Maureen O’Connell, a
deputy of the Dail, responded to allegations that babies were being taken
from England to Ireland then sold for export saying;
‘In three years
523 babies have been sent to America.’
The full extent of
Baby Trafficking in the Republic of Ireland, where the first Adoption Law
was passed in 1959, is still emerging.
Baby Trafficking
in the Republic of Ireland is referred to as ‘Informal Adoption’. In
reality it is the stealing and selling of babies.
Between the 1930’s and
the 1960’s an estimated 60,000 newborns were procured under false pretences
for married couples that had been turned down as prospective adoptive
parents on various grounds.
The perpetrators
of Baby Trafficking broke the law, forged documents, destroyed evidence,
took babies from young mothers on the pretext of arranging legal
adoptions.
Amongst those
implicated are priests, nuns, midwives and nurses who were paid to break the
law and steal babies from their unmarried mothers, then smuggled them to
married couples who brought them up as their own flesh and blood.
Large amounts of
money changed hands to ensure the entire illegal episode was hushed up.
Baby Trafficking was
extremely lucrative, as Kevin Conney of the Adopted Peoples Association in
Dublin explains:
‘A woman
discovered that her ‘adoptive parents’ made a donation of IR£650 to the
local priest, the equivalent of about IR£6,000 today.’
Adult victims of the
Republics Baby Trafficking, some of them shipped to America as babies, faced
a conspiracy of silence and total absence of records when they attempt to
discover their true identity.
Unmarried
mothers whose babies were stolen then sold have no rights and no one is
obliged to help them.
SOURCE |