Banished Babies E-Book

Mike Milotte

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 385

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The story of baby trafficking organised by nuns, sanctioned by an archbishop, administered by civil servants and approved by politicians who tried to keep it secret… In this re-issue of the 2012 second edition of his highly acclaimed Banished Babies, Mike Milotte uncovers in vivid detail how the State colluded with the Church to facilitate the export of thousands of 'illegitimate' children in the 1950s and 60s, and how a black market existed in which Irish babies were bought and sold beyond the fringes of the official scheme. Mike Milotte's damning exposé was first published to critical acclaim in 1997, and quickly achieved iconic status. In this second edition, the author has added previously untold personal stories from some of the 'banished babies' he met in the intervening period, stories that further illuminate the murky shadows of this official, but long-concealed child-export business. Banished Babies will shock and anger anyone who is prepared to confront the truth about Ireland's dark and sordid past.

Leseprobe

Praise for Banished Babies

Mike Milotte is a multi award-winning journalist, former senior reporter and presenter on RTÉ’s Prime Time, and before that Investigations Editor at the Sunday Tribune. He lives in London and has a PhD in modern Irish History.

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 ofIreland’s baby exportbusiness

Second Edition

Mike Milotte

BANISHED BABIES

This edition published 2012 by

by New Island

2 Brookside

Dundrum Road

Dublin 14

www.newisland.ie

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 fromThe Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), Dublin, Ireland.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Note on the Updated and Expanded Edition

Part 1: Church and State

Prologue: A Surprise for the Wife

1. A Happy Hunting Ground

2. McQuaid’s Rules, OK?

3. Me Tommy, You Jane

4. A Hard Act to Follow

5. A Major Inquisition

6. From Cock-Up…

7. … To Cover-Up

8. A Very Grave Offence

9. Troublesome Priest

Part 2: Mother and Child

Prologue: The Adoption Triangle

10. Jim and Dorothy: No Price too High

11. Pat: Against My Will

12. Mary, Michael and Kevin: Legitimate Error?

13. Maureen: Seek and Ye Shall Find (But Don’t Hold Your Breath)

14. Deny Till They Die

Tables

Note on Sources

Note on Monetary Conversions

Endnotes

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.

Perhaps by retelling this story in these changed times its impact will be greater and the taboo on naming adoption as part of the spectrum of Church-State abuse will be broken. In the interest of all those who suffered – the children and their natural mothers – it is certainly to be hoped so.

PART IChurch and State

PrologueA Surprise for the Wife

It was the 12th of July 1949 when wealthy American businessman Rollie William McDowell flew into Ireland with his personal attorney Michael Ebeling. Their arrival attracted no particular attention, but the same could not be said of their departure some two weeks later.

Forty-year-old McDowell, whose ancestors were Irish, had made his money as a property dealer in St Louis, Missouri, but he wasn’t in Ireland in pursuit of real estate. He had come in pursuit of a child. More specifically, he and his attorney had come to investigate the possibility of obtaining a child from an Irish orphanage. If the signs were hopeful McDowell intended sending for his wife, Thelma, who was waiting to hear from him back in St Louis, so they could search together for a suitable infant. The McDowells were realistic. They expected to be in Ireland for quite a while, knowing that adoption, especially inter-country adoption, was likely to be a long, slow process. Yet just two weeks after his arrival in the country, Rollie McDowell returned home, disembarking at New York’s La Guardia airport from the Trans World Airlines flight from Ireland. ‘Never far from his sight,’ according to the New York Times, ‘were Patricia Frances, four months old, and Michael James, four years old, recently of the Braemar House Orphanage in Cork.’

‘I found the children at the first orphanage we went to and they were the first children I saw,’ a proud and beaming McDowell told a reporter at the airport. ‘I liked the girl right away. Then Michael James came over and put his arms around me and said, “I like you,” and he kissed me. He was so very affectionate,’ McDowell went on, ‘I liked him right away. I suppose you can say he adopted me.’ Within days of his first encounter with the children McDowell had taken custody of them. Now, back at La Guardia airport, Rollie McDowell had just enough time to phone Thelma and ask her to meet him when his connecting flight arrived at St Louis at 4pm. He didn’t mention the fact that he had two children in tow. ‘How nice it is to surprise your wife occasionally,’ remarked the New York Times, without a hint of irony.1

The remarkable story of Rollie McDowell’s effortless acquisition and removal of two Irish children was syndicated to newspapers across America, complete with beguiling photographs of the two infants. Fortunately, perhaps, Michael’s bright green trousers and cap weren’t revealed by the black and white newsprint. But for the American media this was an unashamedly happy story, almost a fairytale come true: two little Irish waifs rescued from a life of poverty and misery by a wealthy benefactor who would give them a chance in life for which anyone in their position would be eternally grateful.

In acquiring two children for immediate shipment to the United States, Mr McDowell had broken no laws. Yet the fact that the whole business had been conducted without his wife’s involvement – let alone knowledge – indicated that no one with responsibility for the children’s welfare had bothered to investigate the would-be adoptive parents and their motives, nor the circumstances in which the children would live and be reared in the States. The Braemar Orphanage may have had day-to-day responsibility for the two children, but as citizens of the new Irish Republic, declared just a few months earlier, ultimate liability for their well-being rested squarely with the State as represented by the Government of the day. But the Government, as we shall see, was reluctant to curtail a babies-for-export affair that was primarily the preserve of the Catholic Church.

Rollie McDowell, of course, was just one of many. Close on his heels came US naval airman Eugene Perry. In November 1949 Perry returned from a European posting to his home in California accompanied by two Irish infants, three-year-old James Kearney and two-year-old Mary Dillon, whom he had obtained from the mother-and-baby home run by the Sacred Heart nuns at Castlepollard in County Westmeath. Like many American armed forces personnel who were acquiring babies from Ireland at this time, Perry had made contact with the nuns through a Catholic military chaplain with Irish connections. Like Rollie McDowell, Perry had made the journey to and from Ireland unaccompanied by his wife. Perry’s story, too, received much publicity. One newspaper described the children as ‘Irish war orphans’.2 Another spoke of them as ‘tousled redheads with eyes big as dollars’.3 A third waxed lyrical about the ‘beautiful but homeless orphans’ who departed from ‘the little convent of Sacred Heart… through the streets in a donkey cart’.4 The Castlepollard home was, in fact, an ugly purpose-built institution of 1930s vintage, but that wasn’t going to interfere with a colourful story. And the language got even more saccharine. It was, said one paper, as if ‘… a faery crept through the darkened streets of Castlepollard and through the convent gates and into the convent itself and waved a magic wand and whispered: you shall fly through the air and over an ocean and across a great new land’. From then on it was a story of ‘great winged planes’ and ‘endless Irish laughter’.5

Rollie McDowell and Eugene Perry made the headlines – but only in America. Their exploits were barely mentioned in Ireland where the steadily growing practice of sending children abroad for adoption was not a matter of any significant public debate or comment. Yet it was a practice that had been going on for a number of years before McDowell’s well-publicised coup of 1949, and it was set to continue, without interruption, until the 1970s, by which time thousands of babies, virtually every one of them born to an unmarried mother, had been exported. When this baby trafficking finally faded out its passing was as unremarked as its beginning, and another twenty-five years were to elapse before the story of Ireland’s banished babies finally hit the headlines of the Irish newspapers.

When it did – in 1996 – the facts were initially unclear and tangled, while those who knew the truth kept silent. It was a long time before the realisation dawned that the practice of sending ‘illegitimate’ children to America for adoption had been a highly organised affair rather than a series of random acts by unconnected individuals.

1. A Happy Hunting Ground

‘Almost 500 babies were flown from Shannon for adoption last year.’

The Irish Times, 8 October 1951

‘It would be interesting to know how The Irish Times obtained the figure.’

Department of External Affairs, internal memo

The children involved in Ireland’s transatlantic adoptions were frequently referred to as ‘orphans’, and the institutions they came from as ‘orphanages’, yet almost without exception they were the children of unmarried mothers – ‘illegitimate’ children in the stigmatising language of the day. A review of 330 foreign adoption cases in 1952, for instance, revealed that 327 of the children were ‘illegitimate’ and only three were orphans.1 What was more, 99 out of every 100 were the children of Catholic mothers; children with few rights in Irish law, and little hope of acceptance in Catholic Irish society. The practice of dispatching such children abroad began at a time when there was no legal adoption in Ireland, but it continued for 20 years after adoption was introduced in 1953.

The export of ‘illegitimate’ children to America was organised by nuns, with full official sanction. It was regulated by the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, and facilitated by the State, with the Department of External Affairs issuing passports so the children could be taken out of the country. As far as possible the whole business was conducted in conditions of secrecy – on orders from McQuaid himself – and although individual government ministers were well aware of what was going on, the matter was only discussed once, and briefly, by the full cabinet. It was rarely mentioned in the Irish press, although foreign papers reported and commented on it from time to time. The civil servants who were involved lived in constant fear of awkward parliamentary questions or an angry public outcry. When Archbishop McQuaid asked the Department of External Affairs in November 1951 about the number of ‘adoption passports’ being issued, the secretary of the Department suggested to his Minister, Frank Aiken, that they could tell McQuaid the number was an ‘official secret’.2

In fact, the true number of ‘illegitimate’ children sent across the Atlantic may never be known. No one was counting before American businessman Rollie McDowell’s visit in July 1949. From then onwards the American embassy in Dublin kept a record of entry visas issued to such children3 and from the end of 1950 onwards the Department of External Affairs kept a tally of adoption passports issued. These official figures suggest that around 2,100 children were sent to America between July 1949 and the end of 1973, but there is no record of the numbers before 1949. The earliest post-war reference to a child going to America for adoption is November 1947, but there may have been many before that.4 Nor is there any way of knowing how many children were taken or sent illegally. What newspaper reports there are from the time certainly put the number of children being dispatched across the Atlantic at a much higher level than is acknowledged in the official figures. The Irish Times, for example, reported in October 1951 that ‘almost 500 babies were flown from Shannon for adoption’ in 1950, while already, it said, in the first nine months of 1951, ‘that number is believed to have been exceeded’.5 The same report referred to 18 parties of children leaving Shannon in one week in October 1951, yet official figures reveal just nine adoption passports issued for the whole month of October, and just 122 for the whole year of 1951, a small fraction of the ‘almost 500’ reported by the newspaper.6The Irish Times’ article was read with interest – but with no apparent surprise or explicit disagreement – by the officials in the Department of External Affairs who were issuing the passports. Their sole response was a brief internal memo: ‘It would be interesting to know how The Irish Times obtained the figure.’7

Whatever the numbers, the easy availability of Irish children for removal abroad, particularly when it was prominently reported as in the McDowell and Perry cases, helped paint a picture of Ireland abroad not unlike the image the Irish themselves would come to hold of Romania, China, Russia, Vietnam and other countries where they went in search of babies to adopt in later years: a pathetic and brutal country, teeming with abandoned and desperate children just waiting to be scooped up by more enlightened and kindly souls, and removed from their misery with a minimum of fuss. Regrettably, such an image of Ireland was not entirely unjustified.

The decade after World War Two was probably the most desolate and gloomy period in modern Irish history. As a wartime neutral, the country was cut off from progressive post-war developments in Europe, and isolation simply made the country more conservative than it already was. Ireland was a solidly Catholic country and the Church’s authority was unquestioned, at least in public. It was still a predominantly rural society as well. Church and State were as one in their determination to enforce a deeply traditional moral code, and in the process they displayed what many would see today as an unhealthy obsession with matters sexual, seeking to extend their authority into the bedrooms of the nation. Artificial birth control was outlawed and chastity was demanded of everyone who wasn’t married.

Today almost a quarter of all families in Ireland are headed by a single parent – most of them unmarried mothers – but in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, single parent families, other than those headed by widows or widowers, were virtually unknown. Unmarried couples did not live together, with or without children. ‘Illegitimate’ children, with few exceptions, were consigned to ‘orphanages’. And the orphanages were bursting at the seams, for despite the confining Puritanism of the times, premarital and extramarital sex were far from uncommon. Nowadays, when around 25,000 children are born each year to unmarried women in Ireland (amounting to 34% of all births in 2010), the figures from years past may seem small, at between one and two thousand annually. But it all added up, and the fact that more than 100,000 Irish children were born outside marriage between 1920 and the mid-1970s – when the stigma lessened – seems adequate enough testimony to the hypocrisy of the times.8 Countless thousands more ‘illegitimate’ children were born to young, unmarried women who fled to England to hide their shame. They were so numerous they earned the nickname ‘PFI’ – Pregnant From Ireland.

There was scarcely a family in 1940s, ’50s or ’60s Ireland that didn’t have a relative, friend or acquaintance who either got pregnant out of wedlock or fathered an ‘illegitimate’ child. Yet it was a taboo subject, never discussed in polite company and if mentioned at all then only in hushed tones of holy indignation. An appalling stigma attached to ‘illegitimacy’. Having a child outside marriage was regarded as an unspeakably scandalous act. The mother was seen as a wicked sinner and her child a tainted outcast. Father Cecil Barrett, head of the Catholic Social Welfare Bureau, and Archbishop McQuaid’s closest adviser on such matters, described single mothers as ‘fallen women’ and ‘grave sinners’ with severe ‘moral problems’. Their children were the victims of ‘wickedness’.9 Humanitarian or material assistance, Barrett maintained, ‘may be of no avail, unless the rents in the mother’s spiritual fabric have been repaired’.10 Another Catholic writer described ‘natural’ children as ‘rebels’ who ‘suffer from complexes analogous to those of certain invalids’. They were ‘destined for suffering and often for failure’, while ‘the girl who gives birth to one of them takes upon herself the responsibility for these evils’.11

Men, on the other hand, who fathered children out of wedlock, faced no such stigmatisation. They may have feared retribution from a girl’s family (if family members knew), but by and large the attitude was that it was the ‘fallen’ woman who tempted the hapless man into a sinful relationship. Men were just men and women had to control the male’s ‘natural urges’ by acting modestly. The idea that women, too, might have natural urges was anathema. Female sexuality was denied in a repressive regime designed to exercise maximum control by the male dominated Catholic Church over women, their bodies, and their reproductive capabilities.

Given such attitudes, it was hardly surprising that a girl who became pregnant outside marriage was unlikely to tell her own parents of her predicament, or if she told her mother, the father was kept in the dark. And whoever in the immediate family knew, certainly the neighbours would never be allowed to find out. Many young women who got pregnant were thrown out of the family home and completely disowned by their parents, so great was the shame.

If they were allowed to return it was only after they had got rid of their babies, the visible proof of their mortal sin.

Before the early 1970s, when an allowance for unmarried mothers was first introduced, the Irish State offered no help. Rather than provide an adequate means of life to so many mothers and their children, the State, in effect, closed its eyes to the reality of thousands of births outside marriage. Successive governments ignored the constitutional undertaking to cherish all the children of the nation equally, and simply abandoned all responsibility in this area – as in so many others – to the Catholic Church and its religious orders.

For most of the unfortunate young women caught up in this world of exclusion and deceit, the only option was to turn to the nuns for help. Religious orders such as the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary, the Irish Sisters of Charity and the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul ran maternity hospitals and mother and baby homes that catered exclusively for single women. There were also religious-run ‘orphanages’ for older children, and beyond them the industrial schools. Most of these homes received income from their local authority which had a statutory responsibility to provide the bare necessities for those who could not provide for themselves, and that included ‘destitute’ children. But the Sisters also received bequests and donations, and many boosted their income further by running farms, bakeries and laundries, all staffed by ‘fallen women’ who were compelled to work for their own and their children’s keep. Yet, as with so much else, the full extent of the financial dealings of these religious-run institutions – who were in effect being paid twice for the service they provided – remains shrouded in mystery.

As for the unmarried mothers, even if they had the means, they were unlikely to have the inclination in conservative Catholic Ireland to set up home as single parents.

The overwhelming majority of them had no real alternative but to give their babies away as soon as possible after birth. The stigma attached to their condition meant their first objective was to hide the fact that they had had a child at all, a process that involved concealment, deception and denial, with unquantified consequences in terms of longterm psychological damage. Again, it was the nuns who ran the fostering and adoption societies who arranged to have the children of these single mothers taken from them. And in most cases, it seems, they not only made the arrangements but took all the critical decisions as well, assuming control in the belief that they knew best. So convinced were they of their right to decide that they frequently disposed of children without consulting or informing the mother beforehand. Their assumed moral (whatever about legal) authority to do so was simply not questioned. And, again, this was a further source of income for the sisters, for although they appear not to have charged directly for providing children to adoptive parents (which would have been illegal after 1952), they certainly knew how to maximise the ‘donations’ that flowed into their coffers from the grateful recipients of children for adoption.

For the children themselves there were few options. In the absence of legal adoption in Ireland before 1953, many were ‘boarded out’ to foster parents, with the possibility of being informally adopted, in so-called de facto adoptions. But for some – barely old enough to work – fostering was a euphemism for child labour, mostly on farms, and not infrequently with bachelor farmers. The fate of these children has never been recorded. The alternative, of course, was to remain in institutional care with the nuns.

For the nuns this whole business was something of a paradox. On the one hand they were virtually the only people prepared to offer any kind of help or relief to women who were shunned by the rest of society. But on the other hand they were part and parcel of the established Church, the sole arbiter of society’s moral values. As such, the nuns themselves helped enforce and perpetuate the ethical code that rejected unmarried mothers and banished their hapless offspring. It was a vicious circle.

Entering a mother and baby home run by the Sisters was, more often than not, a last resort for a pregnant woman, a move that was undertaken with great trepidation for these homes had frightening reputations as places of retribution and punishment as much as places of confinement. They most certainly were not places where the bringing forth of new life was celebrated. The nuns provided secrecy, but they exacted a price. Girls and young women entering these institutions, unless they had independent means, had to ‘work their passage’ with hard manual labour, scrubbing and cleaning indoors, working the land outdoors. Many women whose children were not fostered or adopted immediately had to work in the convents for as much as two years after their babies were born before the nuns would agree to take charge of their children. Indeed, some of these unfortunate young mothers became so dependent they remained for the rest of their lives working in the institutions where their children had been born.

This, then, was the world that Rollie McDowell, Eugene Perry and hundreds like them visited so cursorily in their quest for children. They, of course, came from a very different world: the world of wealthy, powerful, self-assured, middle class, white America. They were the victors of the Second World War. Whatever they wanted seemed to be theirs for the asking, Irish babies included. Unlike the mothers of the children, the Americans had everything going for them. Regardless of individual attitudes, it was a grossly unequal relationship, a form of cultural and economic exploitation. At the outset it was not the nuns but the Americans who set the ball rolling, for white middle class America had always experienced a shortage of ‘suitable’ babies for adoption. It was estimated that 20 American couples were chasing after every available white American child. Inevitably in such circumstances a black market developed within America with unscrupulous doctors and lawyers, among others, running ‘baby farms’ – obtaining babies from unmarried women and selling them to childless couples for thousands of dollars.

In the mid-1940s, hopeful American adopters were presented with a new source of children among the hundreds of thousands of displaced orphans in post-war Europe. Many such children were acquired by American military and government personnel stationed in US-occupied territories such as Italy and West Germany. Others were shipped to the States in groups to be offered for adoption there. Thousands of American servicemen were also stationed in Britain and remained there long after the war ended, but in 1948 the UK forbade foreign nationals from taking British children out of the country.12 As a result, many of the US military personnel stationed in Britain turned to Ireland, just a short flight away. As a wartime neutral, Ireland had no war orphans, but it had a superabundance of ‘illegitimate’ children. As in the rest of Europe, the dislocated years of the Second World War saw a huge increase in the number of births outside marriage in Ireland – up by an average of 23% a year – putting the nation’s ‘orphanages’ under even greater strain and providing opportunities for childless Americans like McDowell and Perry to take their pick. And, as these gentlemen had discovered, Ireland had no laws prohibiting the removal of such children. Nor were there restrictions on their entry into America since Ireland’s US immigration quota of 18,000 a year was under-subscribed.

The attraction of Ireland as a potential source of babies for well-to-do white Americans was heightened when other European countries moved, as Britain had done, to protect their children. By July 1948 the Children’s Bureau of the US Social Security Administration was reporting that many European countries who had suffered huge population losses as a result of the war were now ‘anxious to keep all children who are their citizens’, and as a result had ‘set up regulations which prevent children being taken out of the country for purposes of adoption’. By 1950, according to the Geneva-based International Union for Child Welfare, there were approximately 10 qualified European couples willing to adopt each available European child, a complete turnaround from the situation at the end of the war when children could, literally, be picked up in the streets. The Union’s secretary, Mrs J. M. Small, told a conference of the Child Welfare League of America in New York in November 1950 that it was now futile for American couples to go to mainland Europe in the hope of finding children for adoption.13

Ireland, by comparison, had become a happy hunting ground for would-be American adopters. The powers that be in Ireland, clerical and lay, had decided that ‘illegitimate’ Irish children were dispensable. Their removal from the country would not be banned, even though it was a period of mass adult emigration resulting in a declining population. The fact that Americans wanted these children was quite fortuitous for it meant they could be disposed of in a way that seemed beneficial for all concerned: the natural mothers were relieved of their offspring; the Americans found the children they craved, and the children themselves went off to a better life. That, at least, was the theory, but theory and reality were not always the same.

When American Catholics came looking for children to take away to the United States, the nuns who ran the orphanages must have been delighted. For one thing, they had more babies in their care than they could adequately cope with, and it seemed a natural match to pair them off with willing American couples. It also meant fewer mouths to feed, and, as an additional bonus, satisfied wealthy Americans were a potential source of generous donations.

America, of course, had always been seen as the land of opportunity by Irish people seeking a better life. There was nothing at all unusual about crossing the Atlantic to escape the confines and miseries of life in Ireland, and in the postwar era Irish people were again flocking abroad in ever increasing numbers. The nuns no doubt believed America would provide a wonderful chance to children who otherwise would spend many years of their lives in religious-run institutions, and it seemed self-evident that life with a loving family would be preferable to life with the nuns. But at the same time there had to be something fundamentally awry in a society that tried to solve its ‘illegitimacy problem’ by banishing thousands of children to a foreign country, while at the same time doing nothing to address the underlying fears and prejudices that made such banishment both possible and necessary. And unlike adult emigrants, of course, these children had no say whatever in where they ended up. What is more, despite all the efforts to find ‘good Catholic homes’ for them, there is an abundance of evidence that many of the children sent to America faced an uncertain future in the hands of people whose suitability as adoptive parents was seriously in question.

When we add in the plight of the natural mothers who were left behind with their dark, destructive secrets and their numbing pain, it is easy to understand why this is a story Church and State would prefer had not been told.

2. McQuaid’s Rules, OK?

‘We shall have to be careful not to do anything which would embarrass the Archbishop.’

Department of External Affairsinternal memo, 1950

It was Eamon de Valera, self-styled father figure of the Irish nation, who opened Ireland up to America’s child-seekers. De Valera – who had himself been born in America to an unmarried mother – was not only Taoiseach when the baby exodus began, he was also Minister for External Affairs and, as such, responsible for issuing the first children’s ‘adoption passports’. Yet there is no record of de Valera’s thinking on the matter and no record either of how many passports were authorised in his name. What is clear, however, is that he took no steps to stop the departures, although, in an era when tens of thousands of Irish people were leaving the country in a desperate search for work and a decent life, it was his Government’s policy to stem the emigrant tide, not add to it. It was not until after the change of Government in 1948, when Sean MacBride, of the small, radical republican party Clann na Poblachta, was Minister for External Affairs in the country’s first inter-party Government, that steps were taken to regulate – but not stop – the practice of dispatching ‘illegitimate’ children to America.

In the wake of the publicity given to the McDowell and Perry cases in the United States, demand there for Irish babies was rocketing. The McDowells themselves had been inundated with enquiries from other American couples wanting to know how they got their children.1 At the same time, various American Catholic welfare bodies were being bombarded with requests from childless couples across the States for assistance in obtaining Irish children. When the Perry story broke a few months after McDowell’s widely publicised coup, the Irish Consul in San Francisco, Patrick Hughes, wrote to the Department of External Affairs in Dublin seeking advice on the current law relating to such cases. He needed to know, he said, because ‘I receive many inquiries by callers, by telephone and by mail from persons who wish to adopt Irish children.’2

This was the first time an Irish government department had been asked to explain its position regarding the American adoptions, and its reply to Hughes showed the matter had not provoked any deep thought. Hughes was told simply that as there was no law prohibiting the removal of Irish children from the State, the Department of External Affairs was prepared to issue passports to such children provided their mother or guardian had consented to their removal and that there was satisfactory evidence of the suitability of the would-be adopters.3 On the surface these may have seemed reasonable safeguards for both the natural mother and her child, but no one was really concerned about the circumstances in which the mothers – mostly young, vulnerable and frightened women – were ‘consenting’ to the permanent removal of their children from the State. This issue was never seriously addressed during the lifetime of the American adoptions. What was more, in the early years at least, there were no established criteria for determining the ‘suitability’ of applicants for Irish children. And these were certainly matters that should not have been left to civil servants who had no training or expertise in adoption matters and whose function was merely to issue passports, not make critical decisions affecting the future welfare of hundreds, if not thousands of infants and their mothers.

From the very start the whole business had been handled in a haphazard manner, without thought or preparation, and without rules or regulations. And there was evidence that the civil servants who decided whether or not a child would be allowed to go abroad for adoption had little knowledge of adoption policy. In one case officials gave permission for a 57-year-old woman to take a two-year-old child abroad for adoption. In the many letters and memos generated by this particular application, the woman’s advanced age was never once mentioned as a negative factor even though it was generally accepted in adoption practice that 40 was the maximum age at which a woman should adopt a two-year-old.4

Elsewhere, however, concern for the welfare of the infants in question was slowly beginning to surface. In December 1949, within weeks of the Perry case, Health Minister Dr Noel Browne expressed his ‘uneasiness’ to the Department of External Affairs over the growing number of foreign adoptions. As a member of Clann na Poblachta, Browne in effect was questioning his party leader, the Minister for External Affairs, Sean MacBride, in whose name the ‘adoption passports’ were now being issued. Browne had two principal concerns: first, that the applicants for Irish children ‘may be persons turned down as adopters in their own country’, and second, that ‘there is no means of knowing or ensuring that children placed in the care of applicants will be adopted legally in their new country or even that they will remain in the care of the original applicants’.5 The Minister for Health clearly feared that unsuitable people were obtaining Irish children with a view to trading them on, and given America’s notorious black market in babies, Browne’s fears were far from imaginary. His suspicion that people who had been rejected in the States were now getting children from Ireland was borne out when an American journalist, following up the Rollie McDowell story, casually informed the Department of External Affairs that American ‘rejectees’ were indeed turning to Ireland where they encountered no obstacles.6 The Department, however, does not appear to have responded in any way to the warning (which is precisely how it reacted when the same issue arose time after time in the future).

Noel Browne, however, was not proposing that the export of Irish babies be halted. Rather he was urging that it be better regulated so as to safeguard the interests of the children involved. ‘The children so adopted are, in the main, illegitimate children with an uncertain future in this country,’ his officials wrote, and Dr Browne ‘would be diffident in suggesting that obstacles should be placed in the way of their acquiring a new permanent home.’ But would-be foreign adopters, Browne urged, ‘should be obliged to produce evidence of character, suitability and religion, supported by a recommendation from the Diplomatic Representative in this country.’7

The Health Minister’s intervention was the first time anyone in authority in Ireland had asked questions about the safety and welfare of Irish infants who were being sent abroad in ever growing – but still unrecorded – numbers. Distressingly, the Department of External Affairs, which was facilitating the children’s removal, had no reply to give. Instead, the consular officials at Iveagh House asked their embassies in London and Washington what the British and American authorities did to protect Irish children once they had come to their countries for adoption. It looked very much like they were passing the buck.

Noel Browne’s protestations had no immediate impact, and his officials were still pressing External Affairs for a response three months later – by which time another interested party, whose influence was greater than that of a mere cabinet minister, had begun to mobilise – the Catholic Church.

* * * * *

The Reverend Robert Brown, assistant secretary of America’s largest non-governmental welfare organisation, the National Conference of Catholic Charities, was an extremely busy man. He had to keep an eye on a sprawling network of local agencies, all linked under the Catholic Charities umbrella, but each one working independently of the organisation’s Washington head office. Brown’s boss was an Irishman, Monsignor John O’Grady, a native of Roscrea in County Tipperary, where his sister was a nun. After 30 years of involvement with Catholic Charities, O’Grady was now the organisation’s national secretary. He was to play a critical role in the transatlantic adoption business over the next number of years.

O’Grady and Brown were becoming concerned with the ever-growing number of enquiries to local Catholic Charities branches about how to get a baby from Ireland. Each story that appeared in the newspapers about another American couple’s acquisition of an Irish ‘orphan’ simply encouraged more and more childless American couples to come knocking on their door.