Sir, - My wife and I appeared recently on Kenny Live and gave an account of our experiences at the hands of the Eastern Health Board foreign adoption unit. In relation to this and other matters, your Editorial of December 15th asserted that "painful as it is, the process [of assessment of adoptive couples] must be undergone". This is precisely where my wife and I "came in", so to speak.
To which process does your editorial refer? It is simply not true for you to state that "individual social workers operate a process which is laid down for them". The Eastern Health Board's procedures of assessment are being constantly evolved and improvised by the very social workers who enact them. We have first-hand knowledge of this. In our direct experience they have themselves overrun certain boundaries of common sense and decency, and we do not believe that they should be absolved from personal responsibility for their actions, either on a moral basis or otherwise. I therefore also take issue with your assertion that "attacking social workers per se is not a way to argue about the validity of certain questions". It seems to me to be the most logical and direct way of doing so.
On the subject of "the validity of certain questions", it is not unreasonable of me to enquire whether a degree in social sciences qualifies a person to probe deeply into the psycho-sexual or psychological functioning or myself or my wife, or to act as our grief counsellor, "couple counsellor" or in any of the other myriad of areas in which the Eastern Health Board social worker seems keen to profess competence. Surely, if one is to be the subject of such intense interrogative procedures, one is entitled to an "expert" in the specific field? But then the question arises as to the criteria by which the Eastern Health Board's current assessment procedure are drawn. Certainly not those of any other Health Board - which does not mean that their assessment procedures are fundamentally unsafe.
There is absolutely no evidence of this.
There is widespread evidence, however, of the systematic abuse of children in institutionalised care, and if the Eastern Health Board feels the need to discharge its social workers to probe so deeply into the psyche of myself and my wife before allowing children into our care, then surely the same vigorous due diligence should be applied to those social workers acting "in loco parentis" in institutional child care services? Not so, say your correspondents Catherine Sherlock and Trish Callan: "It is unacceptable that any professional's personal circumstances and status be called into question to ascertain their competency as a social worker."
So how should we and other adoptive parents interpret this double standard? It calls to mind the ancient maxim: "Quis custodiet custodes ipsos?" ("Who will guard the guards themselves?")
But perhaps the Eastern Health Board social workers know something about adoptive couples that we have yet to discover for ourselves. Yes. Perhaps that is it. And perhaps if my wife and I had each taken degrees in social sciences, then our "competency as social workers" would override the necessity to be assessed as parents?
But then, odd as it may sound, we have no objection to being assessed as parents. We went through it once before. On that occasion, however, we were not being pre-judged as potentially dysfunctional people about to enter into a potentially dysfunctional familial arrangement, the outcome of which is to "provide a service for somebody else's child". It is this "ideology" which, above all, lies at the heart of the problems currently facing adoptive parents and the Eastern Health Board. - Yours, etc., Nigel Warrengreen,
Malahide Marina Village, Malahide, Co Dublin.