Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business (14 page)

O’Grady proposed a remedy to this series of problems. In place of individual Irish children being sent to individual adoptive couples, he wanted Irish children shipped to America
en bloc
, under the auspices of the head office of Catholic Charities in Washington. The children would be held in orphanages and homes in those areas that had sufficient funds and trained staff to arrange proper adoptions. When asked which areas he had in mind, O’Grady could name just six: Chicago, St Louis, Milwaukee, Newark, Albany and Syracuse. At a time when Catholic Charities had several hundred branches throughout the United States, and was placing Irish children across the country, this was a staggering admission of inadequacy. O’Grady was told that his proposal was a non-starter primarily because it would deprive the Irish authorities of control, but fears were also expressed about hostile publicity.
¹²
Single ‘illegitimate’ children could be dispatched discreetly, but bulk exports would attract unwanted attention. There was a third, and even more compelling reason for rejecting O’Grady’s ‘group plan,’ as it came to be dubbed: Archbishop McQuaid disapproved.
¹³

Shortly after O’Grady’s visit to Dublin, the Department received the first small piece of concrete evidence of the Wisconsin problem. A pointed letter from the Welfare Department at Madison, Wisconsin, revealed that an Irish child had been given to a highly unsuitable family in the area, even though the home and the adoptive parents had been recommended by Catholic Charities.
¹⁴
This, presumably, was one of the children handled by the Wisconsin ‘operator’. As with all previous revelations of unsuitable adoptions, the Irish authorities showed no inclination to investigate the subsequent fate of the children involved. Instead, they comforted themselves with the belief that the problem was localised rather than general. And when Department officials made discreet inquiries about O’Grady himself, they were told he was held in low esteem by many of his own colleagues.
¹⁵
But this was scarcely an adequate answer to the problems that had been revealed. The Department of External Affairs had to respond, and it did so by insisting that all future adoption arrangements for Irish children in America be made by legally registered branches of Catholic Charities. This was a vital improvement, but for an unknown number of Irish children, dispatched to America under a wholly inadequate regime, the new rules came five years too late. And even then, unsuitable people continued to obtain Irish children.

It might be argued, of course, that the Irish authorities could not be held responsible for blunders and failings on the other side of the Atlantic, but it must be remembered that Catholic Charities was chosen to do the job in preference to the federal Children’s Bureau, which had offered a full and comprehensive adoption vetting, placing and monitoring service long before the job was entrusted to Catholic Charities. And Catholic Charities was chosen, not because it offered greater protection for the overall interests of the Irish children involved, but because it alone could be trusted to put matters of religion at the top of the agenda. It was more likely to deliver fervent Catholic couples as adoptive parents than any secular organisation could do.

Given the importance of O’Grady’s revelations, and the potential damage they could do, Sean Morrissey took the prudent step of sending a copy of the minutes of the meeting with O’Grady to his Minister, Liam Cosgrave.
¹⁶
Cosgrave in turn decided that it was time the whole business of the American adoptions was discussed at the Cabinet table, where until now not a word of it had been uttered.

7. ... To Cover-Up

‘It is wrong to suggest that there is anything in the nature of a traffic in the adoption of children.’

Liam Cosgrave, Minister for External Affairs,

Dáil Éireann 1956

‘There are certain aspects of this traffic in adoption children over which the Department has no control.’

Department of External Affairs, Draft Statement to
Government on American Adoptions 1956

When the Irish Government met on 23 March 1956, Liam Cosgrave, the Minister for External Affairs, initiated the first ever cabinet discussion on Ireland’s booming baby exports. The disturbing revelations from America could not be swept under the carpet indefinitely, and Cosgrave also wanted to ensure that his colleagues were not taken by surprise by parliamentary questions on the subject, questions that were already in the pipeline from an opposition TD. It was going to be hard to keep everything under control.

The total number of children officially sent abroad for adoption had just topped the 1,000 mark. It seemed rather

late in the day for the government to start thinking about a matter that up to now it had conveniently ignored. But the absence of a distinct policy did not absolve the government of responsibility. It alone was accountable for the fate of so many hundreds of its infant citizens. There was no question of civil servants, or maverick ministers, running a policy that was not strictly official.

The cabinet discussion of March 1956, as was customary, was not recorded, but Cosgrave was instructed to produce a statement of principles by which the Department of External Affairs would be guided in the matter.
¹
His officials got to work and had soon produced a substantial draft document. This was followed by another, then another, and another.
²
What these successive draft statements reveal is how the deep concerns of at least some civil servants about the whole business of shipping babies across the Atlantic were progressively sanitised prior to the submission of the proposed document to government.

The first draft statement was completely candid about the serious problems that had arisen in the past, mentioning the scandal of Catholic Charities in Wisconsin where Irish children had been obtained under false pretences. ‘There are certain aspects of this traffic in adoption children over which the Department has no control, and in respect of which it is not entirely happy,’ the earliest draft statement said. ‘The distance separating the two countries is such as to prevent any interested authority in Ireland making independent inspection or assessment of the American adoptive parents and their home,’ it went on. Consequently the Department was left dependent on Catholic Charities, but their ‘efficiency and reliability’ had now been found to be ‘not quite uniform throughout America’. In other words, no one could really guarantee the safety and well-being of over 1,000 Irish children sent to America by Church and State during the past decade.

The shortage of babies for adoption in America, the statement went on, ‘creates opportunities for unscrupulous operators and agents to intervene in adoption arrangements for the purpose of commercial profit’. Scarcity also meant the Department came under ‘a certain pressure... to make children available,’ and overall they would ‘prefer that the adoptions should not be subjected to these dangers’. The language was restrained, but this was still a clear admission that there had been serious shortcomings and problems with the American adoptions. This honest account of the system’s deficiencies, however, was diluted when the second draft was produced. Now, all references to the sale of Irish children by the crook in Wisconsin were dropped; the term ‘traffic’ was abandoned; references to ‘commercial profit’ were erased, and the fact that the Department came under (Church) pressure to keep things moving was omitted.

By censoring their own report to the Government, the civil servants might have hoped to keep political concern to a minimum. But there was a limit to their cosseting capabilities, and as the cabinet waited for an opportunity to discuss the business, one of the greatest fears of the officials in the Department of External Affairs became a reality: deputies began asking questions in the Dáil about children being taken to America. A newspaper picked up the scent, leading to more questions and more pressure on the Department to explain, in a public arena, just exactly what was going on – the very last thing they wanted to do.

The first parliamentary question was asked by opposition Fianna Fáil TD Donagh O’Malley on 10 April 1956.
³
He wanted to know whether children who had been temporary inmates of the County Hospital at Croom, County Limerick, had been adopted by American citizens, and if so, what the circumstances surrounding the adoption were. O’Malley gave no background information that might have put the question in context. This was to come later. But the fact that he addressed his question to the Minister for Justice, James Everett, whose responsibilities related only to adoptions within Ireland, was one indication of how little was known or understood, even among public representatives, about the practice of exporting Irish children to the USA. O’Malley’s question really should have been addressed to the Minister for External Affairs, Liam Cos- grave. Everett’s answer gave away as little as possible. ‘Some such children have been taken out of the country for adoption,’ he said, but ‘there was nothing irregular or unlawful about this’.
⁴
As far as Everett was concerned, his brief Dáil answer should have been the end of the matter, and probably would have been had not a mass circulation British newspaper followed up the story.

On 10 June 1956 the
Empire News
published a frontpage article under the banner headline ‘Babies “Sold” to US in Secret,’ with a subheading, ‘Nun says – It’s quite legal’. The story’s opening sentence may seem unremarkable: ‘Babies born to Irish girls who are unable to make homes for them are being flown from Shannon Airport to the United States to be adopted by American families,’ but this was the first time the American adoption issue had been given front-page headline treatment in any popular newspaper circulating in Ireland. Before now, references to the American adoptions in the Irish papers had been few and far between, especially since Archbishop McQuaid’s office had ordered a news blackout some five years earlier. The British Sunday paper went on to say that ‘solicitors, doctors and hospitals are involved in the teeming traffic, which is conducted in conditions of secrecy.’ Investigations in Dublin, Cork and Limerick, the paper said, revealed that ‘payments are made for the children,’ but it gave no further details of the financial transactions.

The
Empire News
story was about two specific children who had been sent to America directly from the Croom

Hospital in Limerick: Anthony Barron, who was two-and- a-half, and three-year-old Mary Clancy. Both children were born in Croom hospital to unmarried mothers, Kathleen Barron and Bridget Clancy, and both had been fostered out to Kathleen’s sister-in-law, Mrs Joan Barron. Joan Barron told the
Empire News
the two infants had been taken from her ‘on various pretexts’ and returned to the hospital, which was run by nuns. Soon after that they were dispatched to America. Joan Barron said she had been willing to adopt the little boy herself, but when she tried to do so she found she was too late: he had been seen travelling through Croom in a motor car along with a nun from the hospital, on his way to Shannon Airport.

The fate of the other child, Mary Clancy, was recounted by Joan Barron’s fifteen-year-old daughter. She told of going to visit three-year-old Mary at Croom Hospital. ‘She had only a small cut from a piece of glass and I could not understand what was going on,’ the daughter said. ‘She was in bed and strapped to the bed with the strap around her middle. She had a vaccination bandage on her arm. Next time I saw her she was up and prettily dressed. A week later I went to Croom again, to Dr Mullins’ dispensary, and asked how Mary was. He said, “She is gone away since last night in an aeroplane.”’ Dr Mullins, Assistant Registrar at the hospital, told the
Empire News,
‘There is nothing wrong with them when the babies go into the hospital. The idea is to civilise them after life in a cottage. They are taught to eat and to wear their clothes properly. They are built up a bit in the three weeks before their American journey.’ Dr Mullins’ comments certainly made it sound like a well- organised operation involving many more children than Anthony Barron and Mary Clancy.

Flight arrangements for the children were made by a nun, Sister Christopher, who told the
Empire News
that ‘the Irish Government know and approve of what we are doing. It is quite legal and we think it better for the children than the poverty of living, for instance, in Mrs Barron’s home. We shall continue to send babies to America until the law is changed. Mrs Barron cannot bring up these children. She is too poor to do so.’ Three-year-old Mary Clancy’s grandmother said that neither she nor the child’s mother, Bridget, who was in London, had received any payment for the infant. ‘All I got,’ she said, ‘was ten shillings from the Sister to buy sweets and odd things for Mary when we went to Dublin to see the American consul.’ In Dublin they had seen ‘a lot of people’ and the very next day Mary Clancy, along with a little boy called Billy, had been flown out to the United States. Mary Clancy’s adoptive parents lived in Wisconsin.

When he was asked in the Dáil on 19 June, by Cork Labour TD Dan Desmond, what he proposed to do about the claims in the
Empire News,
Justice Minister James Everett repeated the earlier formula that ‘there was nothing irregular or unlawful about this’. Faced with what could have become a national scandal, Everett responded with a promise of firm action. The Government, he said, would ‘take steps to deal with such newspapers’.
⁵

Although there was nothing in the Minister for Justice’s comments in the Dáil that indicated the slightest concern about the goings-on at the Croom Hospital, never mind Wisconsin, his Department had been sufficiently worried to order a Garda investigation as soon as it got wind of the fact that Deputy O’Malley was proposing to ask questions. Reporting back that Anthony Barron’s mother and Mary Clancy’s grandmother had consented to the removal of the two children from the State, the police declared themselves satisfied that all was in order.
⁶
They do not appear to have enquired at all into the allegation that the children were ‘sold’. Nor was there any indication as to who vetted the American adopting parents in Wisconsin, the very state where a Catholic Charities worker had been selling Irish babies.