The battle for Irish babies' souls: 'It ruined two lives, hers and mine'

• Date: 20 March 2021
• Author: Jennifer O'Connell
• Published date: 20 March 2021
• Publication title: Irish Times: Web Edition Articles (Dublin, Ireland)

It is a measure of the long shadows cast by Ireland's troubled history of adoption that, at the age of 80, Derek Leinster still hesitates when you ask him what his name is.

His mother's name was Leinster. But he also goes by Linster, which is how it was depicted on some of his documents. There were other names in his childhood – Trainer, the family to whom he was fostered in early childhood. Later, from the age of four until 18, he was Derek Carway, the name of the family who arranged to adopt him out of the Bethany Home.

When the papers giving him up for informal adoption were being finalised "they put down both names, Linster and Leinster". He does not believe this was a mistake. "That was done by my mother's mother because she didn't want me finding my way back" to the family home, he says. In the end, for the purposes of this article, he opts for Leinster.

The confusion over his name is symbolic of the battle for identity still being fought by the generations of people who came through Ireland's murky system of dealing with the children of unmarried mothers.

As the dust settles on the Mother and Baby Homes Commission report and the Reynolds review into birth registrations – which found that up to 20,000 files could potentially relate to irregular registrations – it is clear that Ireland's reckoning with this aspect of its past still has some way to go.

There is a growing clamour for the right of adopted people for full access to the records that are often the key to their identity. Survivors and activists are asking how much of the reluctance to give adopted people access is rooted in fear of what those records might show.

The commission report, which was published in January, found that "adoption, whether informal prior to 1953, or legal from 1953, or foreign, was a very significant exit pathway for children in the institutions". Controversially, it found that there was "very little evidence" of "forced adoption" between 1922 and 1988, although it adds elsewhere that "mothers did not have much choice but that is not the same as forced adoption".

And it adds that it "has no doubt that, whatever the shortcomings of the legal adoption system, it was preferable to placing children in industrial schools or to boarding out or placing at nurse".

Adoption in many ways is too tidy a term for a lot of what actually took place. Both prior to and alongside legal adoptions, there were unregulated or informal adoptions; foreign adoptions; the practices of boarding out and nursing out; non-consensual or forced adoptions; illegal adoptions; and ostensibly legal adoptions under which illegal acts were carried out.

Buried beneath that "preferable", wrapped up in the turgid, legalistic language of the nearly 3,000-page report, are stories of family ties severed, identities concealed, paperwork falsified, children simultaneously neglected and treated like assets of their churches, or commodities to be exported abroad, their mothers regarded as dispensable. And, to this day, records withheld from adult survivors.

The State and both Catholic and Protestant-ethos institutions participated in the system of unregulated adoptions that took place prior to 1953, and sometimes long afterwards. After adoption was legalised, the official system continued to be characterised by ambiguities, loopholes exploited and blind eyes turned.

If there was a hierarchy of concerns about adoption by the authorities during those years, religious considerations were on top, followed by the rights of adoptive parents, followed by concerns for the welfare of the children. The rights of natural parents were recognised in legislation, the report notes, but did not seem to loom large in practice.

To understand how the system was allowed to operate as it did – unregulated throughout the 1940s, and frequently with little regard for children's welfare – requires revisiting the social and religious attitudes of the time.

It was not simply that polite society wanted so-called "illegitimate" children – to use terminology only rendered redundant in the 1990s – out of sight, but that these children were seen as the property of their respective churches, both Catholic and Protestant. Their day-to-day wellbeing may not have been keeping the authorities awake at night, but the integrity of their souls was the subject of much hand-wringing.

Derek Leinster's story

"You don't have to be a Catholic to be listened to as a victim of institutional abuse, but it seems to help. That is my experience as a Protestant victim of institutional neglect," wrote Derek Leinster in an op-ed for this newspaper, published in 2009.

The story that he told in that article and subsequently in letters and articles published in The Irish Times and elsewhere, and in the two...