Precarious Childhood in Post-Independence Ireland by Moira Maguire

Author:Moira Maguire [Maguire, Moira]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Great Britain, Ireland, Europe, Children's Studies, Social Services & Welfare, Social Policy, Social Science, Political Science, History, General
ISBN: 9781847797599
Google: bWW5DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2013-07-19T12:49:51+00:00

Exporting the “problem”: American adoptions of Irish children

For many illegitimate Irish children, adoption by an American family under American adoption laws provided the only alternative to institutional life or an insecure informal adoption or fostering arrangement in Ireland. The legality of sending Irish children out of the state for adoption under foreign laws was scarcely questioned by those involved in the process; civil servants and Catholic agencies were concerned only that the children in question were sent to “good” Catholic homes. Indeed, the hierarchy and civil servants were so concerned with the Catholic question that they refused to allow children to be removed to Northern Ireland or England for adoption lest they fall into the hands of Protestant families or proselytizers.55 On the surface, those involved in the unofficial adoption scheme expressed reservations about the wisdom of sending children out of the state for adoption. In fact, however, it was an ideal solution for most of the parties concerned.

Margaret Humphreys and Gillian Wagner have examined the practice, from the 1870s to the 1950s, of sending “unwanted” children from orphanages and industrial schools in Britain to institutions and families in the farthest reaches of the empire, both as a means of disposing of the “problem” at home and perpetuating a white, British population throughout the empire.56 Orphaned and abandoned children (some of whom were Irish-born) who came into state care became pawns in Britain’s late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century empire-building strategies. Similarly, the institutionalization or overseas adoption of Irish children served as a counterweight to the “paganism” and “liberalism” allegedly inherent in British colonial rule, and protected innocent Irish children from the “evil” clutches of proselytizers even as it denied them constitutional rights and individual identities. The removal of children from their homes and families also helped to protect the veneer of “respectability,” piety, and morality that supposedly distinguished the native Irish government’s rule from that of the former Protestant colonizer. The ends may have differed, but the politicization of definitions and policies relating to childhood in Ireland mirrored those elsewhere in Europe in spite of early nationalist leaders’ insistence on the importance and value of children in the life of the new state.

For religious orders, who operated the mother and baby homes and “adoption” societies from which the majority of children were adopted, overseas adoptions solved an accommodation problem that often reached crisis proportions when babies were born or admitted faster than they could be boarded-out or sent to industrial schools. Sending children to America also relieved local authorities of the financial burden of maintaining them in industrial schools, extern institutions, or foster homes. The only player who did not win, in the official sense, was the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA). Because of its role in issuing passports to facilitate the removal of children from Ireland, the DFA left itself open to allegations that it encouraged and indeed fostered emigration at a time when the Irish population was in a steady decline due to low birth rates and high emigration.

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