Politics

Q&A: What is an illegal adoption, and was the State aware of the practice?

New report recommends a formal inquiry into illegal birth registrations

Illegal adoptions happen when a birth certificate is falsified to register a child as having been born to his or her adoptive parents. Photograph: iStock

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Jennifer Bray
Mon Mar 14 2022 - 15:45

A new report into illegal adoptions in Ireland has recommended the establishment of a formal inquiry, after it found the State was aware of the practice for decades. So what exactly are illegal adoptions, and what rectification does the report propose?

What is an illegal adoption?
Illegal adoptions – or more accurately illegal birth registrations – happen when a birth certificate is falsified to register a child as having been born to his or her adoptive parents. The practice has been a criminal offence in Ireland since 1874.

How did these come to light?
In his report to Government, the special rapporteur for children Conor O'Mahony points out that the State was aware that this practice was likely to have began as far back as the 1950s. The most recent cases came to light in 2018 when Tusla, the child and family agency, told the Department of Children that at least 126 children adopted through St Patrick's Guild Adoption Society had been the subject of an illegal birth registration. The number of confirmed cases has since risen to 151. These cases were found when a suspicious marker "adopted at birth" was found on the files in question and investigated.

What was the Government's response in 2018?
An independent review sampled records held by Tusla and the Adoption Authority of Ireland. From the sample it was extrapolated that up to 20,000 adoption records could potentially relate to cases of illegal birth registration. Further investigation was recommended, and the special rapporteur was asked to examine the issue and report back to Government with proposals for the next steps.

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What does the rapporteur's report say about the State's role?
To summarise, the report found that State authorities in the 1950s and 1960s consciously turned a blind eye to the practice of illegal birth registration. When another case arose in the early 1990s, "no effective action was taken by the State" to "further investigate the practice of illegal birth registrations associated with St Patrick's Guild with a view to establishing the scale of the problem, correcting the register of births or [most importantly] notifying the individuals affected". The report says that even after an initial audit was completed by the Adoption Authority of Ireland in June 2011, which identified at least 120 potential cases of illegal birth registration, a more comprehensive audit was not progressed. It remains unclear how many illegal birth registrations have taken place.

Will it be possible to find out the true extent of the practice?
Turning to this very issue, the rapporteur makes it clear that doing nothing is not an option. The report points out that time is precious for the people affected. The problem is that reviewing all 150,000 files would take a huge amount of resources – which could be found – but more crucially, a very long time, possibly years, by which stage living relatives may have died. Money alone is not enough: adoption tracing is a specialised task. Some records are fragmented and others may not yield answers. Because of this, the report has recommended a targeted, two-pronged approach. A specialist team will carry out a review the files already flagged by Tusla as suspicious and will also provide expedited reviews for anyone who holds a reasonable suspicions that they may have been the subject of an illegal birth registration.

What other recommendations does the report make?

The report highlights how some 50,000 files remain in private ownership and acknowledges concerns from a previous review that there may be a higher level of irregularity in the private sector. These records should be brought together by the State and the specialist team should carry out an initial examination which could then lead to a more detailed investigation if it is warranted.

The report also recommends a formal State inquiry. What form could this take?
Mr O'Mahony points out that recent commissions of investigation have been slow, long-running affairs, and "appear to have become excessively legalistic and over-cautious in their approach to witness testimony". And although commissions may have more powers to compel witnesses and the production of documents, Mr O'Mahony points to the report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes which, he says, "made relatively few adverse findings against organisations or the State [and none against individuals] in spite of voluminous evidence indicative of extensive human rights abuses". For this and many other reasons, the report recommends a non-statutory inquiry operating under a truth commission model. As the report points out, several prominent truth commissions have prioritised the truth of what happened to those whose rights were violated over accountability for those violations.