Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business (2 page)

Perhaps by retelling this story in these changed times its impact will be greater and the taboo on naming adoption as part of the spectrum of Church-State abuse will be broken. In the interest of all those who suffered – the children and their natural mothers – it is certainly to be hoped so.

PART I
Church and State

Prologue
A Surprise for the Wife

It was the 12th of July 1949 when wealthy American businessman Rollie William McDowell flew into Ireland with his personal attorney Michael Ebeling. Their arrival attracted no particular attention, but the same could not be said of their departure some two weeks later.

Forty-year-old McDowell, whose ancestors were Irish, had made his money as a property dealer in St Louis, Missouri, but he wasn’t in Ireland in pursuit of real estate. He had come in pursuit of a child. More specifically, he and his attorney had come to investigate the possibility of obtaining a child from an Irish orphanage. If the signs were hopeful McDowell intended sending for his wife, Thelma, who was waiting to hear from him back in St Louis, so they could search together for a suitable infant. The McDowells were realistic. They expected to be in Ireland for quite a while, knowing that adoption, especially inter-country adoption, was likely to be a long, slow process. Yet just two weeks after his arrival in the country, Rollie McDowell returned home, disembarking at New York’s La Guardia airport from the Trans World Airlines flight from Ireland. ‘Never far from his sight,’ according to the
New York Times,
‘were Patricia Frances, four months old, and Michael James, four years old, recently of the Braemar House Orphanage in Cork.’

‘I found the children at the first orphanage we went to and they were the first children I saw,’ a proud and beaming McDowell told a reporter at the airport. ‘I liked the girl right away. Then Michael James came over and put his arms around me and said, “I like you,” and he kissed me. He was so very affectionate,’ McDowell went on, ‘I liked him right away. I suppose you can say he adopted me.’ Within days of his first encounter with the children McDowell had taken custody of them. Now, back at La Guardia airport, Rollie McDowell had just enough time to phone Thelma and ask her to meet him when his connecting flight arrived at St Louis at 4pm. He didn’t mention the fact that he had two children in tow. ‘How nice it is to surprise your wife occasionally,’ remarked the
New York Times,
without a hint of irony.
¹

The remarkable story of Rollie McDowell’s effortless acquisition and removal of two Irish children was syndicated to newspapers across America, complete with beguiling photographs of the two infants. Fortunately, perhaps, Michael’s bright green trousers and cap weren’t revealed by the black and white newsprint. But for the American media this was an unashamedly happy story, almost a fairytale come true: two little Irish waifs rescued from a life of poverty and misery by a wealthy benefactor who would give them a chance in life for which anyone in their position would be eternally grateful.

In acquiring two children for immediate shipment to the United States, Mr McDowell had broken no laws. Yet the fact that the whole business had been conducted without his wife’s involvement – let alone knowledge – indicated that no one with responsibility for the children’s welfare had bothered to investigate the would-be adoptive parents and their motives, nor the circumstances in which the children would live and be reared in the States. The Braemar Orphanage may have had day-to-day responsibility for the two children, but as citizens of the new Irish Republic, declared just a few months earlier, ultimate liability for their well-being rested squarely with the State as represented by the Government of the day. But the Government, as we shall see, was reluctant to curtail a babies-for-export affair that was primarily the preserve of the Catholic Church.

Rollie McDowell, of course, was just one of many. Close on his heels came US naval airman Eugene Perry. In November 1949 Perry returned from a European posting to his home in California accompanied by two Irish infants, three-year-old James Kearney and two-year-old Mary Dillon, whom he had obtained from the mother-and-baby home run by the Sacred Heart nuns at Castlepollard in County Westmeath. Like many American armed forces personnel who were acquiring babies from Ireland at this time, Perry had made contact with the nuns through a Catholic military chaplain with Irish connections. Like Rollie McDowell, Perry had made the journey to and from Ireland unaccompanied by his wife. Perry’s story, too, received much publicity. One newspaper described the children as ‘Irish war orphans’.
²
Another spoke of them as ‘tousled redheads with eyes big as dollars’.
³
A third waxed lyrical about the ‘beautiful but homeless orphans’ who departed from ‘the little convent of Sacred Heart… through the streets in a donkey cart’.
⁴
The Castlepollard home was, in fact, an ugly purpose-built institution of 1930s vintage, but that wasn’t going to interfere with a colourful story. And the language got even more saccharine. It was, said one paper, as if ‘... a faery crept through the darkened streets of Castlepollard and through the convent gates and into the convent itself and waved a magic wand and whispered: you shall fly through the air and over an ocean and across a great new land’. From then on it was a story of ‘great winged planes’ and ‘endless Irish laughter’.
⁵

Rollie McDowell and Eugene Perry made the headlines – but only in America. Their exploits were barely mentioned in Ireland where the steadily growing practice of sending children abroad for adoption was not a matter of any significant public debate or comment. Yet it was a practice that had been going on for a number of years before McDowell’s well-publicised coup of 1949, and it was set to continue, without interruption, until the 1970s, by which time thousands of babies, virtually every one of them born to an unmarried mother, had been exported. When this baby trafficking finally faded out its passing was as unremarked as its beginning, and another twenty-five years were to elapse before the story of Ireland’s banished babies finally hit the headlines of the Irish newspapers.

When it did – in 1996 – the facts were initially unclear and tangled, while those who knew the truth kept silent. It was a long time before the realisation dawned that the practice of sending ‘illegitimate’ children to America for adoption had been a highly organised affair rather than a series of random acts by unconnected individuals.

1. A Happy Hunting Ground

‘Almost 500 babies were flown from Shannon for adoption last year.’

The Irish Times, 8 October 1951

‘It would be interesting to know how The Irish Times obtained the figure.’

Department of External Affairs, internal memo

The children involved in Ireland’s transatlantic adoptions were frequently referred to as ‘orphans’, and the institutions they came from as ‘orphanages’, yet almost without exception they were the children of unmarried mothers – ‘illegitimate’ children in the stigmatising language of the day. A review of 330 foreign adoption cases in 1952, for instance, revealed that 327 of the children were ‘illegitimate’ and only three were orphans.
¹
What was more, 99 out of every 100 were the children of Catholic mothers; children with few rights in Irish law, and little hope of acceptance in Catholic Irish society. The practice of dispatching such children abroad began at a time when there was no legal adoption in Ireland, but it continued for 20 years after adoption was introduced in 1953.

The export of ‘illegitimate’ children to America was organised by nuns, with full official sanction. It was regulated by the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles

McQuaid, and facilitated by the State, with the Department of External Affairs issuing passports so the children could be taken out of the country. As far as possible the whole business was conducted in conditions of secrecy – on orders from McQuaid himself – and although individual government ministers were well aware of what was going on, the matter was only discussed once, and briefly, by the full cabinet. It was rarely mentioned in the Irish press, although foreign papers reported and commented on it from time to time. The civil servants who were involved lived in constant fear of awkward parliamentary questions or an angry public outcry. When Archbishop McQuaid asked the Department of External Affairs in November 1951 about the number of ‘adoption passports’ being issued, the secretary of the Department suggested to his Minister, Frank Aiken, that they could tell McQuaid the number was an ‘official secret’.
²

In fact, the true number of ‘illegitimate’ children sent across the Atlantic may never be known. No one was counting before American businessman Rollie McDowell’s visit in July 1949. From then onwards the American embassy in Dublin kept a record of entry visas issued to such children
³
and from the end of 1950 onwards the Department of External Affairs kept a tally of adoption passports issued. These official figures suggest that around 2,100 children were sent to America between July 1949 and the end of 1973, but there is no record of the numbers before 1949. The earliest post-war reference to a child going to America for adoption is November 1947, but there may have been many before that.
⁴
Nor is there any way of knowing how many children were taken or sent illegally. What newspaper reports there are from the time certainly put the number of children being dispatched across the Atlantic at a much higher level than is acknowledged in the official figures.
The Irish Times
, for example, reported in October 1951 that ‘almost 500 babies were flown from Shannon for adoption’ in 1950, while already, it said, in the first nine months of 1951, ‘that number is believed to have been exceeded’.
⁵
The same report referred to 18
parties
of children leaving Shannon in
one week
in October 1951, yet official figures reveal just nine adoption passports issued for the whole month of October, and just 122 for the whole year of 1951, a small fraction of the ‘almost 500’ reported by the newspaper.
⁶
The Irish Times’
article was read with interest – but with no apparent surprise or explicit disagreement – by the officials in the Department of External Affairs who were issuing the passports. Their sole response was a brief internal memo: ‘It would be interesting to know how
The Irish Times
obtained the figure.’
⁷

Whatever the numbers, the easy availability of Irish children for removal abroad, particularly when it was prominently reported as in the McDowell and Perry cases, helped paint a picture of Ireland abroad not unlike the image the Irish themselves would come to hold of Romania, China, Russia, Vietnam and other countries where they went in search of babies to adopt in later years: a pathetic and brutal country, teeming with abandoned and desperate children just waiting to be scooped up by more enlightened and kindly souls, and removed from their misery with a minimum of fuss. Regrettably, such an image of Ireland was not entirely unjustified.

The decade after World War Two was probably the most desolate and gloomy period in modern Irish history. As a wartime neutral, the country was cut off from progressive post-war developments in Europe, and isolation simply made the country more conservative than it already was. Ireland was a solidly Catholic country and the Church’s authority was unquestioned, at least in public. It was still a predominantly rural society as well. Church and State were as one in their determination to enforce a deeply traditional moral code, and in the process they displayed what many would see today as an unhealthy obsession with matters sexual, seeking to extend their authority into the bedrooms of the nation. Artificial birth control was outlawed and chastity was demanded of everyone who wasn’t married.

Today almost a quarter of all families in Ireland are headed by a single parent – most of them unmarried mothers – but in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, single parent families, other than those headed by widows or widowers, were virtually unknown. Unmarried couples did not live together, with or without children. ‘Illegitimate’ children, with few exceptions, were consigned to ‘orphanages’. And the orphanages were bursting at the seams, for despite the confining Puritanism of the times, premarital and extramarital sex were far from uncommon. Nowadays, when around 25,000 children are born each year to unmarried women in Ireland (amounting to 34% of all births in 2010), the figures from years past may seem small, at between one and two thousand annually. But it all added up, and the fact that more than 100,000 Irish children were born outside marriage between 1920 and the mid-1970s – when the stigma lessened – seems adequate enough testimony to the hypocrisy of the times.
⁸
Countless thousands more ‘illegitimate’ children were born to young, unmarried women who fled to England to hide their shame. They were so numerous they earned the nickname ‘PFI’ – Pregnant From Ireland.

There was scarcely a family in 1940s, ‘50s or ‘60s Ireland that didn’t have a relative, friend or acquaintance who either got pregnant out of wedlock or fathered an ‘illegitimate’ child. Yet it was a taboo subject, never discussed in polite company and if mentioned at all then only in hushed tones of holy indignation. An appalling stigma attached to ‘illegitimacy’. Having a child outside marriage was regarded as an unspeakably scandalous act. The mother was seen as a wicked sinner and her child a tainted outcast. Father Cecil Barrett, head of the Catholic Social Welfare Bureau, and Archbishop McQuaid’s closest adviser on such matters, described single mothers as ‘fallen women’ and ‘grave sinners’ with severe ‘moral problems’. Their children were the victims of ‘wickedness’.
⁹
Humanitarian or material assistance, Barrett maintained, ‘may be of no avail, unless the rents in the mother’s spiritual fabric have been repaired’.
¹⁰
Another Catholic writer described ‘natural’ children as ‘rebels’ who ‘suffer from complexes analogous to those of certain invalids’. They were ‘destined for suffering and often for failure’, while ‘the girl who gives birth to one of them takes upon herself the responsibility for these evils’.
¹¹