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

by Mike Milotte

  The placement of Irish children in Brooklyn was not always satisfactory. The fact that there were problems was first revealed in May 1954 – by which time 700 children in total had already been officially shipped out from Ireland to the States. Sister Mary Augusta, director of adoption services at the Angel Guardian Home, wrote with her concerns to the three head nuns at Sean Ross Abbey in Tipperary, St Patrick’s Home in Dublin, and Castlepollard in Westmeath. These three adoption societies, together with St Patrick’s Guild in Dublin, St Clare’s in Stamullen, County Meath, and the Sacred Heart adoption society in Cork, were responsible for most of the children sent to America. Sister Mary Augusta in Brooklyn told the sisters in Ireland that because of overworking and understaffing the Angel Guardian home was having difficulty in adequately vetting Catholic American couples who wanted to adopt Irish babies. Consequently they were now giving priority to placing their own, American orphans. Sister Mary Augusta also pointed out, ominously, that would-be American adopters who had already been ‘rejected for serious reasons’ by Catholic Charities were now turning directly to the Irish adoption societies for their babies.1

  The Department of External Affairs had been alerted to this danger as early as 1949 by the then Health Minister, Dr Noel Browne, and had received confirmation from an American journalist the following year that people deemed unsuitable as adoptive parents in the US were obtaining children from Ireland. But when someone with Sister Mary Augusta’s direct knowledge spoke about it, it was clear that the deep-seated cracks – that until now had remained largely hidden – were at last reaching the surface of the official baby export system. Within nine months of Sister Mary Augusta’s first warning, the Brooklyn Director of Catholic Charities, Monsignor J.J. Reddy, acknowledged in a letter to Father Cecil Barrett, head of Archbishop

  McQuaid’s Social Welfare Bureau in Dublin, that the problems were now ‘acute’. The Angel Guardian Home, he admitted, simply wasn’t up to the job of properly assessing would-be adoptive parents. It just didn’t have sufficient qualified staff. As a result, Brooklyn Catholic Charities and the Angel Guardian Home were pulling out completely from the Irish adoption programme.2

  The available records don’t indicate how many Irish children had already been dispatched to Brooklyn on the strength of home study reports produced by overworked and under-qualified Catholic Charities staff, but given the length of time the problem had been in existence, and the key importance of New York as a destination for Irish children, it seems reasonable to assume that the number must have been considerable. The home study report – or lack of it, as described in the earlier case of Mary Theresa Monaghan and her adoption by a paedophile in California – was the critical document. It was the only one among the many required by Church and State in Ireland that went beyond the issues of faith and wealth and actually dealt with the suitability of would-be adopters as actual parents as opposed to spiritual minders and material providers. In fact, as far as religion and wealth were concerned, American applicants for Irish babies were largely a self-selecting group. Religious and financial references would not be difficult for them to supply. It was all the other matters relevant to adoption that required the greatest investigation, but such investigation appeared to be dispensable when resources were stretched.

  Father Cecil Barrett immediately sent a copy of Monsignor Reddy’s letter to St Patrick’s Guild to ‘keep them out of trouble’. He also sent a copy to the Department of External Affairs, so they were made aware of the problem. The withdrawal of such a key institution as the Angel Guardian Home from the Irish adoption programme should have sounded alarm bells among the authorities back in Dublin, yet almost another year was to pass before the true extent of the problem was discovered. What was at stake was the safety and well-being of hundreds of Irish children. But even that seems not to have motivated anyone to act with any degree of urgency.

  Catholic Charities, of course, had been chosen by both Archbishop McQuaid and the Department of External Affairs to vet American adopters in preference to the secular, state-run Children’s Bureau, who had offered to provide home studies for would-be adopters of Irish children. Catholic Charities was the biggest non-governmental welfare organisation in the United States, and as such carried a lot of weight, but it still had serious shortcomings, particularly in the sensitive and critical area of placing children in adoptive homes, a task that required considerable expertise and the commitment of long-term resources. Catholic Charities’ coverage of America’s 50 States was always extremely uneven which meant that some branches were expected to cope with huge geographical areas with few, and frequently untrained staff. What was more, other Catholic Charities branches turned out to have no legal authority whatever for placing children in adoption, a matter that only came to the attention of the Department of External Affairs at the end of 1955. Yet it was on the strength of reports presented by Catholic Charities branches like these that Irish children were being assigned to individual adopters. And if all of this wasn’t bad enough, it soon emerged that Catholic Charities even had shady characters operating within its own ranks, selling babies on the side.

  In short, by the mid-1950s it was becoming obvious that the Church and State’s agreed formula for establishing the suitability of adoptive American parents was far from foolproof. It was not simply an academic matter, but potentially one of life and death. And things were set to get even worse.

  In July 1955 the national secretary of Catholic Charities, Monsignor John O’Grady, made an astonishing and disturbing admission. In a letter to Father Cecil Barrett he revealed that he was ‘more and more convinced that many of the homes in which children were placed are undesirable’.3 It was clear their ‘undesirability’ arose from factors other than religion: the ‘unsuitable’ homes were Catholic homes, and O’Grady’s use of the word ‘many’ indicated that the problem was potentially huge. There was also evidence of children being placed with American couples who simply had not been vetted at all. In August 1955 Barrett received another unsettling letter, this time from the Director of Child Welfare for the state of Kansas, telling him that St Patrick’s Guild were placing Irish children for adoption in Western Kansas ‘without any agency approval of the placement or of the plan which has been made’. The Guild hadn’t even sought the assistance of the Catholic Social Services in Kansas, even though they had expressed a willingness to help.4

  This was extremely unsettling news, and all the more so since the Kansas welfare agency failed to give any indication as to what had happened to the children in question. Nor did anyone in authority in Ireland seem concerned enough to try to find out. What is not clear is how the children involved in these cases managed to get Irish passports in the first instance since, under the Department of External Affairs’ written rules, passports were supposed to be issued only after Catholic Charities had verified the adopting parents as suitable. Yet here were clear, documented cases – and not for the first time either – of children being placed in homes that had never been vetted by any agency. Over the years around 40 Irish children were sent to Kansas.

  One possible way of getting around the rules was outlined in a brochure that was circulating at this time among American couples who wanted to adopt an Irish child. The

  three-page circular, produced by Father Michael Quealy, Administrator of Ennis Cathedral in County Clare, explained that the Department of External Affairs usually required a Catholic Charities home study report together with a priest’s testimonial. But it went on to say that if Catholic Charities didn’t operate in their area (as they didn’t in Western Kansas), and the couple had a letter saying this was the case from Catholic Charities head office in Washington, they could still qualify for an Irish child on the basis of personal testimonials from two priests instead of just one. ‘The passport office in Ireland,’ Quealy’s leaflet said, ‘will accept these as alternatives for a Catholic Charities Report.’ Father Quealy had sent a copy of his brochure to the Department of External Affairs, specifically s
eeking their approval for its contents, and there appears to be no record of anyone in the Department dissenting or asking him to change it in any way.5 A recommendation from a priest, of course, was no substitute at all for a professional social worker’s investigation into the adoptive couple and their home, especially since priests could be subjected to all kinds of pressures and inducements by parishioners who were desperate to obtain a baby. Archbishop McQuaid’s own requirements were somewhat vague in this matter, and it was not until July 1955 that McQuaid explicitly demanded a Catholic Charities report as distinct from a recommendation.6

  On the other hand, there is evidence that the Department of External Affairs could turn down passport requests where a detailed home study report from Catholic Charities was missing. In one case a Catholic couple from Rhode Island had been promised a baby by the nuns in Ireland after supplying all the required affidavits and references except the Catholic Charities home study report. In its place they had furnished only a two-paragraph recommendation from the priest who was their Diocesan

  Director. When the couple then applied for a passport, submitting the same documentation, they were turned down.7 Cases such as this were a cause of considerable friction between the Department and the nuns, as they both appeared to be applying different rules, and couples could incur great expense in arranging to get a baby before falling at the final hurdle of the passport office.

  Yet the disturbing revelations from Kansas indicated that the Department was not always as rigorous as it appeared to be in the Rhode Island case. The Kansas affair still left unanswered the critical question of how children were able to travel from Ireland to unapproved homes. Even by their own flimsy standards, the authorities were failing. Unbelievably, this was still not the end of it.

  American law required that all organisations engaged in placing children for adoption be legally registered, and it had always been assumed within the Department of External Affairs that all branches of Catholic Charities met these criteria and were entitled to handle adoption arrangements for Irish children. But towards the end of 1955 – more than four years after Catholic Charities was chosen for the job and by which time the number of children officially dispatched to the United States had reached the 1,000 mark – the civil servants back in Dublin discovered that some branches of Catholic Charities with which they had been dealing had no legal status whatever when it came to placing children for adoption.8 In practice this meant that home study reports, produced to secure passports from the Irish authorities, had no standing in American courts when it came to legalising the adoption.

  In the absence of a home study report by an approved agency, the proposed adoption could not proceed, and the child’s future would remain undecided until the mess was sorted out. This could all be going on without anyone in authority back in Dublin knowing about it, as there was no monitoring of children once they had left the country. Yet until they were legally adopted and naturalised as Americans, these children were still Irish citizens and the responsibility of the Irish State. The Department’s blind faith in Catholic Charities had resulted in an abdication of responsibility for the welfare of the Irish children they had so trustingly, but carelessly, dispatched across the Atlantic.

  The practice of sending children to America was turning out like a game of Russian roulette. Things might work out, but then again they might not. It was a case of give them a passport, put them on a plane, and hope for the best. Even if most of the cases worked out well, or at least reasonably well (and that’s a big ‘if’), all the evidence indicates that a great many individual Irish babies ended up with people who were regarded – before they got their hands on the children – as totally unfit to become adoptive parents.

  When the authorities back in Ireland learned the sad truth about Catholic Charities and its inadequacies, Sean Morrissey from the Department wrote to the organisation’s national secretary, Monsignor John O’Grady, requesting a list of registered branches. If they knew which branches had the legal right to place children, they could ensure that no more children were sent to areas where the branches were not registered.9 But instead of sending the list as requested, O’Grady got on a plane and flew directly to Dublin to confront the Department face to face. The meeting that resulted was to reveal yet more serious problems.

  On 16 January 1956, O’Grady spent four hours in heated debate with three senior officials at the Department of External Affairs in Iveagh House. Sean Morrissey, who attended the meeting, described it subsequently as ‘disturbing,’ stating that O’Grady ‘made a very poor impression’; that he was ‘very old and rather senile at times’, and that ‘it beats us how he can hold down such a job’. Morrissey recorded that he and the other two officials who met

  O’Grady were ‘thoroughly exhausted and exasperated after the meeting,’ but ‘we kept hammering at him and extracted eventually the revelation that all the branches of his organisation were not reliable as we had been led to believe’. This, he added, ‘was a blow to us because... all our adoption arrangements centred around the recommendations of the branches’. Morrissey was unaware of ‘mass irregularities’, but he said it was ‘disturbing for us to find that any loophole existed,’ because ‘there is persistent public criticism in this country of these adoptions, most of it admittedly emanating from “wild” reports in the cheap English Sunday papers’.10 Once again, the need to avoid adverse publicity came before the need to avert the potentially dire consequences for children of officialdom’s glaring errors.

  The meeting with O’Grady had got off to an awkward start. Sean Morrissey told him that the Department of External Affairs now realised that not all branches of Catholic Charities were legally registered to handle adoptions. O’Grady defiantly denied the charge and asserted ‘there was no such thing as an unregistered branch.’ This was a claim he repeated ‘a number of times,’ but the Department officials already knew otherwise. Trying to evade their questions, O’Grady engaged in a long and irrelevant monologue on the wonders of the American judiciary.11

  But suddenly the American priest changed tack. The minutes of the meeting record that he ‘began to speak about certain “irregular” adoptions’ which had recently taken place in the states of Texas and Wisconsin. The person behind these adoptions was described by O’Grady as a ‘commercial operator’ who ‘had made money from these operations’, causing Catholic Charities ‘grave embarrassment’. Eventually O’Grady got to the point: the children involved ‘were coming from Ireland,’ and their passport applications had been ‘cleared through the Department of External Affairs’.

  These revelations came as ‘a complete shock’ to the Department officials who believed they had taken precautions ‘which appeared to be foolproof in their security,’ especially their ‘inflexible rule’ of dealing only with Catholic Charities. So how, they asked, did the Wisconsin ‘operator’ get his hands on Irish children to sell, unless he himself was part of the Catholic Charities organisation? At first Monsignor O’Grady ‘avoided a direct reply to this question,’ but when pressed by Morrissey he agreed that the Department was ‘being deceived by persons on the American side’.

  The precise details of how the Wisconsin scam operated were not recorded, but it would seem that someone within Catholic Charities in the Wisconsin area was producing home study reports making it possible for Irish children to be dispatched to people within Wisconsin who were unfit to adopt children but who were prepared to pay for the privilege. This was precisely the nightmare scenario predicted a few years earlier by Department official Joe Horan. Presumably something similar had been happening in Texas, which O’Grady had mentioned in similar tones. In addition to these astonishing lapses, O’Grady revealed that in certain areas it was ‘impossible to maintain thriving branches,’ while there was also ‘a lack of funds which restricted employment of specialised personnel,’ an admission which led the Irish officials to conclude that the organisation was simply ‘not equipped at all its branches to deal satisfactorily with
adoptions’.

  O’Grady proposed a remedy to this series of problems. In place of individual Irish children being sent to individual adoptive couples, he wanted Irish children shipped to America en bloc, under the auspices of the head office of Catholic Charities in Washington. The children would be held in orphanages and homes in those areas that had sufficient funds and trained staff to arrange proper adoptions. When asked which areas he had in mind, O’Grady could name just six: Chicago, St Louis, Milwaukee, Newark, Albany and Syracuse. At a time when Catholic Charities had several hundred branches throughout the United States, and was placing Irish children across the country, this was a staggering admission of inadequacy. O’Grady was told that his proposal was a non-starter primarily because it would deprive the Irish authorities of control, but fears were also expressed about hostile publicity.12 Single ‘illegitimate’ children could be dispatched discreetly, but bulk exports would attract unwanted attention. There was a third, and even more compelling reason for rejecting O’Grady’s ‘group plan,’ as it came to be dubbed: Archbishop McQuaid disapproved.13

  Shortly after O’Grady’s visit to Dublin, the Department received the first small piece of concrete evidence of the Wisconsin problem. A pointed letter from the Welfare Department at Madison, Wisconsin, revealed that an Irish child had been given to a highly unsuitable family in the area, even though the home and the adoptive parents had been recommended by Catholic Charities.14 This, presumably, was one of the children handled by the Wisconsin ‘operator’. As with all previous revelations of unsuitable adoptions, the Irish authorities showed no inclination to investigate the subsequent fate of the children involved. Instead, they comforted themselves with the belief that the problem was localised rather than general. And when Department officials made discreet inquiries about O’Grady himself, they were told he was held in low esteem by many of his own colleagues.15 But this was scarcely an adequate answer to the problems that had been revealed. The Department of External Affairs had to respond, and it did so by insisting that all future adoption arrangements for Irish children in America be made by legally registered branches of Catholic Charities. This was a vital improvement, but for an unknown number of Irish children, dispatched to America under a wholly inadequate regime, the new rules came five years too late. And even then, unsuitable people continued to obtain Irish children.