New legislation should make the lengthy process of foreign adoption more user-friendly

THE LEGALITIES are complex and the emotions intense. It is no wonder that the journey to inter-country adoption is often described as a “rollercoaster ride” – and a particularly long one if you live in Ireland.

The landscape of that journey will change from next Monday when new adoption legislation comes into force. The enactment of the Adoption Bill will complete Ireland’s ratification of the Hague Convention on inter-country adoption.

What will this mean for people considering adoption and the children they might adopt? For a start it will change the list of possible source countries for adoptions: some will be closed off and others opened up. It should also foster a better system of assessment and support for foreign adoptions.

Intercountry adoption was first recognised in Irish law in 1991, primarily in response to the plight of children in Romanian orphanages. Since then more than 5,000 children have been registered as foreign adoptions.

We are the last of the Hague member states to ratify the convention. This bill brings us “into the club”, as the Minister for Children, Barry Andrews,explains.

“It opens the door to countries which we were unable to deal with before,” he says. “It also introduces standards which, we would argue, we always applied. But by ratifying the convention we are reflecting this in legislation.”

The new Act is a “massive positive development” according to the parent-led International Adoption Association (IAA), which has campaigned for an overhaul of the system. It means we will be adhering to best international practice, bringing in “layers of assurance” for adoptive parents and their children, says IAA chairman Brian O’Callaghan.

People will be able to adopt children only from countries which have also signed up to the Hague Convention, or with which Ireland has a bilateral agreement. (However, anybody who has been approved to adopt before November 1st will be allowed to proceed with a non-Hague country.) Private foreign adoptions will also be ruled out as, under Hague, adoptions must be processed between the central authorities of the two countries involved.

The latest annual report published by the Adoption Board shows that in 2008 the top four countries from which children were adopted to this country were: Vietnam (182), Russia (117), Ethiopia (26) and Mexico (22). Since then adoptions from Vietnam and Russia have been suspended and Ethiopia, as a non-Hague country, is off limits after November 1st.

“This is not about pulling the shutters down on inter-country adoption,” stresses the chairman of the Adoption Board, Geoffrey Shannon. “It is about providing a better framework in which inter-country adoption can take place. The principle that the adoption must be in the best interests of the child takes centre stage in the new Act.”

More than half of the 83 countries which have ratified the Hague Convention, he points out, are “sending” countries, ie those which place children for inter-country adoption. In recent months the Adoption Board has been seeking to establish administrative agreements with a number of jurisdictions, including Thailand, Bulgaria, the Philippines and Brazil. It has also written to the UK and hopes to meet the central adoption authority there within a matter of weeks.

Irish residents have to be approved here to adopt before they can begin their search overseas for a child in need of adoption. While the assessment process is, by necessity, robust, delays and inconsistencies have angered and frustrated many applicants.

The whole process of adoption has been taking many people up to four or five years, from registering an interest to being matched with a child – something which people from the UK could expect to complete within two years.

Andrews says he hopes the “cruelly long” assessment process can now be shortened because the legislation allows for the Health Service Executive (HSE) to outsource adoption assessments to accredited agencies. He wants to see HSE social workers freed up for child protection and family support work and, while there will be no immediate, wholesale transfer of functions, he envisages assessments being outsourced within a couple of years.

The only comment from the HSE on this matter is that it “continues to work with the Office of the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs and the Adoption Authority of Ireland regarding the implementation of the legislation”.

Even when agencies are accredited to do assessments, everybody will still have to apply initially to the HSE, and that is not something the IAA wanted. It had hoped private agencies would provide an entirely alternative route for assessment.

Pact, a small, independent adoption society, which currently handles about 5 per cent of assessments for inter-country adoption, will only be able to deal with cases assigned to it by the HSE – provided it secures accreditation from the new Adoption Authority to continue doing assessments after November 1st.

Meanwhile, the Irish Association of Social Workers says it is concerned that the knowledge and experience of child welfare which HSE social workers bring to adoption assessments might be lost if the process were to be outsourced.

According to the HSE, at the end of last year there were just over 500 completed applications waiting to begin the preparation stage. Estimation of the waiting time from submitting a completed application to starting a group preparation course varied from 18 months in the eastern region to just one to two months in the northwestern area. However, that does not take into account the many months it can take to complete the application, which requires police vetting from any jurisdiction the applicants might have lived in.

“If I had known how long it was going to take, I would have put our names down earlier,” says Catherine, the adoptive mother of a three-year-old girl who is seeking to adopt a second child. She was happy with the way the “very intense” first assessment was conducted but “it is the delays that are the hardest [part]; the goal posts keep moving”.

Michelle, who has adopted two girls from Vietnam, says the first time the process took four years. She and her husband had heard horror stories about the assessment – which usually involves six meetings with a social worker, for two of which a husband and wife are interviewed separately – but they found it “doable”, if intrusive.

“I was asked things like how many boyfriends did I have when I was young, and what would I do if my daughter became addicted to drugs at the age of 18,” she says.

Another woman, who was seeking approval for a second adoption, says her application has been refused because she is too fat. She has until February to achieve a healthier weight.

An IAA survey last year showed that by far the biggest complaint people had about the assessment system was the time it took. Other issues included the lack of transparency, inconsistencies and a feeling of disempowerment at the hands of the social worker. Few dared to question anything as they feared it would jeopardise their application.

Pathways to Adoption, which was set up as a not-for-profit company five months ago, will look for accreditation to conduct assessments. The legislation is just “opening the door”, says its director, Sharon Dagg. “We are looking forward to applying for our accreditation and entering into negotiations with the HSE.”

What would be different about Pathways’ system? “The process from application to completion would, in the norm, be done within 12 months,” she says.

Pathways is also devising a fully computerised, transparent system which it is confident would reduce parents’ frustrations with current procedures.

The gruelling nature of the assessment process is “unavoidable”, Dagg stresses, as the child is the primary concern, not the parent. She believes it could be conducted more equitably, “but no matter what way you dress it, you are being assessed and that person has the power to say yay or nay”.

Many adoptive parents believe there is an anti-adoption bias within the State system. It was a concern raised in the Dáil last year by Fianna Fáil TD Noel Ahern, who questioned why people were obliged to wait five years to adopt when “it only takes nine months to have a baby”.

When people finally have their declaration of suitability from the Adoption Board, they are currently left to their own devices. But the new legislation provides for mediation agencies to support approved applicants seeking to be matched with a child in need of a home. Advertisements for expressions of interest in providing this service appeared in newspapers last week.

Shane Downer, a former chief executive of the International Adoption Association, is director of Arc Adoption, which will be applying for accreditation as a mediation agency.

He says it will try to build in more assurances relating to foreign adoption but that it is impossible to eradicate all the risks.

While there seems to be a jaundiced view in this country towards adopting older kids, he says the average age at which we adopt is going to have to go up. Older children bring more challenges but international research shows that generally, after adoption, they are able to catch up and achieve their potential.

Downer stresses the need to be more open about the whole process of adoption and have honest discussions about concerns.

“You do not have the right to adopt a child,” he adds. “You have the right to assessment and, if you are approved, you have the right to apply – but you don’t have the right to adopt because it has to be child-centred.”

Shannon acknowledges that there is a lot of uncertainty and anxiety but he is confident that this will diminish as the new system is rolled out. The HSE, the Officer for the Minister of Children and the Adoption Authority have collaborated on a “one-stop” information website which is due to be launched in the coming weeks.

It may be a long journey to adopting a child in a foreign country but that, of course, is only the prelude to the much longer one of parenting.

* Some names have been changed

THE DAY WILL COME WHEN WE WILL SAY GOODBYE - TO AN APARTMENT IN DUBLIN 4 OR TO SOUTH AFRICA'

Mervyn and Gladys Nutley did not have age on their side when they started on the road to adoption in their 40s, so they could have done without it taking five years from the time they applied in September 2003 to when they brought a baby girl, Buhle Joy, who will be three in December, home from South Africa in 2008.

Their social worker made it clear their age could be a problem, but towards the end of the process she was keen that they met her supervisor, as she felt that would help them to have their application approved.

Mervyn’s only criticism of the process is the length it took “particularly when people are saying to you, ‘But you know you are an older couple . . . ’ it’s a bit rich. We were getting older by the minute!”

Gladys, who is now 55, had been married before and widowed. Mervyn (50) says his wife had pretty much come to terms with the issue of infertility within her first marriage.

“When we got married, we talked about adoption, but said it’s probably not for us. I wasn’t particularly broody.”

However, later they thought “we may not need a child but there are lots of children out there who need parents”. Having both done short-term development work in South Africa, they knew the conditions in which abandoned children were living.

“When it came to adoption, Africa gets under your skin; we had fallen in love with the people. What we didn’t realise was that South Africa was very difficult.” He welcomes the setting up of a mediation agency to liaise between prospective adoptive parents and countries where there are children available for adoption.

While now he can’t imagine loving their daughter any more than if she had been born to them, when they were going through assessment they did not have that ache for a child which other couples experience.

“They may already have been through IVF. They are raw and there is this pain almost inside them in terms of need for a child”, which is why, he suggests, couples can find assessment so difficult.

There were occasions during the protracted process when either Mervyn or Gladys wanted to give up, but never at the same time.

“We both have a faith and to a degree we did put our trust in God,” he says. They are both members of the non-denominational Christian Dublin West Community Church and live in a culturally diverse area, a factor which they believe helped their application through.

Buhle, a Zulu word for beauty, is their daughter’s given name and they added Joy to it. “It gives her options when she is older: she can be African and call herself Buhle, or be European and call herself Joy.”

He adds: “We feel she has been given to us to raise and the day will come when we will say goodbye – whether that is to an apartment in Dublin 4 or to South Africa.”

THE KEY CHANGES IN INTER-COUNTRY ADOPTION

Changes in legislation, November 1st:

• The legislation completes Ireland's ratification of the Hague Convention on inter-country adoption.

• Children can be adopted only from other Hague member states, or countries with which we have a bi-lateral agreement.

• A new Adoption Authority will be responsible for regulating all adoption agencies.

• Agencies will be accredited to assess prospective adoptive parents and to offer mediation services to approved applicants seeking a child in need of adoption – but no agency can do both.