Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business (27 page)

On the discovery of the individual records in the National Archive, Caitriona Crowe proposed privately to the Department of Foreign Affairs that essential information be made available, on a confidential basis, to Barnardos, so they could assist and counsel natural mothers who were looking for their now grown children as well as children who were looking for their mothers. The Department of Foreign Affairs, however, said no. Instead of putting the information into the hands of those who could have used it, the Department decided to take legal advice on issues of confidentiality and the right to privacy of those involved. Such a course of action, obviously, could tie the whole thing in knots for the foreseeable future. The matter was put in the hands of Austin Currie to resolve. It was an inauspicious beginning.

In the meantime, Dick Spring, Tanaiste and Minster for Foreign Affairs, decided to go public on the existence of the records. As chance would have it, Spring had a fitting engagement: the very day after the files were found he was due to speak in Waterford on the theme of ‘Creating a better world for our children’. It was here he unveiled the discovery of the first batch of children’s files, announcing, ‘... there are up to 1,500 detailed adoption files, which... contain the names and dates of birth of the children concerned, the names of their birth mothers, the names and details of their adoptive parents ...’ It was a potential treasure trove of information.

Spring also revealed details of some of the policy documents, including ones indicating the close involvement of Archbishop McQuaid back in the early 1950s. For the first time it became clear that this whole business had been organised and operated by the religious, under John Charles McQuaid’s intense sectarian gaze. Then, on the same day as the State opened its own policy files, the Archdiocese of Dublin decided to open a small file of documents and correspondence relating to the American adoptions from McQuaid’s archive. It was the first time any of McQuaid’s voluminous papers had come into the public domain.

Dick Spring seemed to have read the public mood more accurately than Austin Currie. His Waterford speech was the first acknowledgement by anyone in authority that a lot of hurt and damage had been done. Spring was critical of the practices of 40 years ago when so many babies were ‘removed from their young and frightened mothers at the most vulnerable possible time in the life of these mothers,’ and sent off, ‘hopefully to a better life, but at what cost in human suffering we may never know.’

‘We have no way of knowing who suffered most in these situations,’ Spring went on, ‘and we hope that the children involved, at least, went on to have happy and fulfilled lives with their new adoptive parents. But we know from at least some of the stories that that wasn’t always true, and that some of these children have spent many years trying to find out why they were abandoned, as they saw it.’ And outlining the practice of compelling young mothers to sign away all rights forever to their children, Spring said, ‘one can only imagine the pain that must have been involved.’
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Spring’s revelations of a large-scale, highly organised baby traffic, spanning almost three decades, and his acknowledgement of the pain and suffering that resulted from it, set a new tone. A few days later, on 9 March, Austin Currie told RTÉ news, ‘All I can say is that our hypocritical past is catching up with us, and a lot of things are now being revealed that were very carefully hidden in the past. The extent of human misery is now being exposed.’ It was a complete reversal of Currie’s defensive and insensitive Dáil speech of just four days earlier.

The newspapers reflected the growing sense of anger in the community at large. ‘Banished children of Erin’ ran one headline.
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‘Ghosts of our hidden history return,’ said another.
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‘Stark days of revelation’ was the heading over an
Irish Times
editorial. The writer was in sombre mood: ‘When the social history of our times is written, the early months of 1996 will figure as a period of stark revelation, a final drawing away of the veils from a darker, hidden Ireland. These days and weeks have marked a convergence of suppressed grief, of buried secrets and of enduring pain.’
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Another journalist waxed more lyrical, writing that ‘every dog-eared file is a small conspiracy of officially-sanctioned dishonesty... a pocket sized slip of shoddy contemporary history.’
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Spring had another opportunity to flesh out the story when he had to reply to questions in the Dáil on 14 March 1996. On this occasion Spring named the Irish adoption societies that had been involved and revealed the role played by a powerful American religious body, Catholic Charities. But he also conveyed two incorrect impressions about the role played by the Irish State.
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First of all he described the nuns who sent children abroad as their ‘legal guardians’, implying that the courts had conferred some legal status on the nuns and that everything had therefore been done perfectly properly. But the nuns rarely, if ever, went to the trouble or the expense of having themselves appointed legal guardians to the children in their care. The legal basis on which a great many children were dispatched overseas was, and remains, far from clear. Mr Spring also told the Dáil that his Department had required each branch of Catholic Charities, who handled most of the Irish adoptions at the American end, to be ‘approved as a child placing agency under the law’. What he did not say was that this elementary safeguard was only introduced in 1956 by which time over 1,000 children had already been sent to the States and placed for adoption.

The effect of Spring’s remarks was to reassure the House and the public that even if what happened in the past was regrettable it was all done in accordance with law and proper procedures. As this book has been at pains to show, this was far from accurate. No one knows how many Irish infants were dispatched to unsuitable adopters, or how many couples who had been refused an American child to adopt still managed to get one from Ireland. But the files from Dick Spring’s own Department certainly suggest that the numbers in these categories were significant. Finally, no mention at all was made in the Dáil about the murkier dealings in babies, the black market that operated widely in Ireland in the 1950s and 60s, a black market that is also clearly acknowledged in the official files. The full story hadn’t even begun to emerge.

Yet, as far as the State was concerned, the only unresolved matter was what to do with all the personal files and the information they contained. Again, in this regard Dick Spring’s remarks may have misled some. He told the Dáil that he hoped ‘a way will be found to make the information available to the people concerned’. To the hundreds of adopted people who were trying to trace their roots in Ireland, and to the smaller but not insignificant number of natural mothers looking for their children in America, this sounded like the answer to their prayers. But, as we shall see, it turned out to be nothing of the sort. And in the meantime, the first port of call for adopted people coming in search of their mothers was the adoption society that arranged their adoption in the first place. For many, if not most, this proved a deeply frustrating experience.

The nuns who ran these societies would tell anyone seeking to trace their natural mother that a definite ‘guarantee of confidentiality’ was given to these unmarried girls and women when they turned to the nuns with their crisis pregnancies. These undertakings, they argued, had to be kept – in the same way as a binding contract must be adhered to. But there was never any legislative requirement to give such guarantees, and no documentary evidence of their existence – either across the board or in individual cases – has ever been produced. What is more, it is stretching things to describe the relationship between nuns and the unmarried mothers they dealt with as a ‘contract’. Even if something loosely resembling a contract or agreement was reached, the process was carried out from very unequal positions, to the extent that the nuns were effectively in a position to demand anything they wanted, and the shamed and humiliated mothers had little option but to accept the nuns’ terms, however unreasonable, and however inadequately understood those terms might have been. Secrecy – which would seriously damage the health of many of these women – was itself a function of conservative Catholicism.

While the nuns’ assertion that a binding guarantee of confidentiality was given to every unmarried mother in their care remains unsupported by documentation of any kind, what written records there are from the period tell a very different story: when an unmarried woman was offered confidentiality it was never absolute. Father Cecil Barrett was the Catholic Church’s foremost expert on adoption policy in Ireland throughout the period in question, and in his eyes the need for secrecy was part of the programme of moral rehabilitation and nothing else. Barrett held that ‘professional secrets’ of the sort that existed between the nuns and unmarried mothers were ‘the most binding of all,’ but still far from binding in all circumstances. They could be broken, Barrett argued, if for example ‘an unmarried mother was about to cause grave spiritual harm to her child’ – a coded way of referring to the danger of her handing the child over to a Protestant. The ‘professional secret’ could also be broken to ‘save’ the mother from moral harm, if for example she proposed continuing an unmarried relationship with the child’s father.

In Barrett’s book – and there was no other – an unmarried mother’s secret could be divulged to protect the interests of the church and faith. Regardless of the social and personal consequences for the woman, and regardless of any promises of confidentiality that may have been made to her, there was no binding contract.
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And there is no reason to believe the nuns held views contrary to Cecil Barrett’s.

Interestingly, Barrett had nothing whatever to say about the status of the mother’s privacy should her child, in later years, come seeking information about her. Such an event was unthinkable to Barrett and the nuns. No mother was ever offered guarantees in this respect. All the undertakings went in the other direction: that she would never try to see or make contact with her child.

When viewed this way, it seems safe to say that the secrecy ordered by nuns to shroud an unmarried mother’s ‘sin’ was not imposed primarily for her benefit at all. Secrecy was part of the nuns’ control agenda, not a service offered out of kindness to the unfortunate women caught up in the Church’s regime of suppression and deceit. At a wider level, too, it could be seen as a device that enabled Irish society at large to sustain the myth of pre-marital chastity, so important in denying women control over their own sexuality. Pretending that women did not become pregnant outside marriage was one way of denying that women could enjoy sexual relationships with men who were not their husbands.

But while the adoption societies continued to frustrate adopted people searching for their identity, what of the State’s undertakings in 1996 to do everything it could to help?

Gene Autry – one of the babies whose birth at St Rita’s nursing home and subsequent illegal handover to an American military couple had been the subject of a major Garda investigation in 1954 – had extensive dealings with the Department of Foreign Affairs in this period. Gene, whose story was told in Chapter 5, had only discovered in 1997 – when he was already 44 years old – that he had been adopted from Ireland. But when he turned to the Department of Foreign Affairs for help in tracing his natural mother, he was politely told that as his file was now in the National Archive, and as the National Archive Act of 1986 forbade the release of personal information that might cause distress to another living person, there was nothing they could do for him. The official writing this, of course, had no knowledge of whether Gene’s natural mother was alive or not, but it was the standard response to everyone in Gene’s position. Certainly the Department made no effort to discover his mother’s current status, nor, if she were alive, would it try to contact her and ask if her name and address could be passed to her son. The very least the Department could have done was see that the official, public birth record was corrected and that Gene’s natural mother’s name replaced that of Mr and Mrs Autry on his birth certificate – as the law required. That way they could have enabled him to find his mother’s name without breaching the terms of the National Archive Act, if that was what really concerned them. But instead, Gene was given what was considered ‘non-identifying’ information from his file – much of which was simply incorrect and quite misleading. There is no reason to believe this was done with the intention of confusing him, but it does indicate that those in possession of information vital to Gene’s search for his origins were, to put it at its mildest, insensitive to the effect that their misleading advice might have. And of course Gene was just one among hundreds of people sent to America for adoption who were now knocking on the Department’s door, and there is no reason to suppose any of the others fared any better.

Gene was told at the outset that the file from the Garda investigation into his birth at St Rita’s was ‘restricted’ and could not be made available to him, yet this author obtained it on request from the National Archive. Gene was also told the ‘good news’ that Minister Austin Currie was setting up a contact register to help adopted people and their natural parents contact each other, should they so wish. He wasn’t told Currie had ruled out extending this to the American adoptions. The final piece of information that was provided to Gene Autry also proved unhelpful: the pre-1963 birth records from St Rita’s, he was told, were in the custody of the Eastern Health Board. But when he contacted the Eastern Health Board, they denied having them. But Gene never gave up trying, and finally he persuaded an official in the Department to tell him the first letter of his mother’s name, which was not in itself identifying information. The letter was T. With remarkable patience, Gene bided his time, returning some time later to see if anyone could tell him how many letters there were in his mother’s name. Another bit of luck: an official told him this time that there were seven letters. No doubt their intentions were humane, but the fact that they had to turn a very painful human dilemma into something akin to a crossword puzzle, so as not to be seen to be actually
helping,
just served to highlight how inadequate and outdated the law in this vital area is. Gene Autry was one of the lucky ones. Using the information he had gleaned from Department officials he was able to narrow his search down sufficiently to produce a positive result. In the end, he traced his natural mother and in the process discovered she had gone on to marry his father and between them they had produced seven more children – full brothers and sisters for Gene who now enjoys a close relationship with his extended family in Ireland – but with little thanks to officialdom.