John Mulligan Comments on Irish Radio Program

John Mulligan, Chairman, Focus on Romania, comments to Pat Kenny of the Irish Radio RTE Radio 1 "Today with Pat Kenny" concerning adoption in Romania. This concerns Friday's program of 2/24/06.

Dear Pat,

Your programme is usually interesting, thoughtful and balanced, but sometimes it manages not to deliver to its usually high standards. These occasional lapses are forgivable when no injustice is done to anyone, or when the victims of such unfairness have easy access to your airwaves in order to rebalance the equation. In the case of last Friday’s show however, the people who suffer most from such blatantly incorrect and unjust reporting tend to be those with no voice, hence the need to set the matter straight, if you will allow that.

I was in Brussels on Friday and did not hear the programme live, although my email and phone inboxes were quickly filled with messages from people who listened to the show with increasing incredulity as the slot progressed, but who were unable to get through to the programme caller line. On my return on Friday night I replayed the show on the internet, unable to believe my ears at what I was hearing. I know that there are varying shades of opinion on most topics, but some of what I heard from two of your contributors was so far off the mark as to fall into the realms of utter fantasy.

Anne McElhinney is an anti-adoption campaigner, so although I can not even begin to imagine where she is coming from, she is at least true to what she believes. Her view as I understand it is essentially that children abandoned by their natural parents should remain in institutions, no matter how terrible the conditions, rather than be adopted by properly vetted and caring families in another country. While this may be a perverse view by normal standards, it is obviously an honestly held belief in her case. While I know that there is little point in trying to persuade someone with such extreme views as to the error of their ways, it is questionable that she should be allowed to peddle such nonsense on our national airways without challenge. All I would like to say in comment on this part of the programme is that one bad adoption should not be used as a benchmark when so many others are successful.

Anne McElhinney lives in Romania, and it is a real pity that she never looks at the true facts that are clouded by the pronouncements of the Romanian government in the area of child rights. It is certainly much easier for a journalist to recycle government press releases, but would it not serve the reputation of her profession somewhat better if she were just occasionally to carry out some investigative work in the hospitals and institutions there? Investigative journalists such as the Sunday Independent's Maeve Sheehan seem able to find out more in Romania in two or three days than Anne McElhinney has been able to do in ten years.

The second contributor, Barry Mulligan, is in my view more insidious for the very reason that his pronouncements can be seen to carry more weight. His friend Anne McElhinney is at least expected to have extreme views and is not taken seriously by many observers, but Barry has some level of credibility given his former role as the Irish government’s Honorary Consul. This makes his wildly inaccurate pronouncements all the more damaging; having met him once I can confirm that he appears to be essentially a nice enough fellow, but he is obviously blinded to some essential facts by his friendship with McElhinney. It is very important that you set the record straight at least on the more incredible and fanciful statements made by Barry in the course of your interview with him.

His statement that seems to justify the ban on international adoption, i.e. when he said that there are more adoptive parents in Romania awaiting children than there are children available for adoption, is completely false. It is simply and utterly miles from the truth. The figures given by the Child Rights department in Romania are of 36,000 children in institutional care, but they also state that there are no more children under the age of three in institutions. We found last year that they had managed to make more than 4,000 (some observers estimate the figure to be as high as 9,000) of these latter category vanish from the statistics by retaining them in maternity hospitals in order to keep them “off the radar” where the EU is concerned. These children live in hospital wards with no stimulation and with only basic care until they are old enough to enter institutions. When I asked a senior official in Romania’s adoption board in October last as to whether the best interests of these children would be served by international adoption, she replied “of course”. In addition to their hiding these smaller children in maternity hospitals, they are also being stockpiled elsewhere; a few days ago another well respected international human rights body discovered 60 children hidden in an unofficial institution, and formed the view that their development was being damaged by the day due to lack of proper care and stimulation.

I am not a spokesperson for adoptive families, but our work in Romania in the area of human rights allows us to see for ourselves the truth behind the figures that Romania produces in order to achieve EU membership. It is a pity that commentators who live in that country choose not to open their eyes to these facts.

Barry Mulligan’s second wildly inaccurate pronouncement also needs correction. You asked him whether the “bad old days” in Romania’s institutions could be said to be over, eliciting the reply that those days were “most definitely gone”. What utter rubbish! Where has Barry been for the last ten years? Does he not even read the local papers in Romania? Such trite comments do more than show up Barry as someone who doesn’t know what he is talking about; the peddling of such misinformation does a grave injustice to the tens of thousands of victims who still suffer in Romania’s frighteningly overcrowded and under funded institutions. Such bland pronouncements merely serve to make all the more difficult the work of NGOs like ourselves who work for the reform of such places.

The reality is that the “bad old days” are still very much with us, for example:

1. The Child Rights department admits that there are 36,000 children in institutions, and in addition there are between 4,000 and 9,000 additional children “stacked up” in maternity hospitals. An unknown additional number are kept out of sight in unofficial institutions. There is widespread abuse of human rights, including the use of daily sedation as a management method in the absence of adequate staffing levels. Good plans for reform exist at central level, but do not manage to trickle down to the target group.

2. There are an admitted 23,000 adults in institutions under the department of handicap. A reform programme is under way here, with a pilot project sponsored by Focus on Romania in partnership with one of the local authorities. At the current rate of progress the reforms in this sector will have been completed in 930 years!

3. No real plans for reform exist in the mental health sector. There are somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 persons living in mental hospitals, although you do not need to be mentally ill to qualify for inclusion in this category. Just a couple of months ago, a five year old boy was found living in one such place in Urlati in Prahova County; he had been born as a result of the rape of a female inmate, and was living in a cage among a group of naked and filthy adults. This horror story was recounted in Romania’s national daily paper Evenimentul Zilei, on January 10th of this year. If Barry Mulligan were even to read the local papers, perhaps he might understand that the “bad old days” have not gone away.

The vagueness of the numbers in this latter sector, somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000, is due to the non-availability of any kind of accurate information; we asked the EU representative in Bucharest for exact figures and he was unable to elicit such figures, although the EU can confidently state that Romania is meeting all its commitments in the human rights field. Amnesty International found widespread use of captive slave labour in the running of this sector, and the EU advice that only “a partial budget” exists for this area would appear to reinforce this view. The use of slave labour is forbidden under the UN convention on human rights, but such high standards appear not to be required for EU membership.

The EU could solve much of this unnecessary suffering at a stroke, by making reforms a condition of the accession process, but have so far not chosen to do so. With the exception of a few lines in the October report, largely put there as a result of our lobbying, the EU has adopted a “hear no evil, see no evil” approach to this matter. The main thrust of policy in Brussels is for enlargement at all costs, and human rights issues do not generally get a hearing in Europe’s capital. We have found evidence of deliberate understating of the scale of the problem by officials in the European Commission, leading to a situation where the politicians in the parliament are making decisions based on erroneous information. An opportunity to force through reforms is being lost by the inaction of the EU, and the public pronouncements of Anne McElhinney and Barry Mulligan are no help to those of us who believe that human rights should be at the top of the enlargement agenda. Shame on them!

If it is possible to get access to your programme in order to help redress this imbalance and injustice I would be quite willing to speak on air on this issue on Monday.
(I will be working outside of Ireland again from Tuesday). You can contact me at the number below.

John Mulligan
(Chairman, Focus on Romania)


www.focusonromania.net