholic Church, it put the welfare of countless children in jeopardy, and while it may have acknowledged to some extent the suffering of their young and often frightened mothers, it has never admitted its own share of responsibility for the damage done. Nor has the Catholic Church ever recognised that its involvement in the whole affair was the cause of widespread pain and suffering.
By comparison, the Catholic Church in Australia issued an apology in July 2011 for its role in affecting what has been termed ‘forced adoptions’ in that country involving thousands of children from church-run homes. Reports quoting the Australian mothers of these children will be immediately recognisable to many of the Irish mothers whose experiences are recounted in this book: ‘The women said they were alone and frightened and were not told about their rights to revoke adoption consent. They said they were pressured to sign adoption papers before consent could legally be obtained. In some cases documents are said to have been forged.’
If that is what amounts to forced adoption, then Ireland has had more than its fair share of this shameful practice. But Ireland isn’t Australia, and no apologies are even hinted at here. Indeed, the very existence of forced adoption in Ireland – let alone its prevalence – isn’t yet acknowledged in official discourse.
Yet in the years since this book first appeared, the public’s attitude to the Catholic Church and its domination of Irish life has shifted inexorably. We now know, from countless inquiries and investigations, that the abuse of children by Catholic nuns, priests, and Christian Brothers was endemic, even systematic in Ireland, and that the dominant ethos within the Church was to place the avoidance of scandal above the welfare of children. The Irish State has sought to deny any share of responsibility for the direct physical and sexual abuse of children in the care of the religious. But, as the pages that follow make abundantly clear, it cannot escape responsibility for the fate of the children it helped send out of the country for adoption. And in the case of these adoptions too, the avoidance of scandal, at whatever cost, was uppermost in the minds of State authorities.