UNTIL well into the second half of this century, every Aboriginal child in Australia was legally in the power of a civil servant called the chief protector, who had control, without reference to the courts, over the child's place of residence.

In a policy which has resonances for many Irish people, an uncounted number of indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities, for their "better good". Many of the Aboriginal children became unpaid workers: so did thousands of the "orphans" taken as domestic and farm servants, in the recent past, from Irish homes for unmarried mothers.

A fundamentally contemptuous paternalism, rather than economic convenience, was often the main motive of those who implemented the Australian policy. "I would not hesitate for one moment to separate any half caste from its Aboriginal mother," one travelling in spector wrote, "no matter how frantic her momentary grief might be at the time. They soon forget their offspring." The same view was evidently taken of Irish women who became pregnant outside marriage.

These women were the equivalent of the Aborigines in the eyes of State, church and the broader Irish society. Records are inexact, but approximately 20,000 of their babies were formally or informally adopted, fostered or exported from the State between the 1950s and the 1970s. They are presumed to have forgotten their offspring.

This year Australians could read the report of an inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal children from their families conducted by a distinguished former justice of the High Court, Sir Ronald Wilson.

Countless pitiable documents and testimonies presented to that inquiry show how profoundly wrong the travelling inspector was.

Policies of removal were operating into the 1970s. That means Aboriginal people now in their late 20s and 30s were taken from their families.

"They put us in the police ute [truck] and said they were taking us to Broome," according to one recent account. "They put the mums in there as well. But when we'd gone about 10 miles they stopped and threw the mothers out of the car. We jumped on our mothers' backs, crying, trying not to be left behind. But the policemen pulled us off and threw us back in the car. They pushed the mothers away and drove off, while our mothers were chasing the car, running and crying after us.

The scene is almost a commonplace of the 20th century. Sophie's Choice dramatised such a moment from Nazi Germany. Everywhere a dominant culture has defined another as inferior, children have been forcibly removed from their mothers.

Inuit children were forcibly relocated by the Canadian government in the 1950s. Native American children were and are taken for the "better good" by white families. The Swiss government has paid compensation to Romany victims of child removal. The closest parallel in Ireland is the removal of more than 2,000 babies from Irish "orphanages" to the US.

"They were `illegitimate' children, in the stigmatising language of the day," as a recent book about this tragedy puts it, with few rights in Irish law and little hope of acceptance in Catholic Irish society.

"The practice of sending such children abroad began at a time when there was no legal adoption in Ireland but continued for 20 years after adoption was introduced in 1953".

"The export was organised by the nuns (who ran mother and baby homes) with full official sanction. It was regulated by the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, and facilitated by the State, with the Department of Foreign Affairs issuing passports so the children could be taken out of the country."

Last year the then minister for foreign affairs addressed this scandal in a speech which shares the language of the Wilson Aboriginal Inquiry. "We have no way of knowing who suffered most in these situations," Mr Dick Spring said, "and we hope that the children involved, at least, went on to have happy and fulfilled lives with their new adoptive parents.

"But we know from some at least of the stories that that wasn't always true, and that some of the children have spent many years trying to find out why they were abandoned, as they saw it".

The Wilson inquiry was told of economic exploitation, widespread sexual abuse and excessive physical punishment of Aboriginal children who had been removed. They were at risk in the homes that took them in but they also often endured harsh institutional conditions, again familiar in Ireland to many of the "orphans" reared in institutions they have since described as terribly cruel.

"We was all huddled up in a room like a little puppy dog on the floor," a characteristic testimony before the Wilson inquiry says. Sometimes at night we'd cry with hunger. We had to scrounge in the town dump, eating old bread, smashing tomato sauce bottles, licking them.

The assumption that the children of deprived or despised parents are "better off" taken from them was often incorrect.

Nor did the effects end with the individual child. They were, the inquiry found, "multiple, continuing and profoundly disabling ... It impaired their parenting and relationships and in turn their children suffer."

The inquiry, after visiting every Australian state and territory, and hearing evidence from 777 individuals and organisations including indigenous people, government and church representatives, former mission staff, as well as foster and adoptive parents, made 54 sweeping recommendations.

Chief among them is that reparation should be made to the injured parents and children, by measures ranging from acknowledgment and apology to monetary compensation.

Many of the recommendations relate to the gathering of relevant records and the provision of access to them.

IN this State, the files concerning the children taken often unlawfully - from their mothers and sent to the US are still closed. The records of the religious orders which ran the baby homes are still their private property.

Barnardos, which provides information and counselling for anyone with a problem relating to adoption, last month closed the extra service it had opened in response to the discovery of the American files, when its grant for that purpose was spent.

"Many of the now elderly birth mothers," Mike Milotte says in his book, "won't live long enough for their adopted children to find them.

There was no inquiry into anything to do with the separation of Irish mothers and babies, and there is no call for an inquiry. The argument of the Wilson inquiry "that as members of the Australian nation we share responsibility for what our nation has done and does" means nothing here.