by Mike Milotte
It might be argued, of course, that the Irish authorities could not be held responsible for blunders and failings on the other side of the Atlantic, but it must be remembered that Catholic Charities was chosen to do the job in preference to the federal Children’s Bureau, which had offered a full and comprehensive adoption vetting, placing and monitoring service long before the job was entrusted to Catholic Charities. And Catholic Charities was chosen, not because it offered greater protection for the overall interests of the Irish children involved, but because it alone could be trusted to put matters of religion at the top of the agenda. It was more likely to deliver fervent Catholic couples as adoptive parents than any secular organisation could do.
Given the importance of O’Grady’s revelations, and the potential damage they could do, Sean Morrissey took the prudent step of sending a copy of the minutes of the meeting with O’Grady to his Minister, Liam Cosgrave.16 Cosgrave in turn decided that it was time the whole business of the American adoptions was discussed at the Cabinet table, where until now not a word of it had been uttered.
7. ... To Cover-Up
‘It is wrong to suggest that there is anything in the nature of a traffic in the adoption of children.’
Liam Cosgrave, Minister for External Affairs,
Dáil Éireann 1956
‘There are certain aspects of this traffic in adoption children over which the Department has no control.’
Department of External Affairs, Draft Statement to
Government on American Adoptions 1956
When the Irish Government met on 23 March 1956, Liam Cosgrave, the Minister for External Affairs, initiated the first ever cabinet discussion on Ireland’s booming baby exports. The disturbing revelations from America could not be swept under the carpet indefinitely, and Cosgrave also wanted to ensure that his colleagues were not taken by surprise by parliamentary questions on the subject, questions that were already in the pipeline from an opposition TD. It was going to be hard to keep everything under control.
The total number of children officially sent abroad for adoption had just topped the 1,000 mark. It seemed rather
late in the day for the government to start thinking about a matter that up to now it had conveniently ignored. But the absence of a distinct policy did not absolve the government of responsibility. It alone was accountable for the fate of so many hundreds of its infant citizens. There was no question of civil servants, or maverick ministers, running a policy that was not strictly official.
The cabinet discussion of March 1956, as was customary, was not recorded, but Cosgrave was instructed to produce a statement of principles by which the Department of External Affairs would be guided in the matter.1 His officials got to work and had soon produced a substantial draft document. This was followed by another, then another, and another.2 What these successive draft statements reveal is how the deep concerns of at least some civil servants about the whole business of shipping babies across the Atlantic were progressively sanitised prior to the submission of the proposed document to government.
The first draft statement was completely candid about the serious problems that had arisen in the past, mentioning the scandal of Catholic Charities in Wisconsin where Irish children had been obtained under false pretences. ‘There are certain aspects of this traffic in adoption children over which the Department has no control, and in respect of which it is not entirely happy,’ the earliest draft statement said. ‘The distance separating the two countries is such as to prevent any interested authority in Ireland making independent inspection or assessment of the American adoptive parents and their home,’ it went on. Consequently the Department was left dependent on Catholic Charities, but their ‘efficiency and reliability’ had now been found to be ‘not quite uniform throughout America’. In other words, no one could really guarantee the safety and well-being of over 1,000 Irish children sent to America by Church and State during the past decade.
The shortage of babies for adoption in America, the statement went on, ‘creates opportunities for unscrupulous operators and agents to intervene in adoption arrangements for the purpose of commercial profit’. Scarcity also meant the Department came under ‘a certain pressure... to make children available,’ and overall they would ‘prefer that the adoptions should not be subjected to these dangers’. The language was restrained, but this was still a clear admission that there had been serious shortcomings and problems with the American adoptions. This honest account of the system’s deficiencies, however, was diluted when the second draft was produced. Now, all references to the sale of Irish children by the crook in Wisconsin were dropped; the term ‘traffic’ was abandoned; references to ‘commercial profit’ were erased, and the fact that the Department came under (Church) pressure to keep things moving was omitted.
By censoring their own report to the Government, the civil servants might have hoped to keep political concern to a minimum. But there was a limit to their cosseting capabilities, and as the cabinet waited for an opportunity to discuss the business, one of the greatest fears of the officials in the Department of External Affairs became a reality: deputies began asking questions in the Dáil about children being taken to America. A newspaper picked up the scent, leading to more questions and more pressure on the Department to explain, in a public arena, just exactly what was going on – the very last thing they wanted to do.
The first parliamentary question was asked by opposition Fianna Fáil TD Donagh O’Malley on 10 April 1956.3 He wanted to know whether children who had been temporary inmates of the County Hospital at Croom, County Limerick, had been adopted by American citizens, and if so, what the circumstances surrounding the adoption were. O’Malley gave no background information that might have put the question in context. This was to come later. But the fact that he addressed his question to the Minister for Justice, James Everett, whose responsibilities related only to adoptions within Ireland, was one indication of how little was known or understood, even among public representatives, about the practice of exporting Irish children to the USA. O’Malley’s question really should have been addressed to the Minister for External Affairs, Liam Cos- grave. Everett’s answer gave away as little as possible. ‘Some such children have been taken out of the country for adoption,’ he said, but ‘there was nothing irregular or unlawful about this’.4 As far as Everett was concerned, his brief Dáil answer should have been the end of the matter, and probably would have been had not a mass circulation British newspaper followed up the story.
On 10 June 1956 the Empire News published a frontpage article under the banner headline ‘Babies “Sold” to US in Secret,’ with a subheading, ‘Nun says – It’s quite legal’. The story’s opening sentence may seem unremarkable: ‘Babies born to Irish girls who are unable to make homes for them are being flown from Shannon Airport to the United States to be adopted by American families,’ but this was the first time the American adoption issue had been given front-page headline treatment in any popular newspaper circulating in Ireland. Before now, references to the American adoptions in the Irish papers had been few and far between, especially since Archbishop McQuaid’s office had ordered a news blackout some five years earlier. The British Sunday paper went on to say that ‘solicitors, doctors and hospitals are involved in the teeming traffic, which is conducted in conditions of secrecy.’ Investigations in Dublin, Cork and Limerick, the paper said, revealed that ‘payments are made for the children,’ but it gave no further details of the financial transactions.
The Empire News story was about two specific children who had been sent to America directly from the Croom
Hospital in Limerick: Anthony Barron, who was two-and- a-half, and three-year-old Mary Clancy. Both children were born in Croom hospital to unmarried mothers, Kathleen Barron and Bridget Clancy, and both had been fostered out to Kathleen’s sister-in-law, Mrs Joan Barron. Joan Barron told the Empire News the two infants had been taken from her ‘on various pretexts’ and returned to the hospital, which was r
un by nuns. Soon after that they were dispatched to America. Joan Barron said she had been willing to adopt the little boy herself, but when she tried to do so she found she was too late: he had been seen travelling through Croom in a motor car along with a nun from the hospital, on his way to Shannon Airport.
The fate of the other child, Mary Clancy, was recounted by Joan Barron’s fifteen-year-old daughter. She told of going to visit three-year-old Mary at Croom Hospital. ‘She had only a small cut from a piece of glass and I could not understand what was going on,’ the daughter said. ‘She was in bed and strapped to the bed with the strap around her middle. She had a vaccination bandage on her arm. Next time I saw her she was up and prettily dressed. A week later I went to Croom again, to Dr Mullins’ dispensary, and asked how Mary was. He said, “She is gone away since last night in an aeroplane.”’ Dr Mullins, Assistant Registrar at the hospital, told the Empire News, ‘There is nothing wrong with them when the babies go into the hospital. The idea is to civilise them after life in a cottage. They are taught to eat and to wear their clothes properly. They are built up a bit in the three weeks before their American journey.’ Dr Mullins’ comments certainly made it sound like a well- organised operation involving many more children than Anthony Barron and Mary Clancy.
Flight arrangements for the children were made by a nun, Sister Christopher, who told the Empire News that ‘the Irish Government know and approve of what we are doing. It is quite legal and we think it better for the children than the poverty of living, for instance, in Mrs Barron’s home. We shall continue to send babies to America until the law is changed. Mrs Barron cannot bring up these children. She is too poor to do so.’ Three-year-old Mary Clancy’s grandmother said that neither she nor the child’s mother, Bridget, who was in London, had received any payment for the infant. ‘All I got,’ she said, ‘was ten shillings from the Sister to buy sweets and odd things for Mary when we went to Dublin to see the American consul.’ In Dublin they had seen ‘a lot of people’ and the very next day Mary Clancy, along with a little boy called Billy, had been flown out to the United States. Mary Clancy’s adoptive parents lived in Wisconsin.
When he was asked in the Dáil on 19 June, by Cork Labour TD Dan Desmond, what he proposed to do about the claims in the Empire News, Justice Minister James Everett repeated the earlier formula that ‘there was nothing irregular or unlawful about this’. Faced with what could have become a national scandal, Everett responded with a promise of firm action. The Government, he said, would ‘take steps to deal with such newspapers’.5
Although there was nothing in the Minister for Justice’s comments in the Dáil that indicated the slightest concern about the goings-on at the Croom Hospital, never mind Wisconsin, his Department had been sufficiently worried to order a Garda investigation as soon as it got wind of the fact that Deputy O’Malley was proposing to ask questions. Reporting back that Anthony Barron’s mother and Mary Clancy’s grandmother had consented to the removal of the two children from the State, the police declared themselves satisfied that all was in order.6 They do not appear to have enquired at all into the allegation that the children were ‘sold’. Nor was there any indication as to who vetted the American adopting parents in Wisconsin, the very state where a Catholic Charities worker had been selling Irish babies.
James Everett’s minimalist replies failed to satisfy another Labour TD, Maureen O’Carroll from North Dublin, who demanded to know the basic facts of the case. Everett’s reply, ‘I have already given that information,’ was simply untrue. He had revealed nothing.7 Not one to be deterred so easily, Mrs O’Carroll returned to the same matter a month later with a series of questions, this time to the proper authority, the Minister for External Affairs, and future Taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave. She wanted to know how many passports had been issued to ‘illegitimate’ children over one year of age so they could travel to America for adoption, and she wanted to know specifically how many had come from Croom Hospital in Limerick. Mrs O’Carroll also asked for the names and ages of all children removed from the State since the Adoption Act came into force, the dates of their removal and the institutions from which the removals were made.8 Her questions brought more information into the public domain than had been available before.
Liam Cosgrave said that in the period between the enactment of legal adoption on 1 January 1953 and the end of June 1956, 543 passports had been issued to ‘illegitimate’ children for travel to the United States. This, of course, was a very partial answer to the question that had been asked. The Minister could have added, had he wished to give a fuller picture, that his department knew of another 500 or so official child export cases preceding the legalisation of adoption, and was also aware of an extensive black market in babies, proceeding outside the official scheme. As was to be expected, he refused to name any of the children. But, quite arbitrarily, he also refused to name the institutions that had sent them overseas. He did, however, reveal that in the period in question, 26 children (almost 5% of the total) had been inmates of the Croom Hospital in Limerick.9 This seemed to confirm the impression given by Dr Mullins at the hospital, that what was going on there was a very substantial operation. The adverse publicity, however, seems to have brought the Croom operation to an end since the total number of children sent from there to America stopped short of 30.
It is revealing to note that those TDs who questioned the Government’s bona fides in this whole matter were in no way critical of the overriding fixation on matters of religion. Quite the reverse, in fact: they sought to challenge the Government on the grounds that it might not have been doing enough to protect the faith. Labour’s Dan Desmond, for example, wanted to know was the Minister satisfied ‘that these unfortunate little children are being better catered for in religious homes’ than they would be if they ended up ‘in the hands of. some nests in this country that in the past laid their hands on these unfortunate children?’10 The word ‘nests’ was a pejorative term used at the time to describe Protestant-run orphanages. The name came from a mother and baby home in Dublin called the Bird’s Nest which was suspected of proselytising. Cosgrave, of course, had no difficulty in putting Deputy Desmond’s concerns at rest: preserving the faith was top of the agenda.
Maureen O’Carroll also let it be known that she had ‘no objection to the transfer of these children to America as such,’ and went on to say that it was ‘quite probable that many of these children are getting an opportunity in life they could not and would not get here, that they can start a new life... [without] the stigma they normally have to bear.’ But it would be preferable, she said, if the American adopters had to reside for a time in Ireland ‘so that their whole moral character and religious outlook and ideas could be examined’.11
Donagh O’Malley, the Fianna Fáil TD from Limerick who had started the ball rolling, was concerned that their misgivings about foreign adoptions would be ‘splashed across many a paper, not only in Britain but in other countries, to the detriment of this nation’. But he went on to add his own sharp criticisms of the system. ‘I know, as everyone connected with Shannon Airport knows, that these children are going to very wealthy homes,’ he said. ‘The parents of these adopted children can afford to pay the passage of an employee... to take the child, or children, over there. Her first class return air fare is paid. Evidently these children are going to very good families.’ But, he added, ‘there are two sides to that’. The other side was, ‘Who is at the back of these arrangements? Who is the negotiating body? Who is carrying out the deals for these millionaires and semi-millionaires and very high Catholic Americans? Who is the liaison officer between America and this country? No one can find that out.’ Well, Liam Cosgrave certainly wasn’t going to reveal the controlling hand of John Charles McQuaid. And O’Malley left no one in any doubt that there was a racket in progress. ‘Money,’ he said, ‘is passing to the very close relatives of these children, in certain cases to the unfortunate mother. It is a temptation to such a mother if she is offered £100 or £
150 in order to get her to consent.’ (Equivalent to €9,600 and €14,400 today. It is unlikely, however, that the unfortunate mothers were ever the main financial beneficiaries) O’Malley ended by calling for a ‘reinvestigation’ of ‘the whole system of adoption of children’.12
But Liam Cosgrave was having none of it. ‘I deprecate the type of publicity which this debate will attract,’ he retorted, adding, ‘it is wrong to suggest that there is anything in the nature of a traffic in the adoption of children.’ He went on to defend in vigorous terms the ‘very stringent’ rules and regulations imposed by his Department before passports were issued to children travelling abroad for adoption. Every case, he said, was subject to ‘very careful study’ and was investigated by ‘appropriate religious organisations in the adopting countries.’ He went on to say that ‘great care is taken to see that... the prospective adopting parents are suitable and proper people to be granted the custody of a child’13 – a claim that was flatly contradicted by a huge volume of evidence in Cosgrave’s own department. At the very moment when Cosgrave was pacifying the Dáil, his own officials were drafting their report for the Government, on Cosgrave’s own instructions, about the disturbing reality of the American adoptions. Not only did the officials themselves refer to a ‘baby traffic’, they admitted they were neither fully in control nor entirely happy with what was going on.
