Book Review

Banished Babies: The secret history of Ireland's baby export business
By Mike Milotte.
Published by New Island Books.
Price =A37.99.

Reviewed by Michael MacDonncha

(This article first appeared in the Summer 1997 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)

In the year 1965 a brief encounter took place in the corridors of Leinster House between a priest and a TD. The priest was there to plead for leniency towards a wealthy woman in Dublin who ran an institution, St Rita's, where adoptions were organised illegally. When he learned of the reason for the priest's visit the TD laughed and said: "Sure half the children born at St Rita's were fathered by members of the D=E1il!"

It is a striking and in some ways chilling snapshot of the system which held sway in Ireland up to the 1970s. The extraordinary story told in this book is full of the hypocrisy of church and state with single mothers and children as the victims. While unemployment forced young people abroad, politicians and churchmen deplored emigration and passed pious resolutions about bringing it to an end. At the same time they were sanctioning the sale of Irish babies to wealthy American couples, exporting the children they deemed 'illegitimate'.

The church's obsession with sexual morality and its desire to impose its code on state and society, meant women who conceived outside marriage were treated as strumpets, their children as bastards. This bigotry was a relatively new phenomenon in Ireland, a product of the puritanical Roman Catholicism of the late nineteenth century.

Posing as protectors of these women and children, orders of nuns set up 'homes' where women were held in conditions of virtual imprisonment. Their babies were taken from them soon after birth. They were offered no real choice to keep their children, and in many cases their signatures on 'consent' forms were forged.

When the nuns discovered the huge market for babies in the United States they set about exploiting it. The system was driven not by the needs of the children and their mothers, but by the demand for babies across the Atlantic, the profit the nuns could make from this and the useful side effect of removing undesirable reminders of sin.

Racism also helped. Many wealthy Catholic couples in the US feared babies adopted in the States might have African-American blood and an Irish nun was quoted as saying that "Irish children are pure-blooded." In return for the white babies, big dollars in donations flowed to the religious orders from grateful couples.

Little or nothing was done to check the suitability of the homes to which children were sent. Government ministers and civil servants colluded in this corrupt system and often turned a blind eye to illegalities, including forged birth certificates and dodgy passports.

One of the villains of the piece is the late Fr Michael Cleary. His wealth allowed his clandestine partner to keep his child, but he himself played a nefarious part in separating other young mothers from their children. Presiding over the system was Archbishop McQuaid who ordered a news blackout on the child export trade. It is a measure of his power that this was obeyed by the newspapers.

Mike Milotte shows how Coalition Ministers Austin Currie and Dick Spring have failed to keep their promises to allow total transparency on this scandal. Adoptees who wish to trace their birth mothers still face unreasonable obstacles from Church and State. This is an astonishing story, meticulously told and is an excellent piece of journalism.

(This article appeared in the Summer 1997 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)

Copyright 1997 Michael MacDonncha