Three decades ago, American couples were adopting babies born to single women in mother and baby homes in Ireland. Today, Irish couples pay £10,500 to adopt babies from Russian orphanages - we have, it seems, come full circle. At the same time, as the Adopted People's Association pointed out yesterday, thousands of children are on waiting lists for the services of social workers because there are too few foster parents - partly because many social workers simply have not got the time to carry out the lengthy processing of applications.
It is ironic, to say the least, that the Eastern Health Board, the country's biggest, has more social workers devoted to assessing parents who wish to adopt children abroad than it has in its Fostering Resource Unit. Even at that, the completion of assessments for foreign adoptions can take 18 months to two years. But once they have been assessed as suitable, prospective adopters of Russian babies are on their own.
This is where organisations such as the American-based Adoptions Unlimited come in. For people who have registered with them, they handle the Russian end of the adoptions. Payments required for this and for legal and administrative fees range from £6,600 for a child over six years of age to £10,500 for a child under two years. In other words, the younger the child the higher the fee. Adoptions Unlimited says there are good reasons for this: that those who adopt babies must pay for their care from the time of their birth. This is bound to raise concerns in the minds of observers. So are the complaints from some couples in the United States who are unhappy with their experiences in dealing with Adoptions Unlimited. So too is the fact that one State, New Mexico, told Adoptions Unlimited to stop operating as an adoption agency in its territory and is investigating allegations - denied by the agency - that it breached this instruction.
This is not to say that the people who act for Adoptions Unlimited in Ireland are motivated by anything other than the desire to help others. They themselves adopted a baby through the agency and were happy with the experience. They say they receive no payment whatsoever for the work they do. But it is not good enough, in a matter involving the well-being of children, to leave people shopping around for agencies to help them - especially since the State, through the health boards, assesses the suitability of these very people for adoption.
If we are to have foreign adoptions, the best protection for all concerned is to have the entire process managed by State agencies here - most likely the Adoption Board - and by State agencies in the other countries. Such an arrangement would protect adoptive parents and the children they finally adopt.
There may be additional approaches which could be taken too. Chief among these, as the Adopted People's Association suggests, is an overhaul of the fostering system to make it more attractive. There is, of course, a world of difference between fostering, in which parents are essentially working for the health boards, and adoption which enables people to complete their families. The Minister of State for Children, Mr Fahey, told the Irish Foster Care Association yesterday that he is providing £100,000 to the Eastern Health Board to enable it to clear up a backlog in fostering assessments, and that is surely a step in the right direction. There are no easy answers in this area. The issue of adoption raises the rawest and most painful of emotions.