Extracts from a letter from Thomas V. Commins to Peter Berry (Dublin)
(345/96) (345/164) (Copy)

I have been meaning to write to you for some little while back on one or two points related to the coming into force of the Adoption Bill 1952, which it is my understanding, is likely to have passed finally through the Oireachtas by the middle of December next. The points in question are those touched [on] by you in the second paragraph of your letter to me (ref. 93/105) of the 1st September¹ and the third paragraph of your letter to Iremonger under the same reference, dated 23rd September.²

Before I go on to these however, perhaps I should say that we in this Department have examined the Bill as it stands at present and, for the record, we have no observations to make on it, as affecting internal adoptions, except to offer the following comment.

[693 words omitted regarding internal adoptions]

With regard to the other aspect of the Bill, to which I have referred in my first paragraph above, I quite agree with what you say in the second paragraph of your letter to me of the 1st September, that the restriction contained in Section 39 of the Bill is important in that it prohibits entirely the removal of full orphans from the State. But what I am anxious that you will appreciate is that the restriction as it stands will have only the most negligible, if indeed any effect on the situation as it now exists in regard to the adoption of Irish children by e.g. American families. Of approximately 330 passports which we have issued over the past two years to children to enable them to travel abroad to America and other countries – mainly America of course, for the purpose of adoption there are only some three cases in which the children are orphans; in all other cases the children were illegitimate and in 95% of the latter cases they were over one year old. The illegitimate child of one year or over is of course specifically exempted from the prohibition contained in sub-Section (1) of Section 39 provided he is brought or sent abroad, whether for adoption or otherwise, with the approval of its parent, guardian or relative. Under our existing procedure such approval has to be there before we would issue a passport to enable such a child to travel.

This brings me to the remarks contained in the third paragraph of your letter of the 23rd September, to Iremonger, regarding the operation of Section 39 of the Bill when it becomes law. The sole function of this Department in relation to Section 39 is the issue of passports and I think it essential that I should make it clear that we could see nothing in Section 39 to justify us using the passport machinery to exercise an administrative restraint on the travel abroad, for adoption or other purposes, of children in the exempted categories outlined in sub-sections (2) and (3) of that Section. Quite the contrary. In fact, we must, it seems to us, regard Section 39 of this Bill, even at the present, as a precise statement of Government policy in the matter of what categories of children are to be permitted to go abroad or be restrained from so doing and we must be guided by that in the issue of passports. This being so we have, for instance, decided against the issue of future passports to illegitimate children under one year to travel abroad for adoption purposes. Similarly, we must interpret the Government policy reflected in sub-sections (2) and (3) of Section 39 as specifically inhibiting us from exercising an administrative restraint on the travel abroad of the exempted categories of children whose right so to travel the two sub-sections in question so clearly preserve.