Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business

by Mike Milotte

  When we add in the plight of the natural mothers who were left behind with their dark, destructive secrets and their numbing pain, it is easy to understand why this is a story Church and State would prefer had not been told.

  2. McQuaid’s Rules, OK?

  ‘We shall have to be careful not to do anything which would embarrass the Archbishop.’

  Department of External Affairs

  internal memo, 1950

  It was Eamon de Valera, self-styled father figure of the Irish nation, who opened Ireland up to America’s child- seekers. De Valera – who had himself been born in America to an unmarried mother – was not only Taoiseach when the baby exodus began, he was also Minister for External Affairs and, as such, responsible for issuing the first children’s ‘adoption passports’. Yet there is no record of de Valera’s thinking on the matter and no record either of how many passports were authorised in his name. What is clear, however, is that he took no steps to stop the departures, although, in an era when tens of thousands of Irish people were leaving the country in a desperate search for work and a decent life, it was his Government’s policy to stem the emigrant tide, not add to it. It was not until after the change of Government in 1948, when Sean MacBride, of the small, radical republican party Clann na Poblachta, was Minister for External Affairs in the country’s first inter-party Government, that steps were taken to regulate – but not stop – the practice of dispatching ‘illegitimate’ children to America.

  In the wake of the publicity given to the McDowell and Perry cases in the United States, demand there for Irish babies was rocketing. The McDowells themselves had been inundated with enquiries from other American couples wanting to know how they got their children.1 At the same time, various American Catholic welfare bodies were being bombarded with requests from childless couples across the States for assistance in obtaining Irish children. When the Perry story broke a few months after McDowell’s widely publicised coup, the Irish Consul in San Francisco, Patrick Hughes, wrote to the Department of External Affairs in Dublin seeking advice on the current law relating to such cases. He needed to know, he said, because ‘I receive many inquiries by callers, by telephone and by mail from persons who wish to adopt Irish children.’2

  This was the first time an Irish government department had been asked to explain its position regarding the American adoptions, and its reply to Hughes showed the matter had not provoked any deep thought. Hughes was told simply that as there was no law prohibiting the removal of Irish children from the State, the Department of External Affairs was prepared to issue passports to such children provided their mother or guardian had consented to their removal and that there was satisfactory evidence of the suitability of the would-be adopters.3 On the surface these may have seemed reasonable safeguards for both the natural mother and her child, but no one was really concerned about the circumstances in which the mothers – mostly young, vulnerable and frightened women – were ‘consenting’ to the permanent removal of their children from the State. This issue was never seriously addressed during the lifetime of the American adoptions. What was more, in the early years at least, there were no established criteria for determining the ‘suitability’ of applicants for Irish children. And these were certainly matters that should not have been left to civil servants who had no training or expertise in adoption matters and whose function was merely to issue passports, not make critical decisions affecting the future welfare of hundreds, if not thousands of infants and their mothers.

  From the very start the whole business had been handled in a haphazard manner, without thought or preparation, and without rules or regulations. And there was evidence that the civil servants who decided whether or not a child would be allowed to go abroad for adoption had little knowledge of adoption policy. In one case officials gave permission for a 57-year-old woman to take a two-year-old child abroad for adoption. In the many letters and memos generated by this particular application, the woman’s advanced age was never once mentioned as a negative factor even though it was generally accepted in adoption practice that 40 was the maximum age at which a woman should adopt a two-year-old.4

  Elsewhere, however, concern for the welfare of the infants in question was slowly beginning to surface. In December 1949, within weeks of the Perry case, Health Minister Dr Noel Browne expressed his ‘uneasiness’ to the Department of External Affairs over the growing number of foreign adoptions. As a member of Clann na Poblachta, Browne in effect was questioning his party leader, the Minister for External Affairs, Sean MacBride, in whose name the ‘adoption passports’ were now being issued. Browne had two principal concerns: first, that the applicants for Irish children ‘may be persons turned down as adopters in their own country’, and second, that ‘there is no means of knowing or ensuring that children placed in the care of applicants will be adopted legally in their new country or even that they will remain in the care of the original applicants’.5 The Minister for Health clearly feared that unsuitable people were obtaining Irish children with a view to trading them on, and given America’s notorious black market in babies, Browne’s fears were far from imaginary. His suspicion that people who had been rejected in the States were now getting children from Ireland was borne out when an American journalist, following up the Rollie McDowell story, casually informed the Department of External Affairs that American ‘rejectees’ were indeed turning to Ireland where they encountered no obstacles.6 The Department, however, does not appear to have responded in any way to the warning (which is precisely how it reacted when the same issue arose time after time in the future).

  Noel Browne, however, was not proposing that the export of Irish babies be halted. Rather he was urging that it be better regulated so as to safeguard the interests of the children involved. ‘The children so adopted are, in the main, illegitimate children with an uncertain future in this country,’ his officials wrote, and Dr Browne ‘would be diffident in suggesting that obstacles should be placed in the way of their acquiring a new permanent home.’ But would- be foreign adopters, Browne urged, ‘should be obliged to produce evidence of character, suitability and religion, supported by a recommendation from the Diplomatic Representative in this country.’7

  The Health Minister’s intervention was the first time anyone in authority in Ireland had asked questions about the safety and welfare of Irish infants who were being sent abroad in ever growing – but still unrecorded – numbers. Distressingly, the Department of External Affairs, which was facilitating the children’s removal, had no reply to give. Instead, the consular officials at Iveagh House asked their embassies in London and Washington what the British and American authorities did to protect Irish children once they had come to their countries for adoption. It looked very much like they were passing the buck.

  Noel Browne’s protestations had no immediate impact, and his officials were still pressing External Affairs for a response three months later – by which time another interested party, whose influence was greater than that of a mere cabinet minister, had begun to mobilise – the Catholic Church.

  *****

  The Reverend Robert Brown, assistant secretary of America’s largest non-governmental welfare organisation, the National Conference of Catholic Charities, was an extremely busy man. He had to keep an eye on a sprawling network of local agencies, all linked under the Catholic Charities umbrella, but each one working independently of the organisation’s Washington head office. Brown’s boss was an Irishman, Monsignor John O’Grady, a native of Roscrea in County Tipperary, where his sister was a nun. After 30 years of involvement with Catholic Charities, O’Grady was now the organisation’s national secretary. He was to play a critical role in the transatlantic adoption business over the next number of years.

  O’Grady and Brown were becoming concerned with the ever-growing number of enquiries to local Catholic Charities branches about how to get a baby from Ireland. Each story that appeared in the newspapers about another American couple’s acquisition of an Irish ‘orph
an’ simply encouraged more and more childless American couples to come knocking on their door.

  Although overworked already, Brown decided to make some enquiries of his own, and on 8 March 1950 he wrote an anxious letter to the St Vincent de Paul Society in Dublin, drawing its attention to the American newspaper articles. The Rev Brown was worried at the apparent lack of regulation in the growing baby export trade, and what concerned him most of all was the danger of Catholic Irish children falling into the hands of non-Catholic American adopters. Brown elaborated on his concerns. He knew of one woman, he said, a non-Catholic who had received a letter from an Irish nun saying she would be ‘very glad to send her a baby’. Although the woman’s husband was a Catholic, Brown went on, they had married outside the Church. ‘One of the basic concerns should certainly be to preserve the faith of these youngsters’, Father Brown concluded. He offered the collaboration of Catholic Charities ‘in any way possible to this end’.8 With this letter, Brown had set the pattern for all future interventions by both Church and State: religion came first.

  As they had no experience in this area, the Society of St Vincent de Paul forwarded Brown’s letter to Father Cecil Barrett, head of the Catholic Social Welfare Bureau in Dublin. The CSWB was an organisation set up by Archbishop McQuaid in the mid-1940s to provide for the welfare of Catholics, and Barrett was the acknowledged clerical expert on child fostering and adoption. He was also head of the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society (CPRS), a militant anti-proselytising organisation that spent much of its time bringing Catholic ‘Pregnant From Ireland’ young women back from England in an effort to ensure their babies did not fall into non-Catholic hands. In its annual report for 1950, the CPRS noted that many of the children that it had ‘taken over’ in the preceding year ‘were in grave danger of being handed over to Protestants’. This was precisely the thinking that shaped the Church’s attitude to the American adoptions as well: it was better that Irish children be dispatched to Catholic couples thousands of miles across the Atlantic – even if their suitability as adoptive parents could not always be guaranteed – than that they fall into the hands of Protestants closer to home.

  Before advising St Vincent de Paul on how to reply to Father Brown in America, Cecil Barrett took the precaution of consulting Archbishop McQuaid’s secretary, Father Chris Mangan. It was as well he did, for when McQuaid heard of what was happening, and of the danger that non- Catholics could acquire Catholic infants, he ordered that no more babies be sent to America until all the circumstances were fully investigated.9

  At the time, children were being taken or sent to America from religious-run institutions all around the country. McQuaid’s writ, however, did not extend beyond the two religious-run agencies that came within his Dublin diocese – St Patrick’s Guild in Abbey Street and St Patrick’s Home on the Navan Road. Provincial homes that were actively sending babies to America, such as those run by the Sacred Heart Sisters in Castlepollard, Roscrea and Cork, were unaffected by the McQuaid ban. Over the years the Roscrea nuns sent around 450 children, those at Castlepol- lard 300, and the nuns in Cork, 100. But, as the Dublin ban took effect, Father Brown was informed that the ‘problem’ was under investigation and reassured that the clerical authorities in Ireland ‘would not be a party to any arrangements unless we were assured of the absolute preservation of the faith of the children involved’.10

  McQuaid’s instant and firm response once the matter of faith was called into question threw into even sharper relief the State’s dithering when Health Minister Noel Browne had raised his concerns about the legal status and general welfare of departing children. While the State abdicated responsibility, the Church was gaining the upper hand and in the future would be calling all the shots. What was more, this seemed to be the outcome desired by the Department of External Affairs. A senior official in the Department told the departmental secretary that he had not dealt with Dr Browne’s query, several months after receiving it, ‘because... I am not aware whether the Archbishop has yet arrived at any policy’.11 A vital matter concerning child welfare had been put on hold until the Archbishop made his position clear.

  McQuaid’s insistence that the removal of babies be halted until matters of faith could be guaranteed was relayed immediately to Sister Frances Elizabeth, head of St Patrick’s Guild, and to Sister Monica Farrelly, in charge at St Patrick’s Home. Despite their similar names, these institutions were quite distinct. St Patrick’s Home on the Navan Road – known as St Pat’s – was run by the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul. It was a home where unmarried women lived before and after their babies were born. It came under the Dublin Board of Assistance and was maintained on the Dublin rates. It took in single women from all over the country, and it was known as the only home of its kind that would take in a woman who became pregnant out of marriage a second time – ‘second offenders’ as Cecil Barrett labelled them.12 Nuns elsewhere simply turned such women away. But St Pat’s also had a reputation for exceptional harshness towards the ‘offenders’. In total, St Pat’s sent more than 250 children to the United States.

  St Patrick’s Guild, on the other hand – with offices at Middle Abbey Street in Dublin – was run by the Irish Sisters of Charity. By comparison with St Pat’s, it had little direct contact with the mothers of the children it dealt with. It was not a mother and children’s home as such but a fostering, and later an adoption, society, connected with the infants’ home at Temple Hill in Blackrock, the source of most of the children it sent to America. Temple Hill, in turn, took in babies that had been born elsewhere. It did not take their mothers. The Guild had been founded in 1910 by Miss Mary Cruice, who wanted to provide the first Catholic alternative to Dublin’s Protestant fostering services. Later Miss Cruice linked up with the Sisters of Charity and in 1942 the Guild was placed ‘under Diocesan control subject to such conditions as His Grace the Archbishop of Dublin may approve’. The Sisters of Charity were by then in day-to-day control and were to the forefront in organising the dispatch of babies to America. The Guild sent its first ‘illegitimate’ child to the States for adoption on 18 November 1947.13 By 1950 it had sent 57 children and before it ended the practice in 1967 the Guild had dispatched a total of 572 infants across the Atlantic, more than any other single adoption society.14

  This was how Sister Frances Elizabeth, the nun in charge of St Patrick’s Guild, described one of the children in her care to an American couple who were hoping to adopt him, sight unseen:

  ‘All our children are born out of wedlock of respectable parents and no child is given for adoption unless the background is excellent. Anthony has a particularly good background… His mother was a very superior type of girl. She lived at home with her people. The family are very respectable. They know nothing of her misfortune. It is because of Anthony’s excellent background that we are anxious to get a good home for him. He is a very gentle lovable little boy. He has made his First Communion and is getting on very nicely at school. He is perfectly healthy. We are enclosing a little snap of him. He has fair hair, blue eyes and reflects the gentleness and culture of his mother.’15

  This seems typical of the sort of information that was made available to adopting Americans – minimal, non-specific and of little real value, if not totally inadequate, as the basis of any adoption. The couple in this case were told that if they did not accept the child immediately he would be offered elsewhere. They accepted. The whole business, from first postal enquiry to dispatch of child, was completed within two months.

  This was the sort of rapid-fire adoption that archbishop McQuaid wanted to bring under control – and Sister Frances Elizabeth was none too pleased at the Archbishop’s letter enforcing a no-warning ban on her entire operation. She penned a frantic letter in reply to the Archbishop. ‘We have seven adoptions already arranged for the USA,’ she wrote. ‘Three of the children have been issued with visas and four have their passports. All transport has been arranged. In one case the adopter is on his way over to take
the baby back with him. One of these intending adopters is a personal friend of His Eminence, Cardinal Spellman and His Lordship, Dr O’Leary, both of whom have recommended him.’ She went on: ‘I beg His Grace to allow us to send these little children. It would be such a bitter blow to the adopters to be denied their little child just when their hopes were about to be realised. Also, I would be very grateful if you would advise me what to say to the many others whose applications I have already received. All are vouched for as excellent Catholics and they have beautiful homes.’16

  Even in 1950, being the friend of a Cardinal, an excellent Catholic, and having a beautiful home could not have been considered even remotely adequate qualifications for adopting a child, yet the Archbishop agreed that Sister Frances Elizabeth’s seven adoptions could go ahead once he had sight of legal agreements signed by the prospective adopters ‘to the effect that they undertake to rear the children in the Catholic faith’. When the transatlantic adoptions eventually recommenced, this was to be the fundamental condition applied to all applicants, and in these cases it seems to have been sufficient for the Department of External Affairs to issue passports. Sister Frances was also told there was to be no publicity for any of these adoptions and that she must make no more arrangements until permitted to do so by the Archbishop.17