Dublin: Irish Authorities Must Help Trace Removed Babies - Sibling Urges: *UPDATED

*Thousands of Irish people "must have been" illegally adopted, with many taken out of the country, the Adoption Authority (A A I) has admitted.

The controversial claims clash with statements from the then children’s minister and now justice minister, Frances Fitzgerald, who told the Dáil last year that every adoption carried out by the State was legal.

Susan Lohan of the Adoption Rights Alliance said she was “astonished” the AAI revealed the figures, as her organisation has campaigned for years for an investigation into the alleged practice. No audit of adoption records held by the AAI, HSE or religious adoption agencies has ever being carried out.

Illegal adoptions arise in different ways, but one of the most controversial is when a child’s birth certificate falsely states that its adoptive parents are its birth parents. It’s believed this practice often followed the forced handover of children from unmarried mothers.

The AAI says there are two groups of illegally adopted people:

- Those who’ve been told they’re adopted, even though an official adoption process never took place.

- Those who wrongly believe they were born to their adoptive parents, as this is what their birth certificate states and what their families have told them.

“There must be many thousands out there, who in their positions might not know they are [not] adopted and their registration is illegal or irregular,” AAI chief executive Kiernan Gildea told the Dáil Committee on Health and Children last week.

Mr Gildea said some people who have contacted the National Contact Preference Register, which is used by adopted people and their birth parents to contact one another, are aware of their “irregular” status.

“We have 100 applications on the National Adoption Contact Preference Register (NACPR) for those people who are lucky enough to know they have a birth certificate but they were [not] adopted,” he said in response to a question from independent TD Clare Daly.

Speaking in the Dáil in November, Ms Fitzgerald said the Australian state apology on forced adoption was due to government policies at the time in that country, before stating that every adoption carried out by the Irish State has been legal. “All adoptions which the Irish State has been involved in since 1952 have been in line with this [Adoption Act 1952] and subsequent adoption legislation,” she said.

The minister also stated last year that illegal adoptions referred only to illegal birth registrations, which meant the State was not involved as no formal adoption took place.

Ms Lohan says falsified birth certificates are “the tip of the iceberg”. “Illegal birth registrations are a small part of the illegal adoptions that need to be investigated. We also need to examine those rendered illegal as the mother was under the age of consent, where surrender forms were signed before babies had reached the legal date of six weeks, where adoptions were signed off to couples who were not ordinarily resident in the State, and where signatures were routinely forged and consent not freely given.”

The Adoption Rights Alliance discussed the need for a broad interpretation of illegal adoptions with Minister for Children Charlie Flanagan, when they met him last week about the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation. Ms Lohan said he told them he wanted a “once and for all” investigation into all of the issues they brought to his attention.

She also warned if cases where children were handed over illegally can be proved, it could lead to an onslaught of legal actions.

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The Irish authorities must help the families of children who were sent to the United States for adoption to trace them, the daughter of one woman held in a Mother and Baby home in Ireland last night declared.

Helen Baker’s search for her half-brother, Oliver Cullen, began after her mother Margaret died three years ago, still missing the child taken from her a half-century before - her only memory a fading, treasured black-and-white photograph.

Last night, Baker was one of a small group to gather outside the Irish Embassy in London to demand that the Irish Government holds a proper investigation into Ireland’s Mother and Baby homes.

• Plea to include children ‘boarded out’ in mother and baby inquiry
• Mother-and-baby homes investigation decision within weeks
• More than 660 children died in Dublin home in seven years

Margaret Cullen’s journey to Sean Ross Abbey, Roscrea, CoTipperary, run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary, began in Rathvilly, Co Carlow in 1956, after she became pregnant.

“She had been the eldest of 10. Her family didn’t have any choice. The local priest told her that an example had had to be made of her,” Baker told The Irish Times.

Cullen’s resulting son, Oliver, was “taken away from her” and sent for adoption to the US when he was 4 and a half years old. “She was told never to try to track him down - that she would ruin his life if she did.”

Three years ago, her mother died, leading Baker to take up the effort to find the half-brother she has now known about for nearly two decades.

So far efforts to trace him have failed, since the Irish authorities have refused to give her any information because her mother died three years ago. “But he was my brother,” she said.

Following her time in Roscrea, Baker’s mother came to Cardiff and married quickly: “She craved stability, so that is why she did that, maybe not well. But she was happy with my stepfather.”

Her mother revealed her past when mother and daughter sat by her stepfather’s side when he was dying in hospital in 1995: “We spent a lot of time together then. She had always intended to tell me.
www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/government-must-help-trace-removed-babies-sibling-urges-1.1855450 

“I am glad that she did,” Baker commented, “but she felt that she could never try to find him because of what the nuns had drilled into her. It was just like the Philomena movie.”

After her son had been taken from her, Cullen had suffered a nervous breakdown and was treated with electric shock therapy in an Irish hospital, Baker added.

“I believed it caused her huge trauma. She lost part of her memory as a result of the treatment. All I have of my brother is a photograph of him taken by the nuns when he was about three or so.