THE ADOPTION PROCESS IN IRELAND

Abstract

In Ireland the law of adoption, now consisting of seven pieces of legislation,¹ has provided the legal framework for a practice that has seen 41,618 children adopted² since the Adoption Act 1952 first introduced a legal means for making this possible. As elsewhere, this period has seen a steady annual decline in adoption orders—from 1,115 in 1980 down to 263 Irish adoption orders in 2003. It has also been a period in which there has been an uncoupling of the traditional association between unmarried mothers and adoption as the latter has gradually ceased to be used almost exclusively as a means of regulating the non-kinship placements of voluntarily relinquished illegitimate babies. Instead it is increasingly becoming a means of sanctioning the private family arrangements of birth parents, almost always mothers, in respect of their own children. Adoption as a public child care resource, legislatively expedited elsewhere, is not encouraged by government policy in this jurisdiction which partially explains the steady increase in intercountry adoptions.