Couples applying to adopt foreign children will have to contribute towards the £4,000 cost of their health board assessment if the proposals in a new report are adopted.
The recommendation is included in a study of how the health boards assess such couples. It was carried out for the Department of Health and Children by Dr Valerie O'Brien and Dr Valerie Richardson of UCD. It also recommends that the maximum age gap between the child being adopted and the oldest member of the couple should be 42 years.
It found that one-fifth of assessments are completed within a year but that as many as one third take between two and three years.
In 1998, 198 couples were cleared to adopt, but 481 couples were on a waiting list for assessments at the end of that year.
Clearing the backlog would cost an extra £2.7 million a year for three years, Dr Richardson told a press conference yesterday. The Minister of State for Children, Mr Frank Fahey, said £500,000 extra was being provided this year to tackle the waiting lists and he would be going to Government to seek further funding for the future.
Mr Fahey said yesterday he is in favour of charging to raise money to fund the service. The charge would be related to the couple's income, and people who could not pay would not have to. The report says that if the standardised assessment procedure it is recommending is implemented, the cost of an assessment will be between £3,750 and £4,380.
The new procedure would reduce the hours involved in assessments and increase the annual number of assessments completed by each social worker from 11 to between 18 and 24. The report notes that for domestic adoptions there is normally an age limit of 38 years for men and 35 years for women.
There is no such limit for foreign adoptions, and persons up to 57 years of age were passed by the Adoption Board in 1998. It suggests that for foreign adoptions the oldest partner should not be more than 42 years older than the child. But Mr Fahey said he did not want strict limits.
The International Adoption Association gave a guarded welcome to the report. It said the proposed three-year implementation period "means the report will do nothing for couples facing many years of further delay". It wants new adoption agencies licensed to carry out assessments so as to eliminate the backlog.