THIS is a plea for a practical act of love. Over the last few days, a great many Christians in Ireland will have attended again to the message of the New Testament. The word "love" will have taken on life again in their minds. If we were asked what we mean by "love" - any of us, Christian or not - we would probably point to children and parents. That is love, we would say. That what there is between them.
We could not imagine anyone standing between a parent and a child, and saying to one or the other "I want to prevent you loving. I want to stop love from reaching you." Yet as a society we are doing something like this. We are allowing minor bureaucratic difficulties to stand in the way of children, who were lost to their mothers in the punitive Ireland of recent times, finding their mothers. (The fathers are even more lost again.) And we won't help mothers, who lost children who haunt them, find those children. And those searching people are not looking for much. They're middle aged and old, now. They're not asking for love, now. All they seek is just the bare minimum - the merest shorthand - of what might have been. "You didn't want to give me away, did you?" "Did you think of me, ever?" "Have you been happy?"
There should be a voluntary contact register on which anyone who is searching for a parent, a child, or a sibling, can place the details which would identify them to the other party, if that party, too, is searching. The Department of Health should see to the setting up of such a register. It is all we can do to atone for the past. The country is full of, and will for the next 20 or 30 years be full of, people whose lives were broken by the iron demands of "respectability". There are tens of thousands of adults who grew up in special schools, in other institutions, in foster homes, "boarded out", adopted here, adopted abroad, sent to relatives, passed from this place to that - people who went astray from their families of origin, and who did not count for enough, in the Ireland of the time, to have their progress recorded. Well - the legally adopted 40,000 or so have records. But as many more, perhaps, do not. Those are the people who might get answers to the questions that dominate their lives from a contact register.
WOMEN criss crossed Ireland to give birth in places they never knew the name of. Their babies were given false names, foster mothers' names, numbers, names of other babies. People grew up thinking their mother was dead, their mother was their sister, their mother was in America and would be coming back some day. Documentation was lost or altered. Adults now find that they have been praying at the wrong graves for years. Loss of dignity, now and then, was what thousand upon thousand of Irish women and children were made to pay, so as to keep the bland surface of patriarchal Ireland "respectable". And now, when the mothers and children who survived that secret hell look for each other, they can hardly find each other.
And they are looking. I spent some time last week observing - at a distance which preserved the callers' confidentiality - the Barnardo's adoption "hotline". I could hardly believe my eyes and ears. I have seldom seen a service so over burdened. The main switchboard rings all the time with people who can't get through to the adoption line. Callers sometimes have to try for hours, even days, to talk to one of the counsellors. People ring from offices temporarily empty, from phone boxes where their money runs out, from phones in hallways where they are watching the door in case someone comes. The counsellors barely have time to fill in the logs they keep because every phone rings again as soon as it is put down. And no call can be hurried. Many of the calls have been a long time a lifetime, even in the making.
You can look through the glass of the door of the little room in Barnardo's and see the heads bent over the phones, the hands scribbling details on sheets of paper. Songlines of pain cross in that room. A woman who was 14 when she gave birth, who stayed with the baby two weeks, who last saw him when a man came to collect him ... "He would be making his First Communion now. Is there any way I could gel a photo?" A brother, seeking a sister he thinks was sent by the nuns they lived with to California. "This is urgent, he is in bad health." An old woman who does not know who she is at all: she was reared by a "granny" who told her nothing. A son rings: can he find his birth mother without his adoptive parents being involved? A young woman who won't give any name. No one in the world knows she had a child. But she needs to talk about it. If she went to a Barnardo's support group, could they guarantee no one there would know her?
The people who answer the phones at Barnardo's are trained and experienced. As they have to be, to deal with hour after hour of such inquiries. When the Department of Health does set up a contact register it will have to be staffed by trained people, too. The hearts of ordinary people would break. They would be useless.
All Barnardo's can do is tell people how to go about finding things out themselves. They don't "trace". And they have no records. No one has all the records. The splendid National Archive is trying to compile, as a beginning, a list of all the groups of records which are relevant to children strayed from their origins (not that they have anywhere to put those records, even if they could get their hands on them). But at the moment the situation is chaotic. Sometimes, whether a reunion or even an exchange of information is possible depends on the whim of some elderly individual who has been running their own part of this sad show for decades. The State, after all, left the religious to run all this. Nuns and brothers and priests don't have to answer to anyone about the things they knew, even when they are still in the same work, and findable.
And the latest news on one part of the jigsaw - the almost 2,000 files, recently discovered, on Irish children adopted in America - is not good. Austin Currie, Minister for State with special responsibility for children, refers to "initiating inquiries. . . to ascertain the status of records held" and "the considerable task involved in checking records which are now decades old".
A VOLUNTARY contact register is the only thing that can help when records cannot be consulted, or records do not exist. And such a register could be set up tomorrow. No legislation is needed. All that is needed is a budget and an office and the appointment of a small trained staff. And it should be set up tomorrow. The need for it is now, and will decline. Spring is here. New life is bursting out everywhere. Could not the Government match this natural energy with some energy of its own? Could it not move to honour, for the first time, the deep bonds of physical relationship - bonds which our country treated with such cruel contempt in the past?