Molly and Victor Rock have rocked the system and been victorious. On August 22nd, they adopted a three-year-old Russian boy. It had been only two months since they were rejected as adoptive parents by the Eastern Health Board, on May 25th. After an interview with Molly Rock in The Irish Times in June, in which she accused the board of being "vindictive", the Adoption Board overturned the Eastern Health Board's decision, enabling the Rocks to adopt.
The Rocks' happy ending is significant for the International Adoption Association, which has long complained against what it claims are five-year waits for adoption assessment in the Eastern Health Board (EHB) area. Civil unrest is being considered by the association, whose members will "lay down in the streets" if the Government does not act quickly to speed the adoption process, according to a spokesman. He also alleged that behind the board's slow progress there lies a reluctance to facilitate international adoptions.
Having walked through fire on behalf of not only themselves, but all prospective adoptive parents, Molly and Victor Rock are deservedly ecstatic with their new arrival, an adorable blond-haired, brown-eyed boy whom Molly describes as puppy-like in his appreciation of affection and kindness. Ben Rock eats all the time, because he has never tasted anything as delicious as his new favourite food, bananas, having been nourished since babyhood by dull soups and bread. The smiling boy chatters away in Russian, although he has wasted no time in learning to call Molly "Mummy". "We could not have made him better ourselves," says Molly proudly. Ben was born Sergei to an 18-year-old single mother who left him in hospital when he was six days old. He spent the first formative years of his life as one of 170 babies and children under the age of four at the well-run Borivichi orphanage in Knovgorod, between Moscow and St Petersburg. He is the 10th child to be adopted by Irish parents from the Borivichi orphanage, where adoption is viewed positively. Like 70 other Irish couples, Molly and Victor achieved the adoption with the help of the Frank Foundation, based in North Carolina. They paid the foundation $15,000 (about £12,000) in exchange for flights, accommodation, interpreters, introductions and legal documentation necessary for the adoption.
Behind the Rocks' joy is a saga of health board bureaucracy and delay, which ultimately led to two independent investigations; one by Barnardos, conducted last spring, found a lack of trust between parents and revealed that one social worker took much longer than others to complete assessments. The second report, submitted by the Department of Social Policy at UCD in July, recommended a streamlining of the assessment process, shortening it to 12-15 months.
The Rocks applied for assessment in January 1997 and were rejected by the board on May 25th, 1999, two and a half years later. Prior to their rejection by the board, Molly and Victor had publicly complained on RTE's Kenny Live that the assessment procedure was too lengthy and that their social worker was hostile. When the couple were rejected by the board on May 25th, Molly and Victor refused to accept their verdict. On July 6th, the Adoption Board reviewed the case, asking Molly why she thought she had been turned down. "Because I complained about a bad system," she told them. The Adoption Board backed her up.
Following negative publicity from the International Adoption Association about EHB handling of adoption assessments, the board was given £213,000 by the Minister for Health to pay for five additional social workers and two administrators. Last month, the EHB recruited five additional social workers in the UK - it already had eight - to work exclusively in the area of adoption, according to an EHB spokeswoman.
The IAA is awaiting these improvements with some scepticism. It maintains that the EHB has had the lowest productivity of all health boards in adoption assessments. There are 350 couples queuing and 150 in the process of assessment, according to figures supplied to the IAA by the EHB in June, 1999. The largest number of assessments completed in one year by the EHB - 74 - was in 1998. One hundred new applications for adoption assessment were received in the six months to June of 1999. At its 1998 productivity level, it will be five years before these couples begin their assessment, which itself takes up to a further year. When this was put to the EHB by The Irish Times, the board initially claimed that it had completed 113 adoption assessments between January and the end of August 1999, which is well up on the 1998 rate. However, when the board was challenged on this figure - about which the IAA was sceptical - it clarified the figure as 112, explaining that of these, 69 applications were approved, four were not approved and 39 applications were withdrawn. The 39 withdrawals may inflate the figure and certainly explains the disparity between 74 assessments last year and 112 this year. Last year's figure of 74 assessments (69 approved and five not approved) did not include of withdrawn applications.
THE IAA, which represents some 500 couples who have adopted or wish to adopt abroad, is not reassured by this latest misunderstanding, which has added to what Barnardo's called "a lack of trust" between the EHB and prospective adoptive parents.
The IAA is calling on Frank Fahey, Minister of State at the Department of Health with special responsibility for children, "to act decisively to help the hundreds of couples queuing for an assessment of their suitability as adoptive parents. Given the evident problems in obtaining a timely and professional service from some health boards, especially the EHB, there is only one credible way to deal with the problem, which is for the Minister to enter discussions with the Adoption Board to allow licences to be issued to new adoption agencies to carry out suitability assessments on Irish couples".
"The IAA is aware that two organisations at least have applications before the Adoption Board for a licence to carry out adoption assessments," the association says.
The IAA is concerned that the UCD report, while revealing the low productivity of the EHB compared with other health boards, offered no explanation. The report showed that, while the EHB completed no assessment in less than 18 months, 60 per cent of other health board assessments were concluded in that time. After 23 months, the EHB had completed only 22 per cent of assessments, whereas 92 per cent of assessments in other health boards were finished.
"How can it be that the EHB, with the lion's share of the funds and the bulk of the social workers - carries out so few assessments? We are still waiting to find out," said an IAA spokesman.
The IAA is holding a meeting of its members in Dublin, Kildare and Wicklow in the Glen Royal Hotel in Maynooth on Saturday at 11 a.m.
