Dear Senator Van Turnhout - sincere thanks & congratulations for making the points you have made on inter-country adoption (ICA). It is critical that voices such as yours would be heard in Ireland, to wake people up to the basic facts about Intercountry Adoption (ICA); firstly ICA is a measure of last resort for overseas, vulnerable, impoverished children seeking homes, whose wider families & communities are unable to provide homes for them. IT IS NEVER A FIRST WORLD ADULT RIGHT to a child (as warned against by Alexandria Yuster, a senior advisor on child protection with UNICEF, who argues that international adoption is now more about finding children for first world parents than finding homes for children). Anyone who thinks that ICA is anything other than a multi-billion dollar business is either naive in the extreme or in denial of the blatently obvious.
In Ireland, had Minister Frances Fitzgerald or any of her predecessors had the political integrity to have carried out an investigation into Ireland's criminal activities surrounding adoption, she would have confirmed the occurance of child abduction, wholesale forced adoptions; child trafficking, illegal adoptions, illegal vaccine trials to name just a few. It is beyond galling for the 60,000+ adopted people in Ireland clamouring for information on our adoptions & on our families of origin to witness Minister Fitzgerald's breast beating over the "yearnings" of 23 families, for whom she has created bespoke legislation to loosen an already very lax regulation regarding the validity of 3 year old adoption passports. Senator Van Turnhout, I share your worry that it is only a matter of time before another bunch of "Martini Adopters" (any time, any place, any where), start lobbying for the Minister to open up some other corrupt market for children & it would not surprise me in the least if we eventually see a complete unwinding of our ratification of the Hague Convention to placate the "yearnings" of would-be Irish adopters. I also predict that the same parents, who bombard the Minister abt relaxing standards will in a decades time be jumping up & down & wanting to blames someone when their now adult children are unable to uncover their origins within those corrupt countries, from which they were removed. Of all the bills that the Oireachtas have passed since 2011, this one truly lays bare the bald, fawning self-interest of party politics - looking merely to the next election. We have learned nothing
Susan Lohan
Posted on 20 Mar 2014 3:22 pm
Dear Senator Van Turnhout - sincere thanks & congratulations for making the points you have made on inter-country adoption (ICA). It is critical that voices such as yours would be heard in Ireland, to wake people up to the basic facts about Intercountry Adoption (ICA); firstly ICA is a measure of last resort for overseas, vulnerable, impoverished children seeking homes, whose wider families & communities are unable to provide homes for them. IT IS NEVER A FIRST WORLD ADULT RIGHT to a child (as warned against by Alexandria Yuster, a senior advisor on child protection with UNICEF, who argues that international adoption is now more about finding children for first world parents than finding homes for children). Anyone who thinks that ICA is anything other than a multi-billion dollar business is either naive in the extreme or in denial of the blatently obvious.
In Ireland, had Minister Frances Fitzgerald or any of her predecessors had the political integrity to have carried out an investigation into Ireland's criminal activities surrounding adoption, she would have confirmed the occurance of child abduction, wholesale forced adoptions; child trafficking, illegal adoptions, illegal vaccine trials to name just a few. It is beyond galling for the 60,000+ adopted people in Ireland clamouring for information on our adoptions & on our families of origin to witness Minister Fitzgerald's breast beating over the "yearnings" of 23 families, for whom she has created bespoke legislation to loosen an already very lax regulation regarding the validity of 3 year old adoption passports. Senator Van Turnhout, I share your worry that it is only a matter of time before another bunch of "Martini Adopters" (any time, any place, any where), start lobbying for the Minister to open up some other corrupt market for children & it would not surprise me in the least if we eventually see a complete unwinding of our ratification of the Hague Convention to placate the "yearnings" of would-be Irish adopters. I also predict that the same parents, who bombard the Minister abt relaxing standards will in a decades time be jumping up & down & wanting to blames someone when their now adult children are unable to uncover their origins within those corrupt countries, from which they were removed. Of all the bills that the Oireachtas have passed since 2011, this one truly lays bare the bald, fawning self-interest of party politics - looking merely to the next election. We have learned nothing