Frances Fitzgerald: I Saw Baby Dossier in 2011

By Conall O Fatharta
Irish Examiner
June 12, 2014

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Former children’s minister Frances Fitzgerald has admitted she read a dossier in 2011 calling for an inquiry into mother-and-baby homes, vaccine trials and illegal adoptions.

Ms Fitzgerald is coming under pressure to explain why she failed to act on the issue during her three years in office.

The 131-page dossier prepared by the Adoption Rights Alliance (ARA) called for a statutory inquiry into the homes, vaccine trials carried out in them and the scale of forced and illegal adoptions arranged in such institutions.

“During their time in the mother-and-baby homes, these women and girls were treated in a sub-human fashion, often denied adequate medical care or pain relief while giving birth. The women were also forced to carry out tough manual labour, whether they were pregnant or not. After their time was up (sometimes before) their babies were taken from them and sent for adoption, sometimes to America,” said the report.

The ARA dossier referred to children of unmarried mothers being treated as “guinea pigs” for vaccine trials which if they occurred in China, the Government “would clamber to be the first to issue condemnation”.

ARA also hit out at the Adoption Authority (AAI) as having “repeatedly refused to deal with the issue of illegal adoptions” pointing to a personal commitment by chairman Geoffrey Shannon in November 2010 to deal with the issue, which was contradicted by then registrar Kiernan Gildea later that month who said the authority had no plans to investigate the issue.

Ms Fitzgerald admitted yesterday she had read the dossier and said she had done “a huge amount of work” in bringing records together and in bringing about a more active approach to information and tracing for adopted people.

Despite promising new legislation in 2011, no heads of bill has yet been published.

The Irish Examiner revealed this week that no full-scale audit of the tens of thousands of adoption files held by the State has ever been undertaken.

This is despite the fact that HSE has admitted some files contain evidence of illegal birth registrations and that certain adoption agencies admitted they facilitated illegal adoptions.

As recently as February of this year, then children’s minister Ms Fitzgerald confirmed no audit of the files was planned.

The Adoption Authority carried out an audit of files it held in 2010, following the Irish Examiner’s investigation into the case of Tressa Reeves. It uncovered evidence of 50 illegal adoptions and reported this to the Department of Children.