Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business (7 page)

The issuing of the passport in London was a cause of deep embarrassment because it could have been interpreted as condoning, encouraging, and even committing a criminal offence under a law that was designed to protect the interests of vulnerable children. Anyone guilty of assisting in the removal of a child for adoption abroad faced up to six months in prison and a £50 fine, a substantial amount in the early 1950s – around €4,800 today.

As the scandal unfolded, the British authorities came under pressure to explain how a wealthy and flamboyant Hollywood actress could so easily procure a child in broad daylight, as it were, and in the middle of London. The British police even followed Tommy’s father, Michael Snr, around London – surreptitiously but fruitlessly – to see if he would collect money from Jane Russell’s agents in return for his son. By contrast, the only question asked of Frank Aiken, Minister for External Affairs in the Irish Parliament concerned whether he seen the newspaper reports, and ‘what precautions were taken to protect the religious life of the infant?’
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The questioner was Waterford Labour TD and future party chairman Tom Kyne, and his curious question was no doubt prompted by the fact that Russell was a devout and practising Protestant while Tommy Kavanagh was, by birth if not by choice, a Catholic.

Aiken sidestepped the religious issue but did tell the Dáil that newspaper reports of the case ‘were not correct in stating that the passport was granted to enable the child to be adopted in the United States.’ It had been granted, he said, so the child could go to America on holiday with his new friend, Jane Russell. But Aiken knew the explanation he had given was a fiction, and if opposition deputies had known the full background to the case they might have accused the Minister of deliberately misleading the Dáil.

A detailed memo had been prepared for Mr Aiken before he answered Kyne’s question.
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It gave the complete background to the case, from the point of view of the passport staff in the Irish embassy in London. In so doing it left no doubt at all that Tommy Kavanagh was given a passport so he could travel to the States to be adopted. Had this come out, of course, it could have caused a diplomatic incident and could have led to the prosecution of Irish embassy staff.

On 5 November 1951, the day before the passport was issued, one of Russell’s London agents, George Routledge, telephoned the Irish embassy in London to enquire about passport regulations. In the course of his conversation with embassy staff Routledge referred to Russell’s intention of adopting an Irish child – an intention that had been widely reported in the newspapers, including
The Irish Times.
The consular staff explained the legal position to Routledge – it would be unlawful to remove an Irish child from the UK for adoption in the US. On the next day, Routledge came in person to the embassy along with Michael Kavanagh, Tommy’s father. They completed the application form, giving ‘holiday’ as the reason for the child’s visit to America. They were issued there and then with a passport for the infant.

Although the application form made no mention of adoption, the Irish officials clearly knew this was the real intention behind the request for a passport, and just two days after the passport was issued, the embassy telexed the Department of External Affairs in Dublin to inform them that ‘a passport had been granted to enable an Irish child to travel abroad for adoption.’ The telex didn’t name the child or the adopters, but when Dublin asked for particulars, the embassy replied that the passport had been for the child in ‘the Jane Russell baby case’.

This exchange of correspondence was quoted in the memo to Frank Aiken, to inform him fully of the position before he spoke in the Dáil. It made it absolutely clear the embassy staff in London knew Tommy Kavanagh was to be taken to America for adoption, regardless of what was said on the passport application about a ‘holiday’. Officials in the Department of External Affairs were also very clear on the significance of the deception. Had it been ‘admitted that adoption was contemplated’, an internal memo noted with considerable emphasis,
‘ourpassport officer would be liable for 6 months!!’
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The Irish denial of culpability was helped a little when the British Home Secretary, Maxwell Fyfe, in reply to questions in the British Parliament, repeated the formula that Mr and Mrs Kavanagh had officially consented only to Tommy travelling to America for a three-month holiday, not for adoption.
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But the British authorities later showed that they themselves were not convinced when they charged the Kavanaghs with the offence of ‘unlawfully permitting the care and possession of the said infant to be transferred to one Jane Russell Waterfield, a person resident abroad, namely in the United States of America.’
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The Irish authorities were also clearly unconvinced by their own public pronouncements. Just the day before Aiken spoke in the Dáil, instructions were rushed to Irish embassies and legations around the world that no passports were to be issued to children under the age of 18 without prior clearance from the head of mission. It was an exces- sive measure if all they were concerned with was Irish children having innocent holidays abroad with friends approved by their parents.

Back in Hollywood, Jane Russell soon let it be known that she had every intention of adopting Tommy Kavanagh, once the ‘fuss’ had died down.
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But when the Kavanaghs were subsequently brought before the courts, they were reported as accusing Jane Russell of ‘keeping in the background’ while they took all the blame.
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The Kavanaghs pleaded guilty at Bow Street Court and were each given a twelve month conditional discharge. As they left the court they were jeered and jostled by a hostile crowd. They had told the court they received photographs and regular letters from Russell, and when the Magistrate read these he remarked that Russell ‘must be a very very nice woman’. Eventually the adoption went ahead.

In fact, Jane Russell’s interest in adoption went far beyond Tommy Kavanagh. With her American-football star husband, Robert Waterfield, Russell set up a full-scale professional adoption service – WAIF – which subsequently handled around 40,000 American adoptions.
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But Russell’s activities were not always welcomed by Catholic agencies in America. The National Catholic Welfare Conference, which handled scores of requests from Americans looking for Irish babies to adopt, wrote to Archbishop McQuaid’s adoption advisor, Father Cecil Barrett, in 1958 warning him that ‘there will be trouble’ should Ms Russell and her associates ‘engage in bringing over Catholic orphans’ from Ireland, for despite their claims to be ‘non-sectarian’, they were in fact connected to the Young Women’s Christian Association – a wholly Protestant outfit.
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The Russell/Kavanagh affair also had a more immediate sequel when a mass-circulation German evening newspaper,
8 Uhr Blatt,
published a long article on December 13, 1951 under the heading ‘1,000 children disappear from Ireland’.

‘A wave of resentment sweeps Ireland at present,’ the paper stated, ‘after American film-star Jane Russell flew to the USA with 16-month old Tommy Kavanagh, because she wanted so much to have a child.’ The case simply highlighted ‘a regular export in children to the USA’ which had reached such a pitch, the paper said, that the government in Dublin was planning a new law ‘to put an end to the traffic’.

An Irish child welfare organisation was quoted by the German paper as saying that Ireland ‘has become a sort of hunting ground today for foreign millionaires who believe they can acquire children to suit their whims just in the same way as they could get valuable pedigree animals. In the last few months more than one hundred children have left Ireland without any official organisation being in a position to make any enquiries as to their future habitat.’

The article quoted examples of children being sent to the USA with no further news of what became of them. It claimed that ‘altogether almost a thousand children have been taken abroad from the Green Isle during the course of the past year.’ And with 80,000 couples queuing up to adopt children in the United States, there was plenty of scope for this traffic to grow. But where demand outstripped supply to such an extent, people would inevitably pay to get a baby, thus ensuring ‘a regular black market’ in babies in the USA.

The German paper pointed out that baby-selling enterprises had recently been broken up in New York, Maryland and Massachusetts and the operators arrested. One lawyer alone had already sold 100 children at the lucrative rate of $3,000 apiece before he was caught. $300,000 in 1951 is the equivalent of a business with a turnover well in excess of €10m today

This was a hard-hitting article that made Ireland look like a pathetically backward Third World country where stray or unwanted children could be acquired at will. Not surprisingly, the
Chargé d’Affaires
at the Irish legation in Bonn, Aedan O’Beirne, read the
8 Uhr Blatt
article – which he described as ‘sordid’ – with a growing sense of anger. His immediate reaction was to seek permission from the secretary of the Department of External Affairs to demand of the paper’s editor that he ‘publish a rebuttal of the story’.
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O’Beirne’s request for ‘speedy counter action’ was circulated among senior officials in Dublin, but the unanimous view there was that no action should or could be taken. As one official noted: ‘No action is required, especially as the article is largely correct.’
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Joe Horan replied to O’Beirne by saying they could only demand a rebuttal if they could ‘put matters in truer perspective’. This they were unable to do, Horan pointed out, for the article was ‘largely not incorrect.’ It was better to say nothing at all since to complain would be to attract ‘more adverse publicity’.
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This was an astonishing admission by a very senior Irish State official that the American adoption business was riddled with uncertainty, to put it at its mildest. The only fact that was disputed was the figure of 1,000 children exported to the US in the course of a year. This was far in excess of
The Irish Times’
estimate of ‘500 plus’ for the first nine months of 1951
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and completely out of line with the official figure of 122 ‘adoption passports’ for the whole year. But Horan seemed to accept that the number of children exported from Ireland exceeded the official tally to a considerable degree.

Joe Horan was the civil servant with the greatest hands- on experience of the American adoption scene. All passport applications passed through his hands. Not surprisingly, he was well aware of the realities of adoption in the American context, and when he said that such a damning article was ‘largely not incorrect’, he knew what he was talking about. Horan had serious reservations about the effectiveness of official controls. The Department, he noted, was only aware of adoption cases where intending adopters actually applied for passports for the children they wanted but, as he pointed out, they did not need a passport to get the child out of Ireland. ‘Once they have the child,’ Horan wrote, ‘there is nothing to stop them getting on the boat at Dun Laoghaire or the plane at Collinstown’ and going first to Britain.
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Once they were out of the Irish jurisdiction, the authorities in Dublin would simply lose track of them. International travel without a valid passport was no easy matter of course, but there was a black market in forged and stolen passports. What was more, American embassies around the world had the authority, under US federal law, to issue entry visas to people without passports, and that included babies and children. The main requirement for getting a visa for a child was simply that the American ‘sponsor’ gave an undertaking that the child would not become a ‘public charge’ after entering the United States. But as the ever-perceptive Joe Horan noted, ‘such an undertaking is worthless since... there is no danger that such a child would become a public charge after entering the United States; it would simply be sold to another couple.’
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Knowing what he did about the loopholes in the official system, it was little wonder Horan felt unable, in honesty, to refute newspaper claims that there was a significant black-market trade going on in Irish babies.

As much as a year before the Jane Russell case, Horan had expressed his deep-seated fears about this ‘veritable trade in orphans’. ‘There is a market for children in the USA,’ Horan wrote. It flourished because ‘demand exceeds supply,’ and as a result, ‘there are in some states shady institutions known as “baby farms” which specialise in collecting children and giving them to adopting parents for a consideration’. There was an obvious concern that Irish children might be procured by these baby farms since among certain Americans, Horan noted, Ireland ‘enjoys quite a reputation... as a place where one can get children for adoption without much difficulty.’
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In further writings, Horan again drew attention to the ‘many private institutions’ in America that ‘do a business in children for adoption,’ and he described Ireland as ‘a happy hunting ground’ for people looking for children – the same phrase used by the German paper,
8 Uhr Blatt
.
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Following the outcry surrounding the Jane Russell case, and clearly worried by the amount of media attention it attracted, Horan again recorded his concerns about dispatching children to America. ‘Supposing it happened,’ he wrote, ‘that the child was surrendered to persons who, on arrival in the USA, proceeded to sell it off to the highest bidder, with consequent press publicity etc. It is we who would be held responsible as it is we who would have to answer parliamentary questions, face a press campaign here, and so on.’
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This overwhelming concern with adverse publicity was reflected in another of Horan’s revealing papers. ‘One always has the horrible fear,’ he wrote, ‘that some of the proposed adopters may wish to get their hands on a child for the purpose of making money by selling it to another couple anxious to adopt a child... with for us, all sorts of undesirable prospects such as letters to the newspapers, parliamentary questions and so on. We must be alive to the possibility that the name of this country might one day figure in one of those “exposures” they have from time to time in the USA.’
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The fate of the children seemed of much less concern than the prospect of ‘bad publicity’.