The recent, short-lived controversy over the 2000-word Report of the Farrelly Commission (‘Grace’s case’) was followed by an equally brief period of media interest and public outcry. Responses to the State’s decision to proceed no further – with 47 other potential cases meriting investigation – ranged from outraged shock to lukewarm political mantra. As the Minister for Children, Disability and Equality noted – with considerable understatement – in the Oireachtas, ‘ …the circumstances of Grace’s case were truly unacceptable and rightly caused great concern when they came to public attention.’ The episode – for want of a better term – speaks to much more than glib notions of concern and unacceptability: it serves as a pointed reminder of just how easily – and consistently – societies can fail utterly to protect their most vulnerable members. These failures can be compounded by our increasing ability to turn away blind-eyed and unmoved by such abuses and atrocities, past and ongoing.
This case should have sparked much more than the usual levels of consternation that similar scandals have provoked over the years. It raises deeply uncomfortable questions about the nature of inherent (and systemically manufactured) vulnerabilities, particularly where these have arisen from familial or indeed state abandonment. It has shone a painful light on the concept of substitute caregiving, recalling some of the worst myths and fables on ‘foundlings’ and the way in which unwelcomed offspring might be treated or viewed by society. It is an indictment too of human nature, that certain children continue to be relinquished – willingly or otherwise – by birth families who cannot look after them. An unwritten, traditional sub-text is still discernible too: abandoned Others should be grateful for having at least been taken in, given the unthinkable alternatives. Such reasoning, underpinned perhaps by an increasing sense of compassion-fatigue, might explain the brevity of the public’s outrage, and the quashing of further action by the government.
Substitute caregiving – whether carried out by state, church, or altruistic, kindly parents – has a richly complex history, steeped in unsettling foundling tropes (rescue, thankfulness, fear of unknown strangers) and disturbing folkloric warnings (Hansel and Gretel, The Juniper Tree). Two conflicting models exist: the abandoned or orphaned innocent child in need of saving – but still quite likely to grow up a hero – versus the deemed-surplus, illegitimate, ‘demon seed’ or changeling child (again, for want of better, kinder terms). These Othered ones have always been too dangerous or challenging to be kept at home or raised by birth families. They wander through numerous, dark folk tales after having faced neglect or exposure, the mercy-led act that ‘unhomes’ a child, leaving them outdoors to face the elements, or be collected by passing slave traders or clerics. Parents – step, foster, or natal – tend in such stories to be made harsh by their own poverty or social exclusion. They justify their actions by pleading scarcity or absence of resources i.e. food and shelter and perhaps an overabundance of shame at being unable to keep their child.
Grace’s story, revealed by whistleblowers, has several such elements: fostered by inadequate ‘carers,’ she had survived being relinquished within a Mother and Baby institution. As a severely disabled infant, she would not have been deemed adoptable. Doubly othered then, she since been rejected again, by society, given the speed with which media and public interest in her has apparently waned. Likewise, her story is unlikely to be made any time soon into a film, novel, or play peopled with cruel or kindly nuns, and softened by a redemptive ending involving daring escape or all-healing reunion. It serves instead as a reminder of the less-frequently discussed state and sociocultural failings that happened over decades within fostering farm homes, orphanages, and workhouses, and indeed anywhere where those who were regarded as ‘less than’ might be less seen and more easily forgotten about.
That there is to be no follow-up Inquiry, is not particularly shocking, given what is happening in neighbouring jurisdictions. The UK government’s ongoing refusal to offer an apology for the acknowledged, systemic abuses which affected adoptees and their mothers for much of the 20th century, sends a clear warning: states which continue to endorse forced adoptions as a means of child protection, are unlikely to condemn the modern version too strongly. There is a sense of impunity: having conceded that a range of ‘historic’ human rights violations occurred, the UK government then denied its culpability, on the basis that apparently nobody truly knew what was happening. If certain abuses were common knowledge and tacitly tolerated – orphanisations via sealed or falsified records, dangerously inadequate substitute ‘homes’ – then it seems that states and churches can still plead that no other options were open to them at that time, sociocultural and familial attitudes being what they were (as the Irish government has argued).
The issue of scarcening resources has perhaps become the new sacred talisman. Where once it was seen as ungrateful to disparage the kind charity of church or state – with their ‘imperfect refuges’ for those shamed and unwanted by their families – it now feels equally unseemly to expect redress, particularly if this might affect the health of the public purse. Such thinking has taken some of the shine off Northern Ireland’s nascent redress process, which has sharply delimited the eligible pool of survivor-applicants (former residents of certain Mother and Baby Institutions and some of their descendants) and also served to keep the proposed initial award – the standardised payment – as low as possible. The media has repeatedly emphasised the issue of costs, perhaps implying that some victims are less worthy than others, for example if they lack directly lived experience.
The Public Consultations on the proposed redress schemes (2024, 2025) similarly stress that public funds are finite and scarcening. Similar reasoning will likely prevent an apology for historic forced adoptions in England and Wales. To apologise is to admit responsibility for the sort of harms, abuses, and failings that demand tangible redress, and further investigations, to try and prevent future recurrences. Where redress does not take the form of individualised monetary payments, it still tends to be costly: trauma-informed, dignified memorials require a decent budget, even if these might exist only in the form of a promised overhaul of safeguarding measures, which seems to be planned for Grace’s case. Had this Report led to further inquiry, further distressing truths might well have emerged, requiring more formalised reparation.
Such processes can have hidden costs, in terms of damaging public confidence in state systems. Belief in key concepts can be shaken too, even those that have long underpinned domestic child protection policies and laws: permanence, best interests, and the voice of the child. To admit that we are not always able or keen to protect our most vulnerable Others – especially those who were ‘unfamilied’ by law, policy, or parental failings – is to concede that even darker truths about human nature exist. Traditional presumptions on substitutive parental or state care – that it will always be of a high standard, for example – can also blind us to its dangers and failings. The concept of inviolably protective permanence is similarly worrying: had Grace been adopted by her neglectful ‘carers,’ her story might never have surfaced, given the lack of intervention and state oversight that adoption orders tend to bring.
Perhaps the most worrying aspect of her tragic story is that there are likely others still suffering similar abuse. Grace’s case joins a long list of similar scandals: it is hard to imagine it being the final one of its sort, given dwindling resources and the vagaries of state ‘care’ recently uncovered on this Island and indeed elsewhere. The media’s rapid loss of interest – and their unified focus on the matter of costs – does not bode well for other redress processes presently ongoing. That the disabled, non-verbal child at the heart of this scandal (now a middle-aged woman, but no less vulnerable) was gifted the pseudonym Grace, is deeply ironic, given how little of it she has been afforded.
Dr Alice Diver is a Senior Lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research falls mainly within the field of Critical Adoption Studies, in particular those aspects of law, policy, and literary fiction which highlight the systemic and widespread unconscious biases – and intergenerational harms – that tend to surround and shape adoptees’ human rights within issues of familial and identity losses.
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