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

by Mike Milotte

  The idea that an organisation like Catholic Charities should be involved in the business of finding racially pure babies for wealthy couples who wanted them was not one with which Monsignor Bryan Walsh had any sympathy.

  Indeed he did not believe the adoption process should be demand-led at all. ‘In my view it wasn’t our job to respond to the demands of people who wanted children, to go out and find what they wanted. It was our job to find homes for the children already in our care, not to recruit children for adoption. The Irish adoptions, it seems to me, fell into this category. There is no doubt it was a demand- led process.’ In other words, it was undertaken in the first instance to meet the needs and requirements of wealthy American adopters, not the Irish children.

  This led to further problems down the line. In a country like America, where couples seeking children for adoption outnumbered available children by twenty to one, priests and others associated with Catholic Charities were under constant pressure to find children for demanding parishioners. There were even cases of couples threatening to leave the Church unless they were supplied with a baby, Monsignor Walsh said. Under these circumstances, many clerics within Catholic Charities looked to Ireland for an answer to their own local problems and pressures. And there was an obvious danger that in their desire to keep strident parishioners happy, they would cut corners.

  And there were other practical and immediate concerns. The procedure followed by the adoption societies in Ireland, whereby a single mother signed her child over to a named nun, permitting the nun to export the child, was a dubious practice in the eyes of Monsignor Walsh. ‘We had no means in an agency like ours of being assured that everything had been done properly and above board in Ireland; that there had been proper surrender papers, freely signed on the basis of informed consent; that the mother – and the father even – knew what they were doing in surrendering their children for adoption by Americans. This was a fundamental concern of mine right from the start.’

  And he had good reason to be concerned, for there were often question marks over signatures on consent documents. But even where signatures were not in doubt, other serious questions remained. One official in the Department of External Affairs had described adoption society procedures for handling child exports as having ‘no valid foundation in law’ because a society had ‘no legal right whatever to the custody of an illegitimate child until it is constituted a legal guardian of the child by an Irish court.’ But ‘in normal cases this does not take place,’ because the societies never ‘indulge in the expense involved.’2 In his concerns over this issue at least, Monsignor Walsh was clearly not alone.

  But even had the moral and legal basis of many of these adoptions not been in question, Monsignor Walsh still had major reservations. ‘I was very concerned how serious a matter it was to pluck a child out of Ireland and place him permanently for adoption in a new culture – cut off his or her roots in Ireland without any consent on the part of that child, saying “you’re going to be an American from now on”. That was questionable,’ he said. ‘I never did think that was the solution for Irish children. My argument was that through education and proper social services, the solution should be in Ireland itself.’ This was the very argument that had been advanced by Minister Tom O’Higgins in the mid- 1950s, but no one had been listening.

  Bryan Walsh also knew from those of his colleagues within Catholic Charities who did handle Irish adoptions that they had endless problems in their dealings with the nuns back in Ireland. The single biggest issue concerned ‘matching’ – the critical process by which a particular child was selected for placement in a particular home. ‘Catholic Charities were expected to vet American couples without being given any information at all about the child they were hoping to receive,’ Monsignor Walsh said. Another prominent Catholic Charities director put it this way: ‘We have to send a complete case history with many documents and in return we get a picture and a birth date!’3 This meant that while Catholic charities could say in general that a couple would make suitable adoptive parents they could not say they would be suitable parents for the child subsequently picked by the nuns, since they knew nothing of the child in question. This was a symptom of the mail-order nature of the business that had been so roundly criticised by the Child Welfare League of America and the US branch of the International Social Service in 1958. Father Cecil Bar- rett was well aware of this problem and even brought it to the attention of Archbishop McQuaid’s secretary. ‘The success of the adoption often depends on the care exercised in selecting a particular child for a definite home,’ he noted, but in the American adoptions, elementary matching was impossible because of ‘the difficulty of obtaining a full and complete history of each child from the Sisters here.’4 But Monsignor Walsh acknowledges that he was ‘a fairly lone voice’ within Catholic Charities, where his attitudes were seen as ‘almost un-American’ and where the predominant view was that ‘any child from Ireland would be better off in the United States.’

  ‘I simply did not agree with that reasoning. I did not share that opinion,’ he said. ‘The attitude I took was one of questioning America, questioning the Church in America even. I had some fierce arguments on this point within Catholic Charities, but the opposite view prevailed, that anyone really would be better in America than in Ireland. Now from the point of view of those looking after these children in Ireland I can see the attraction of the nice American couple coming in and offering a nice home to one of their babies. There is no question that to the religious sisters in the orphanages the offer of a home in the United States – where they thought everyone was a millionaire – was marvellous. That was understandable from 3,000 miles away where all the images of America were positive. But those of us who worked in welfare programmes in United States knew differently. Poverty was endemic in the States with two out of every three children growing up in deprivation. Racism was a serious issue and anti-Irish feeling ran very strong in many areas and communities. America was a very violent society. It’s not a land of milk and honey for most of the people who live there. But that’s what the sisters back in Ireland thought and I’m sure they believed they were doing the best for the children in their care. I saw it very differently, and I think history bears out my view because child welfare in America has been steadily deteriorating for the past 40 years, all the way through from the beginning of the Irish adoption programme, as it happens.’

  Monsignor Walsh’s opposition to the entire practice of importing Irish children into America for adoption led him to boycott the scheme. Catholic Charities in Miami simply refused to co-operate in any way. It refused to offer advice to parishioners on the procedures involved in obtaining children from Ireland. It refused to do home studies and Monsignor Walsh continued to argue against the whole business at Catholic Charities conferences. The effect of his boycott can be seen in the fact that throughout all the years of the American adoptions, only five Irish children were sent to the state of Florida.

  ‘Now we are seeing some new problems when people try to trace their roots,’ he noted. ‘In the 1950s and 60s the emphasis was all on confidentiality and complete separation of the adoptive family and the natural family. The mother and her child should never see each other again. That was the theory. Today we know differently – you just can’t do that. Tracing and searching are commonplace, but for the Irish adoptees it is made much harder across 3,000 miles of ocean. And having two different legal systems doesn’t help. It just makes something that is already difficult and traumatic even worse. But of course nobody thought about that when they were sending Irish babies to the States in the past.’

  PART II

  Mother and Child

  Prologue

  The Adoption Triangle

  Adoption is a three way process involving the child, the birth parents and the adoptive parents. Everyone’s story is different, but the ones told here, which look at the experience from all three sides of the triangle, have been chosen because each of them raises i
ssues and deals with emotions that are common to all.

  Jim and Dorothy Rowe were a typical Catholic American couple who turned to Ireland for a baby after many frustrating years of trying to adopt in the States. Their story shows how they went about getting an Irish baby and what they had to do to make it all legal. Their story also raises questions about money...

  Maureen, their Irish-born daughter, grew up in comfort, but also in conflict – with her religion and with her adoptive mother. It was not a happy childhood. In later years when Maureen set out to discover her roots, what she found instead was an obstacle course leading to a wall of silence.

  Patricia Eyres was one of the unmarried mothers whose children were sent to America. For nearly two years she lived with the nuns before parting with her baby, a blow from which she never recovered. She kept the whole affair secret for thirty-four years. When she finally discovered her son’s fate in America, she was devastated.

  When Mary Cunningham and Michael Geraghty got married they thought their secret ‘love-child’, born seven months before the wedding, had already been sent to America. They went on to have six more children. Thirty- four years later they discovered some startling facts about what actually happened to their long-lost son.

  10. Jim and Dorothy:

  No Price Too High

  ‘We pray for our benefactors every day.’

  St Clare’s Adoption Society, 1966

  Jim and Dorothy Rowe were probably quite typical of the American couples who obtained babies from Ireland.1 They were natives of New York’s Brooklyn district and had married when they were both 30 years old in 1949. But Mrs Rowe was infertile. In 1955 they had adopted a little boy, George, from the nuns at the Angel Guardian Home, their local orphanage in Brooklyn. But all their efforts since then to acquire a sister for George had proved futile. There just were not enough babies to go round, and priority was given to the first-time adopters. It was getting to a point where the nun in charge of adoptions at the Home wasn’t even bothering to reply to the Rowes’ increasingly desperate letters looking for a little girl: ‘Each day we eagerly await the mail to see if there will be something from you, but each day we are disappointed...’ ‘A year has passed since we applied and we have had no word from you...’ ‘We were wondering if we were still on your list...’ And so it went on.

  And Jim and Dorothy weren’t getting any younger. Catholic Charities usually applied an upper age limit of 38 to women – Dorothy’s age in 1958 when their latest efforts to adopt had come to nothing. But as luck would have it, the Angel Guardian Home, after a period of disengagement from the Irish adoption business, was back on stream when the new standardisation regulations for Irish adoptions came into force in 1958. Under the new rules the Irish authorities, unlike Catholic Charities, would permit American women up to 42 years of age, and men up to 45, to adopt Irish children. When the Rowes got to hear of the Irish babies through a priest in the neighbourhood, they jumped at the chance.

  The Rowes were devout and traditional Catholics. They were also comfortably well off. Jim was an engineer on a salary of $7,500 a year. They owned two houses worth $31,000. Their savings amounted to $4,000 and their life policies to $20,000. They also had a new Chevrolet and furs and jewellery worth $5,000. They had no debts. To anyone in Ireland the Rowes would have appeared fabulously wealthy. Mr Rowe’s salary was equivalent to around £52 a week at a time when the average wage in Ireland was just £7. His salary was equivalent to around €260,000 a year in today’s terms. Likewise, the Rowes’ houses, savings and other assets were worth over €2m at today’s values.

  Immediately they heard of the Irish babies, they wrote to the Angel Guardian Home, this time asking specifically for ‘a little girl from Ireland’. The nuns at the home knew how desperate the Rowes were. They were also aware of their advancing years and of their financial status. The mention of Irish babies seemed to have unlocked the door and things suddenly began to happen. On 25 February 1960, Jim and Dorothy were invited to attend the Home to discuss their ‘interest in Irish adoptions’. The meeting was brief and matter-of-fact. The Rowes were given the name and address of an Irish adoption agency: St Clare’s, at Sta- mullen in County Meath. The nuns had also given them some useful hints, which they scribbled down on a small piece of paper – when they wrote to St Clare’s they should emphasise two things above all: their devotion to the faith, and the size of their bank balance.

  St Clare’s adoption society was run by the Franciscan Sisters of St Clare under the chairmanship of Father PJ Regan. Father Regan was also parish priest at Castlepollard, about 20 miles away in County Westmeath, where the Sacred Heart nuns ran one of their mother-and-baby homes. During the years of the American adoptions, almost 300 children were dispatched from Castlepollard home and another 130 or so from St Clare’s. Many of the children offered for adoption by St Clare’s were babies who had been born at Castlepollard, and Father Regan was the link.

  On 14 April 1960, the Rowes wrote to St Clare’s seeking a little girl, or ‘more than one if it is possible’. As advised, much of their letter was taken up with the details of their material circumstances. They enclosed verification of Mr Rowe’s salary from his employer, federal income tax returns and assorted bank statements. They also laid great stress on their religious zeal and promised to ‘do all in our power to see that our children receive a good sound Catholic education and upbringing’. In line with Archbishop McQuaid’s requirements, their doctor also wrote to say they were not ‘shirking natural parenthood’. With the letter they sent multiple copies of their Church marriage certificate, Catholic baptismal certificates and personal recommendations from priests and nuns. They also enclosed an assortment of family photographs.

  Their letter had been remarkably unrevealing about their personalities, even about the reasons for wanting a second child, other than as ‘a sister for George’. The unspoken, but unambiguous, assumption underlying their entire approach was that adoption was a ‘cure’ for their own childlessness rather than a service to the adopted child. That this assumption went entirely unchallenged by either the St Clare’s Adoption Society in Ireland or the Angel Guardian Home in New York simply indicated their acceptance of it. But the critical point in the Rowes’ letter to St Clare’s was left to the end: Angel Guardian Home, they said, ‘mentioned to us the cost involved in getting a child from Ireland and we are perfectly willing and capable of meeting the expense’. And not only of one child, but of two if possible. From then on everything moved at high speed. Within a fortnight a Catholic Charities report on the Rowes had reached Ireland and was approved at diocesan level. One of the nuns at St Clare’s wrote to say they hoped ‘very soon to be in a position to choose a baby girl for you’. Two weeks later, on 13 May 1960, she wrote again, just a ten line impersonal note: ‘I now enclose a photograph of a baby girl who would be available for you if you would like to have her.’ The baby’s name was Marion. She had been born on 1 June 1959. By the time formalities were completed she would be over one year old and eligible to leave the country for adoption. She had suffered from gastro-enteritis in early infancy but had made a full recovery. Marion’s mother was ‘unmarried but comes from a respectable family and is well educated’.

  That was the sum total of the information available to the Rowes, on which they had to decide whether or not to adopt the infant Marion, whom of course they had never seen. This was strictly babies by mail-order. The description of the mother as ‘unmarried but respectable and well educated’ was the formula repeated by the nuns in virtually every case. It conveyed no impression whatever of the kind of person the mother was. There was no mention of the child’s father. The circumstances in which the baby had been placed for adoption were not mentioned. There was no family medical history. The list of missing information could go on and on, but the Rowes weren’t asking questions. After years of fruitless searching for a child America they were unlikely at this stage to put obstacles in the way by asking for further information or appearing aw
kward. They replied by cablegram: ‘Baby wanted. Send soon as possible. Love her already’. They would be ‘counting the minutes until she arrives’. They would also be counting the dollars.

  The Rowes’ acceptance of baby Marion was acknowledged with a bill for £50 ‘for expenses’ from St Clare’s. The bill – equivalent, in relation to average Irish wages, to €4,800 in today’s money – was not itemised, and it is difficult to imagine what it might have related to since the only expenses incurred by the nuns at this point in their dealings with the Rowes were for postage on three airmail letters and a photograph of baby Marion. And Marion discovered in later life that all expenses arising from her birth and stay at Castlepollard had been paid by her natural father, so the money wasn’t to cover that either. But even if her father hadn’t paid, the local authority would have done so.

  The 1952 Adoption Act had made it a criminal offence to charge money for arranging an adoption. Receipted expenditure on such things as lawyers’ fees, transport costs and so on could legitimately be passed on to the adopters – and in the Rowes’ case, were, in full, at a later date. But the Rowes still weren’t asking any questions, and on receipt of the bill immediately sent a Sterling draft for £50, payable directly to St Clare’s and encashable at the Munster and Leinster Bank in Stamullen. St Clare’s acknowledged receipt of the money by return post. Marion – or Maureen as she now is – says she discovered in later life that the first cheque was followed by several others which her adoptive parents described as donations.

  That was all it took. Baby Marion was assigned to Mr and Mrs Rowe. The future course of all their lives had been determined by a brief exchange of letters and the payment of £50 (€4,800). All that remained to be done now was the completion of formal paperwork, such as passport and visa applications, and baby Marion would be ready to go.