Letter from Seán Morrissey to Seán Ronan (Chicago)
(Copy)

With regard to your minute of the 29th ultimo¹ about the question of our adopted children, I think I can best bring you up-to-date on this subject by sending you a copy of a memorandum which we prepared, following Monsignor O’Grady’s last visit to Iveagh House.² He was here in January last.

We are, quite definitely, opposed to the ‘group plan’ and, as you will see from the record, Monsignor O’Grady was left in no doubt about our attitude. It is disturbing to find, if what Father Brogan says is true, that he still has hopes of converting anyone over here to his view. (The Archbishop of Dublin, who I may tell you is keenly interested in adoptions and imposes his own controls in the Archdiocese, is quite opposed to the plan also). Your responses to Father Brogan were therefore correct and, if you see him again, we won’t mind how strongly you reiterate them.

For your confidential information – although this is plainly to be gathered from the memorandum – Monsignor O’Grady made a very poor impression on us. He is very old and rather senile at times. We were thoroughly exhausted and exasperated after the meeting: it went on for over four hours! But we kept hammering at him and extracted eventually the revelation that all the Branches of his organisation were not as reliable as we had been led to believe. This was a blow to us because, as you may know, all our adoption arrangements centred around the recommendations of the Branches.

Shortly after his visit we had practical proof that all was not well. A letter turned up one day from the Director of the Welfare Department at Madison, the State capital of Wisconsin, questioning the placement of an Irish child with a certain family in that area. It was clearly not a suitable family, yet the organisation, which had recommended the home and parents, was included in the Monsignor’s approved list!

As a result of these developments we introduced a substantial change in our regulations. Whereas previously, as I say, we operated totally on Monsignor’s list, nowadays we will not accept the recommendations of any of his Branches which are not licensed and approved as child-placing agencies by the local State authorities. This is the tightening up to which Father Brogan was presumably referring.

While I do not wish to suggest that there was anything in the nature of mass irregularities under the old régime, it was disturbing for us to find that any loop-hole existed, especially since there is persistent public criticism in this country of these adoptions, most of it admittedly emanating from ‘wild’ reports in the cheap Sunday English papers.

More³ of this information need be divulged to Father Brogan, whose work we find very satisfactory (a compliment which you may indeed pass on to him) but I would be very glad if you could ferret out discreetly from him any inside information you can as to how Monsignor O’Grady stands with the organisation. It beats us how he holds down such a job. After his visit we thought of asking the Embassy at Washington for a discreet report, but we felt it was too delicate a matter to raise there. Now that Father Brogan has approached you, you might find means of pumping him but you would need to tread warily lest anything got back to the Monsignor. We are not really desperately interested since our new régime removes our earlier total dependence on the organisation.