Sir, - How, Mr Anton Sweeney wonders (July 1st), is a statement by the Chairman of the Irish Foreign Adoption Group (IFAG) that research shows intercountry adoption to have benefits for children to be reconciled with a ministerial reply to a parliamentary question stating that no research into the long-term effects of intercountry adoption has been carried out by the Irish Department of Health, the Irish Adoption Board or the Irish regional Health Boards?
The absence of proper research funding that handicaps virtually all disciplines in this country is regularly criticised and discussed in your columns and elsewhere. Irish research is thin on the ground for many subjects and in these areas we must routinely draw on the work of scholars from outside our boundaries to put in place the basic requirements of an informed discussion.
On the effects of intercountry adoption there is a substantial literature from those North American and European countries (such as Holland, Germany and Scandinavia) where the practice has been well established for decades in contrast to its more recent growth and development in Ireland.
A comprehensive overview of this literature has been provided by Barbara Tizard, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of London, in her article "Intercountry Adoption: A Review of the Evidence" in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry Volume 32, 1991. Another important and more recent examination of the subject is to be found in Child Adoption (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1997) by Rene Hoksbergen, Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and general director of the Adoption Centre at Utrecht University in Holland. The findings of the research which Professors Tizard and Hoksbergen discuss are, as the IFAG chairman has correctly indicated (June 9th), strongly positive ones. - Yours, etc., Dr Peter Murray,
Dept of Sociology, NUI, Maynooth, Co Kildare.