Couples wanting to adopt are angry that it can take up to four years to be assessed before the search for a baby begins. Róisín Ingle reports
John and Maggie Lynch have been waiting quite a while for seven-month-old Jack who, in between smiling brightly at his parents, is making his presence felt by banging a spoon on the table of a Dublin city-centre hotel. After marrying in 1997, the couple went through three stressful years of IVF treatment before being told they couldn't have children of their own. Six weeks ago the couple travelled to Russia to bring blue-eyed Jack home to Rush, Co Dublin, where they joined the growing ranks of Irish people choosing to adopt children from overseas.
Like many couples in the same position, they faced an 18-month wait for an official response from the time they applied to their local health board. It was a further six months, after going through the standard 12-week education course, before they even saw a social worker.
"It's far too long really," says John, bouncing the baby on his knee. "You are in a kind of limbo for the whole time."
As it turns out the Lynchs were lucky, especially since at age 30 and 32 they were relatively young when starting the adoption process. As others have discovered, there can be a wait of up to four years to be assessed depending on which health board area you live in. After that, applicants can expect to wait another year while they go through the pre-adoption course and strict vetting procedures which may or may not lead to them being deemed eligible to adopt.
If you have a medical problem, are looking to adopt alone or are older than the average applicant, another year or so could be added to that period. Given the long waiting lists for children from some countries - the most popular are currently Russia, China, Romania, Thailand and Ethiopia - it can take up to two years after being cleared before the applicant will be in a position to bring a baby home.
The growing waiting lists for assessment in Ireland, caused mainly by insufficient numbers of social workers in certain health boards, will be a hot topic at the fifth annual conference of the International Adoption Association (IIA) which takes place next weekend. With fertility rates declining, and people waiting longer to have families, there are longer queues for inter-country adoption combined with a reduction in resources.
Impending adoption legislation, designed to update existing adoption laws and establish a firmer framework for international adoptions, will also be on the conference agenda. While the association welcomes the fact that the new legislation is expected to enshrine the 1963 Hague Convention on international adoption into Irish law, campaigners fear it could lead to the introduction of an upper age limit for adoptive parents.
ACCORDING TO KEVIN O'Byrne, chairman of the IIA, an age limit would be "unworkable" given the current waiting times. He and his wife Lorraine adopted Caoimhe from Russia, and he puts forward a scenario where, taking into account the time a couple might spend trying to have a family, undergoing fertility treatment and waiting to be processed by the health board, applicants could be in their mid-40s - the age limit proposed is 45 - before becoming parents.
"Officially there is no age limit but we hear from members that if you are over 50 your application may not be dealt with at all," he says. "We believe it is deeply unfair, anybody who is healthy and fit should be eligible to be assessed."
Geoffrey Shannon, solicitor and author of a major new work on international adoption called Child Law, says that in line with international law, any policy on adoption should be "child centred".
"In my view there should be no upper age limit because the process should be about the child, not about the needs of a childless couple or some kind of social engineering. On that basis the law should assess applicants on a case-by-case basis rather than excluding potential parents by imposing limitations of age," he says. To this end, Shannon suggests, any assessment of potential parents in the future should not be just an examination of the morals and character of applicants but should look at their capacity to support a child's needs in relation to identity issues such as parentage and culture.
"With regard to domestic adoption, one of the areas causing greatest pain is that there is no automatic right to identity so any child-centred policy should address this," adds Shannon, who will talk about these issues at the conference.
John and Maggie Lynch's decision to try to adopt a Russian child was made partly because there is a Russian community in Rush which they viewed as important for their child's identity as he grows older. Their research also showed it was one of the easiest countries to adopt from, although there is no bilateral agreement in place and, like many choose to do, they eventually adopted Jack independently of the Adoption Board.
At first they tried to adopt from within Ireland. "We weren't encouraged to put our names down because there are only a small number of children available for adoption and there were lots of people waiting," she says. "Once we applied for inter-country adoption, we found the waiting terrible but we had no problem with the actual assessment process itself," says Maggie. "The social worker was professional and thorough but had a lovely manner. You know this is your last chance at being a mummy so there is a lot of pressure on. The authorities have to make sure you have come to terms with the fertility issues and that we were not going to take a child from another country and make believe it is genetically ours, which could lead to the child feeling inferior if he didn't live up to our expectations."
IT'S A GRUELLING process. Again, depending on the health board area they live in, applicants are quizzed on anything from the occupations of their family members to their masturbation habits. Reports from both sole and older applicants suggest the groups are likely to be treated differently in the assessment process, and some say the negative aspects of inter-country adoption are stressed at a pre-assessment meeting.
One woman, herself adopted and recently declared eligible for inter-country adoption, says that during the process she was asked by a social worker whether she had thought about the fact that her birth might have been the result of a rape. "I don't know anyone else who was asked such a thing," she says, adding that she found the process "arduous".
Accounts such as this have led to a call for a more uniform code of assessment across the regions where practices can differ significantly. In addition, campaigners will welcome an adoption authority which is expected to replace the existing Adoption Board under any new legislation. This would lead to the assessment procedure being centrally funded, which would speed up applications. The imminent change in the health board structure is viewed as the ideal time to set up such a national assessment system.
Another area that requires more scrutiny is post-adoption services in which, one expert will tell next week's conference, this country is sorely lacking. Dubliner Sharon McCloskey is an occupational therapist in Connecticut and knows how vital speech, language, movement and other therapies can be to newly arrived children. "Any child who comes to the US from an international adoption is automatically assessed for sensory integration. If they miss out on that experience it can impact significantly on their learning abilities later on," she says of the services which, unlike here, are fully integrated into US schools.
"If you are a parent of a child from Russia or Romania in Ireland right now, there is post-adoption screening done with a health professional but they miss out on the automatic access to an occupational therapist or a team of multi-skilled therapists which children get as a matter of course [in the US]. It is so important to identify these issues early on. Not all children will have problems, of course, but early intervention is vital for those who do."
O'Byrne says what is needed here is a similarly integrated approach. "What we are calling for is a one-stop shop for families where all the necessary services are in place," he says.
ALSO CRUCIAL TO the impending legislation is the issue of whether certain countries who have not signed up to the Hague convention will be blocked to Irish people. This could lead to parents with children who came from a non-Hague signatory country not being able to adopt a second child from that country. Ireland has bilateral agreements with China, Vietnam, Belarus, Romania and Thailand. "If the State was doing its job we would have arrangements with places such as Russia and Guatemala to allow those vulnerable people - and remember by that stage most people have been through an awful lot - to adopt from other countries," he says. "There is a duty of care at issue here."
More regulation is also required in the area of donations made to baby homes or paid by parents to the agencies who carry out the complex adoption administrative work in the donor countries, fees which can range from €2,000 to €20,000.
One source said feelings were running so high among those affected that there was talk of an adoption candidate being put forward at the next election.
The Minister of State for Children, Brian Lenihan, has responsibility for the adoption legislation and this week told The Irish Times that while the issues of an upper age limit and source countries for adoption would be addressed in the new Bill, he could not comment on specific details at this stage. He will put his proposals to the Cabinet in early December and will attend next week's conference.
The International Adoption Association conference takes place in Dublin on November 7th. For information, tel: 01-4579505 between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m., Monday-Friday, or see www.iaaireland.org