Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business (19 page)

Their letter had been remarkably unrevealing about their personalities, even about the reasons for wanting a second child, other than as ‘a sister for George’. The unspoken, but unambiguous, assumption underlying their entire approach was that adoption was a ‘cure’ for their own childlessness rather than a service to the adopted child. That this assumption went entirely unchallenged by either the St Clare’s Adoption Society in Ireland or the Angel Guardian Home in New York simply indicated their acceptance of it. But the critical point in the Rowes’ letter to St Clare’s was left to the end: Angel Guardian Home, they said, ‘mentioned to us the cost involved in getting a child from Ireland and we are perfectly willing and capable of meeting the expense’. And not only of one child, but of two if possible. From then on everything moved at high speed. Within a fortnight a Catholic Charities report on the Rowes had reached Ireland and was approved at diocesan level. One of the nuns at St Clare’s wrote to say they hoped ‘very soon to be in a position to choose a baby girl for you’. Two weeks later, on 13 May 1960, she wrote again, just a ten line impersonal note: ‘I now enclose a photograph of a baby girl who would be available for you if you would like to have her.’ The baby’s name was Marion. She had been born on 1 June 1959. By the time formalities were completed she would be over one year old and eligible to leave the country for adoption. She had suffered from gastro-enteritis in early infancy but had made a full recovery. Marion’s mother was ‘unmarried but comes from a respectable family and is well educated’.

That was the sum total of the information available to the Rowes, on which they had to decide whether or not to adopt the infant Marion, whom of course they had never seen. This was strictly babies by mail-order. The description of the mother as ‘unmarried but respectable and well educated’ was the formula repeated by the nuns in virtually every case. It conveyed no impression whatever of the kind of person the mother was. There was no mention of the child’s father. The circumstances in which the baby had been placed for adoption were not mentioned. There was no family medical history. The list of missing information could go on and on, but the Rowes weren’t asking questions. After years of fruitless searching for a child America they were unlikely at this stage to put obstacles in the way by asking for further information or appearing awkward. They replied by cablegram: ‘Baby wanted. Send soon as possible. Love her already’. They would be ‘counting the minutes until she arrives’. They would also be counting the dollars.

The Rowes’ acceptance of baby Marion was acknowledged with a bill for £50 ‘for expenses’ from St Clare’s. The bill – equivalent, in relation to average Irish wages, to €4,800 in today’s money – was not itemised, and it is difficult to imagine what it might have related to since the only expenses incurred by the nuns at this point in their dealings with the Rowes were for postage on three airmail letters and a photograph of baby Marion. And Marion discovered in later life that all expenses arising from her birth and stay at Castlepollard had been paid by her natural father, so the money wasn’t to cover that either. But even if her father hadn’t paid, the local authority would have done so.

The 1952 Adoption Act had made it a criminal offence to charge money for arranging an adoption. Receipted expenditure on such things as lawyers’ fees, transport costs and so on could legitimately be passed on to the adopters – and in the Rowes’ case, were, in full, at a later date. But the Rowes still weren’t asking any questions, and on receipt of the bill immediately sent a Sterling draft for £50, payable directly to St Clare’s and encashable at the Munster and Leinster Bank in Stamullen. St Clare’s acknowledged receipt of the money by return post. Marion – or Maureen as she now is – says she discovered in later life that the first cheque was followed by several others which her adoptive parents described as donations.

That was all it took. Baby Marion was assigned to Mr and Mrs Rowe. The future course of all their lives had been determined by a brief exchange of letters and the payment of £50 (€4,800). All that remained to be done now was the completion of formal paperwork, such as passport and visa applications, and baby Marion would be ready to go.

Marion’s passport application was submitted to the Department of External Affairs by the nuns in Stamullen, and consisted by and large of the documents prescribed by Archbishop McQuaid – essential proofs of the Rowes’ Catholicism such as their marriage and baptismal certificates, references from priests, a Catholic Charities home report, and sworn undertakings from the Rowes to bring baby Marion up, and to educate her, in the faith. Without this last document the Department of External Affairs would refuse a passport, even though no such condition applied to adoptions within Ireland. There was also a statement signed by Marion’s mother in the presence of a Notary Public in which she ‘relinquished all claims to the child for ever’ and consented to her removal from the State for adoption abroad by anyone ‘deemed suitable’ by St Clare’s. To the consular officials in the Department of External Affairs, this was a routine application. Everything appeared to be in order, and on the 15 July 1960 baby Marion got her passport, issued in the name of the Minister for External Affairs, Frank Aiken.

By comparison with the Irish passport requirements, the demands of the American embassy for an immigrant visa were distinctly secular.

The Rowes had to guarantee that the ‘alien’ they were sponsoring for entry to the States – i.e. Marion – would not become a ‘public charge’. The ‘alien’ had to answer such questions as: ‘Are you a drug dealer?’ ‘Do you have leprosy?’ ‘Are you going to the United States to engage in an immoral sexual act?’ ‘Are you a psychopath or otherwise mentally insane?’ and ‘Are you a member of the Communist Party?’ On Marion’s behalf St Clare’s answered ‘no’ to each question, and on 28 July 1960 her immigrant visa was issued.

Under international air-traffic law, minors under eight years of age had to be accompanied on all flights, so baby Marion needed an escort. There were several options. She could be entrusted to any one of a number of young Irish women who had made themselves known to the nuns as willing volunteers. For the girls it meant a free flight to New York and a few days in America, all at the adopters’ expense. Or a children’s nurse could be hired for the job, at extra expense. There was even an American company called Shannon Travel Services which specialised in bringing Irish ‘orphans’ to the States, collecting them by taxi from the orphanage, driving them to Shannon, and engaging escorts for the flight. But in the end the Rowes decided to send a female escort of their own choice from New York. The escort arrived at Stamullen on Monday 8 August 1960 and took custody of baby Marion, all dressed in her best clothes. Next day, baby and escort were aboard the Pan American Airlines afternoon flight from London to New York’s Idlewild airport. The total bill from the airline company was a staggering $455, equivalent to €16,000 today. The Rowes were at the airport to meet their little ‘alien’.

Just that morning the Rowes had received their first detailed description of their new daughter from St Clare’s. Her height, weight, colouring, eating habits and diet were described in minute detail. She had been passed by the doctor as ‘perfectly healthy and normal both physically and mentally,’ but ‘does not walk yet, in fact is not quite standing’. Though Marion was already 14 months old, St Clare’s advised the Rowes that her lack of mobility was ‘nothing to worry about as children in an institution are slower at all these things than a child in its own home’. There were, after all, 60 children at a time in the nursery, so they weren’t getting much personal attention. Marion had no ‘particular little habits,’ the nuns reported, ‘but she can do with a lot of love and affection.’

The Rowes were overjoyed with their new daughter – whose name they changed to Maureen. They wrote fervent thank you letters to the nuns at St Clare’s. But they were also worried that Maureen was still not walking and asked the nuns if there were such things as ‘walkie pens’ in Ireland. Yes, replied St Clare’s, ‘we have walkie pens over here, but they are expensive, so are more or less beyond us, but we do have one. They are grand for teaching babies to walk’. Next time they wrote, the Rowes enclosed $20 – with the purchasing power of almost €700 in today’s money – enough to buy any number of ‘walkie pens’.

Although subsequent letters rarely mentioned money, Maureen was to learn from her father Jim in the years ahead that he and Dorothy sent fairly regular donations to the nuns in Ireland. He mentioned sums of $50 and more – not vast amounts to the Rowes, but a fortune to the nuns and equivalent to €1,725 today. Maureen believed her adoptive parents had been made aware of the nuns’ expectations in this regard before she arrived in the United States. Certainly someone had told the Rowes that the nuns’ account was at the Munster and Leinster Bank, a detail that was never mentioned once in any of the letters from St Clare’s. ‘Well basically,’ Maureen said, ‘from talking to my father, they had given donations up to a certain amount a year. I think it was an unspoken understanding. They would always give money. He sent it to the nuns, mailed cheques to them as a gift. He said it wasn’t that much but it was over many years. You know he had a good job as an engineer, they had a nice home. Money wasn’t a problem.’

As late as September 1966, by which time Maureen was over six years old, St Clare’s Adoption Society was writing to the Rowes asking for money, from them or any of their friends, to help ‘build a new wing for all our little darlings’. The sisters told them ‘we pray for our benefactors every day’. This was the sort of request Mr Rowe would have responded to with generosity. ‘He’s that kind of person,’ Maureen said, ‘very generous financially’. Her adoptive parents, she said, imagined that Ireland was an impoverished third-world country and that by sending money they were helping keep babies alive who might otherwise not survive. What was more, she said, ‘they were both over 40 years of age. If they hadn’t got a child from outside America, adoption would have been closed to them, so they were very, very grateful.’

And there were further expenses in America too, including Maureen’s legal adoption and naturalisation. After a compulsory probationary adoption period, the application for full adoption was drawn up in the summer of 1961, a service for which the Rowes’ lawyers sent a $150 bill (€5,175 in today’s money). Another bill followed – equivalent to €480 today – from an Irish lawyer who had obtained the consent of Maureen’s natural mother to the adoption. Finally, on 13 December 1961, Judge Maximillian Moss, presiding over the Surrogate’s Court in the Civic Centre of King’s County, Brooklyn, approved the adoption and officially sanctioned the change of name.

The only outstanding legal matter was to have Maureen made an American citizen through an application for naturalisation. The Rowes had to appear before a naturalisation examiner (cost $10, equivalent today to €350), and then a judge to answer another series of questions. ‘Had they recently divorced or committed adultery?’ ‘Committed crimes?’ ‘Become prostitutes, drug addicts, communists or pacifists?’ One can only wonder at Maureen’s fate had the answer to any of these questions been yes. As it was, their petition was granted. Maureen Rowe, blonde, blue-eyed, three feet seven and a half inches tall, weighing 40 pounds and very nearly five years old, was ‘admitted as a citizen of the United States of America’.

The Rowes’ adoption experience differed in no significant way from that of most American couples adopting from Ireland in those years. The key factor, common to all, was that children were being adopted sight unseen while the motives of the adopters were barely interrogated. It was strictly adoption by mail-order, the system that had been sharply criticised in 1958 – just two years before Maureen was dispatched to the US – by two of America’s leading child-protection bodies: International Social Service and the Child Welfare League of America. But their calls for a change in the law to prevent what they called ‘proxy’ adoptions had fallen on deaf ears. Maureen Rowe may have escaped the worst consequences of such a system as described by the ISS and CWLA, but, as we shall see, her life as an adopted child was far from the idyll imagined by the nuns back in Ireland.

11. Pat: Against My Will

‘Someone always made a run for it, but they were caught and dragged back... I suppose it was like a prison.’

Patricia Thuillier, 1996

When the story of Ireland’s baby-export business first emerged in 1996, Patricia Thuillier was in her 50s. With her family grown, she lived with her husband in a well-presented terraced house in one of Dublin’s post-war suburban estates, and worked as a nurse with children with intellectual disability. To anyone who didn’t know her, Pat would have appeared unexceptional, outwardly busy and confident. But for 34 years Pat’s life revolved around a pitiful and destructive lie.
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In 1962 Pat had become a single mother. In 1964 her baby boy had been sent to America for adoption. Shortly afterwards Pat married and had four more children. But she never told her husband or any of their children about the first baby. It remained a secret, buried deep inside her. Only when the story of the American adoptions began to unfold, almost three and a half decades after she had had her first child, did Pat tell her husband. ‘We were watching a programme on television about those babies when my husband said how awful it was for the poor women. I don’t know where it came from, I just said it: “I’m one of those women. I had a baby.” It was very emotional. He asked why I hadn’t told him all the years we were married, but I just couldn’t. I was so ashamed and so afraid of what people would think of me, what sort of a person was I at all? I dreaded rejection.’

Pat’s fears of contempt and rebuff had governed her life for 34 years, and her anxieties were well-grounded in experience – not with her husband but with the nuns. In fact, Pat’s husband was totally supportive. He told her that any son of hers was his son too. He couldn’t agree to her request not to tell their (adult) children, and when he did tell them they all rallied round as well. But they weren’t just considerate and understanding. They were angry. Angry at the way their mother had been treated all those years ago; angry at the awful hurt and damage she had suffered as a result of 34 years of suppression and denial. Together, as a family, they set out to find their long-lost son and brother.