There is much to celebrate in the final judgment in the Tristan Dowse case. A young child who has suffered many rejections and changes in his short life has been reunited with his natural mother who, from now on, is his guardian and custodian.
The couple who adopted him, only to change their minds two years later and hand him to an orphanage, will maintain him and his mother in relative comfort until he is 18. At that time he will have a substantial lump sum to give him a good start in life. It is to be hoped that all the trauma he suffered in his early years can be overcome and that he will now be able to live in security and prosperity with his birth family.
This State and its various servants are to be congratulated for bringing about this outcome. As the judgment spells out, the Attorney General pursued the issue of Mr and Mrs Dowse's constitutional obligations to their adopted child with tenacity, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Adoption Board went to great lengths to ascertain Tristan's circumstances and evaluate his needs, and the High Court has now upheld Tristan's rights both to maintenance from his former adoptive parents, his continuing succession rights and his rights as an Irish citizen.
Yet, though this has gripped the imagination of the Irish public, it is not just the story of one boy who became an Irish citizen in a far away place and was then effectively abandoned by his adoptive family, with nothing to protect him but the Irish State and its courts. It raises general issues about foreign adoptions and the rights of Irish children, however they obtained citizenship.
The issue of adoption is an emotive one, all the more so when a child from another culture is taken into an Irish family. While in the past adoption was relatively easy, in recent years Irish couples who wish to adopt have had to undergo rigorous - some say too rigorous - investigations as to their suitability. What this episode illustrates is that adoptions can break down, with harrowing consequences for the defenceless child. It is vital that prospective adoptive parents adopting under Irish law are examined as fully as possible to ensure, insofar as is humanly possible, that an adoption can proceed smoothly and not be disrupted by, for example, the birth of a natural child.
This judgment also sets down some important principles for the future. It builds on previous High Court judgments relating to the rights of the child and breaks new ground in using Section 7 of the 1991 Adoption Act to make detailed orders about the welfare of the child when an adoption is extinguished. It is made very clear that, if an adoption does break down, the child should not suffer as a result and the adoptive parents' obligations are not thereby annulled. Children's rights are to be examined independently of the adults in their lives.
The judgment confirms a trend in the courts of a new awareness of emerging international law on children's rights. It is to be hoped that this will now be reinforced by the Government introducing robust legislation to protect children's rights into the future.