PETER MURPHY is a full time farmer in the west of Ireland (the name of the family has been changed to protect the identity of the minors). He has five children, four of whom are living with him. The fifth was taken into care shortly after his birth in April 1985.
When Mr Murphy next saw him a year later, doubts had arisen about the parentage of the child and he agreed to him being kept in care for a limited period while his parentage was established. He is still waiting for this question to be resolved.
Mr Murphy's involvement with the Western Health Board began shortly after the birth of his first child. His wife, Mary, suffered from post natal depression and was admitted to the local psychiatric hospital, run by the health board, in 1978.
This marked the beginning of a deterioration in her mental health, which worsened over the years and through successive pregnancies and which led to her being in and out of mental hospital for the rest of her life. She died in 1992. She had five children in all.
It had become clear that due to her ill health, she was unable to look after the children properly and, according to documents supplied to Boyle Circuit Court the family approached the health board for a home help. This was refused. Instead, the board suggested the children go into care.
The three eldest children were briefly in a foster home, returned home and later spent over a year in residential homes in Clifden and Renmore, Co Galway. The home in Clifden has recently become the subject of allegations of abuse.
Mr Murphy visited his children every weekend. He became unhappy with the care they were receiving and, in the summer of 1984, he took them home. He appealed the care order to Boyle Circuit Court in January 1985, and won the appeal. At this hearing various witnesses, including the teachers in the local school, attested to the quality of the care the children were getting at home, their good performance in school and their general wellbeing.
These children and a younger sister have lived with him since. All are still in full time education, one at third level, they are involved in local cultural and sporting activities and give every indication of being happy, well adjusted and high achieving young people.
By the time he won his appeal against this care order, Mrs Murphy was pregnant again and back in a psychiatric hospital. She gave birth to a son in April, 1985.
According to Mr Murphy, the social worker approached him at home and asked him what he was going to do about the baby. He asked if a suitable foster home was available. "I was willing to have him fostered until four to give my wife a chance to recover," he told The Irish Times.
He already had experience of foster care as opposed to residential care, as the youngest of his other four children had been fostered with a local family when she was three weeks old. This had worked well, with the two families remaining in close contact both before and after she returned home as a toddler.
This time the social worker said there was no foster home available and he said he would seek the advice of his wife's GP and obstetrician and be guided by them. They advised that, for the sake of both, mother and baby should be kept together. The obstetrician asked him if he could contribute to the cost of home help, which he agreed to do.
Mr Murphy has made a number of allegations about the attitude of the social worker to him and his wife during this time and her apparent determination to take the child into care come what may.
Under the regulations governing health boards, individual cases cannot be discussed by staff. When contacted by The Irish Times to answer these allegations, the social worker said she could not discuss the case without the permission of the health board.
A spokesman for the board said she could not speak to The Irish Times. He also ascertained that Mr Murphy had agreed to his case being discussed.
Within days of the birth, the health board obtained a Place of Safety Order for the baby from the local district court, enabling it to take him into care temporarily. This stated that he should be kept in hospital for some days before being brought to a foster home about 30 miles away.
When Mr Murphy arrived to bring his wife and young son home from the hospital a month after the child's birth, he found his wife in a distraught state saying the social worker had taken the baby while she was out of the room. "The mother was hysterical, crying out for her child, he said.
To take a child into care permanently, a health board needs a Fit Person Order. When the board applied for this on May 9th, the district justice refused it on the evidence, according to Mr Murphy.
The programme manager for community care in the Western Health Board, Mr Seamus Mannion, said the hearing was adjourned. He said there were five adjournments of the Fit Person Order hearing. According to Mr Mannion, this was "to give him [the father] time to sort things out". He said the adjournments continued until Mr Murphy signed a voluntary care agreement in April 1986.
Mr Murphy gives a different version of the court hearings over the next year. His version of the outcome is supported by the court records.
Meanwhile, some months after the baby was taken, Mrs Murphy heard rumours in the hospital that a child had died in the care of the health board and that it was her child. She was upset, particularly as the child had not been baptised. Various attempts to get the health board to produce the child for baptism came to naught, Mr Murphy said.
A report in the Roscommon Herald of the court hearing on the December 15th adjournment of the Fit Person Order application refers to uncertainty about the child's identity and to the reported death of a baby. According to the newspaper report, Judge Bernard Brennan required the health board social worker present in court to produce a paediatrician on January 15th to give evidence that the child in question was the Murphy child.
According to the records of the district court, the application for the Fit Person Order from the health board was struck out at the next hearing on January 16th, after Judge Brennan had sought proof that this was the Murphy child. But the child was not returned to his family following the striking out of the application.
In March, Mr Murphy was suddenly summoned to the local general hospital to give permission to have this baby treated for meningitis. When he arrived, he found his wife had come from the nearby psychiatric hospital. She was crying and saying the child was not hers, that his complexion and eye colour were different and that he seemed older than he should have been.
Mr Murphy says that at this point the county medical officer said they had been wrong to take the child into care and they should never have done so. This doctor is no longer in this position, but she is still with the health board. When contacted, she said she was unable to discuss the case with The Irish Times.
Mr Murphy expressed to her his doubts about the identity of the child and was offered blood tests. However, the result of the blood tests, a copy of which has been seen by The Irish Times, only states the blood group and rhesus factor of the child's blood, which is not definitive for identification purposes.
He says he asked for more definitive blood tests, but was told he would have to pay for them himself, including the cost of accommodation in Dublin for all three of them while they were being carried out. He refused to do this.
At various times when Mr Murphy sought tests to determine the identity of the child, he was told to pay for them himself. They would have cost, at most, some hundreds of pounds - a lot for a small farmer, but not for a health board. Meanwhile, the board has spent about £24,000 (at today's prices) keeping the child in foster care.
Mr Murphy then decided to place the child in temporary care on a voluntary basis until the question of his identity was cleared up. "When the blood test proved inconclusive, I felt I had no choice but to sign the child into care for three years. In that time I thought we'd have a chance to clarify the blood tests," he says.
He says the county medical officer suggested he visit the foster home to check on the child for himself. He did, in the company of the baby's grandparents, but was refused admittance. He told The Irish Times the foster parents said the child was not his and he did not go back. His visit, but not the doctor's suggestion, has been confirmed by the health board.
Meanwhile, his wife to spend most of her time in the local health board psychiatric hospital, where she died of a drug overdose in 1992. The subsequent inquest failed to establish how she came to take the lethal mixture of drugs which killed her. The health board brought the boy, now seven, to her funeral.
A year later the health board contacted Mr Murphy and invited him to a meeting with a social worker to discuss the child. At this meeting, Mr Murphy, accompanied by his solicitor, suggested that a DNA test be done to establish the child's identity. The board agreed, but only if Mr Murphy paid the costs, though later correspondence suggests reluctance to allow the test.
There the matter rested until it was raised in the Dail by Mrs Maire Geoghegan Quinn in a parliamentary question in October last year. The reply, given privately, refers to a voluntary care agreement being signed by Mr Murphy in April 1985, apparently just after the birth of the child. In fact the order was signed exactly a year later.
Initial inquiries from The Irish Times to the Western Health Board about the case also produced the explanation that the child had been voluntarily placed in care in 1985. When the date on the voluntary care agreement, which has been seen by The Irish Times, was pointed out, the board said Mr Murphy had signed the agreement after a series of adjournments of the Fit Person Order application.
The suggestion was that these adjournments were to allow him to sort things out. In fact, he opposed the order, the judge asked, the health board to produce evidence to support it and, presumably in the absence of such evidence, the application was eventually struck out.
The Western Health Board has also intimated that it is now willing to agree to a DNA test for the boy, if it is assured in advance of Mr Murphy's acceptance of the child if the result is positive.
This has never been in question, according to Mr Murphy: "I'm not rejecting the child. He's always thought of in the house and at Christmas, there's always a place set for him. But the child must know who he is."