Issues come and issues go. Organisations which find themselves in the eye of a storm just have to sit tight for a little while - people invariably lose interest and move on. Even better, go on holidays, far out of the reach of irritating questions.
The long holiday approach is a much-favoured tactic of government and is now deeply embedded in our system of parliamentary democracy. Oireachtas holidays are so frequent that eyes get taken off balls to the extent that balls just vanish.
With the big summer break coming up next week, Dáil time is running out. Issues not raised over the next few days will most likely disappear from public view. Independent TD for Cavan/Monaghan Paudge Connolly has realised this.
Over the past few weeks, he has had people coming to him in a desperate state, not knowing where to turn. They have applied to adopt a baby from Vietnam, and have even paid a substantial sum of money to the Vietnamese adoption facilitator, My Linh Soland. They now discover that she is a convicted criminal, who served jail time in the US for fraud.
According to Paudge Connolly, they are tormented by the fact that no one will tell them what is going on. All the Adoption Board will say is that the matter is under investigation.
"That's not good enough," says the Independent TD. "I've managed to get the issue down for an adjournment debate in the Dáil and I will be seeking an independent investigation of exactly what is going on with adoptions from Vietnam. The Adoption Board cannot investigate itself, and someone must take political responsibility for this mess."
Paudge Connolly is particularly concerned at reports of the amount of money that changes hands during these adoptions. In one of his parliamentary questions to the Minister for Health, Mary Harney, he asks for her views "on the transfer of considerable sums of money from Irish prospective adoptive parents as part of the Irish Vietnamese adoption process directly to the personal bank account of a facilitator [ My Linh Soland] ... Her views on whether it is irregular that further funding be delivered to this person in US$50 and US$100 notes. Her view on whether this practice is acceptable, particularly in view of the facilitator's US criminal record."
He may get an answer to some of these questions, but he is not holding his breath. He has already been fobbed off in the Dáil once this week by being told that "the matter is under investigation". But he is determined to keep at it. "It's like hitting a football against a haystack," he says in frustration, "you get very little response."
I also have been fobbed off. On Monday last, I put a list of 25 questions to the Adoption Board on these issues. They refused to answer even a single one. They will give no information about the nature of their internal investigation, when it will be concluded, whether its findings will be made public, whether they have ever received any complaints about My Linh Soland, if they plan to interview adoptive parents about their experiences in Vietnam, or how they plan to deal with the dozens of couples who have paid money to My Linh Soland and are waiting to adopt.
All I was able to find out was that the two senior members of the board's administration, CEO John Collins and registrar Kiernan Gildea, have gone on their holidays and won't be back for weeks.
Meanwhile, there are about 150 couples who have adopted Vietnamese babies with the involvement of the fraudster My Linh Soland, and who must now be deeply concerned.
The Adoption Board issued a statement yesterday to the effect that the Vietnamese authorities have stated that all of these adoptions are fully legal from their perspective.
However, questions must still remain.
We in this country have direct experience of Irish babies being adopted by foreign couples. When many of them returned here as adults over the past decade to trace their birth families, they found heart-breaking stories of mothers forced against their will to give up their babies, often not even aware that the infants had been adopted by American couples.
This is a spectre which haunts the area of inter-country adoption, where today, of course, it is Irish couples, with unquestionably the best possible motives, adopting from elsewhere.
The very least that is owed to these parents and to their babies is that when major concerns arise (as they have in Vietnam), a thorough, independent and fully transparent investigation should be immediately undertaken.
For future adoptions, it is now even more urgent that the terms of the Hague Convention be implemented in Ireland. Designed to eliminate the abduction or sale of children for adoption, it was signed by the Irish government in 1993. It provides vital safeguards to protect children, their birth parents and their adoptive families. It is a disgrace that, 13 years later, the legislation needed to implement it in this country has still not appeared.