This report, launched in July, offers an in-depth exploration of the Irish domestic adoption process over seven decades, capturing experiences from both voluntary and professional perspectives.

It draws from interviews with 14 individuals involved in domestic adoption, conducted between 2021 and 2022, just before the enactment of the Birth Information and Tracing Act (BITA) in October 2022. Its objectives were to capture individual experiences of how adoption was facilitated, how it worked in practice, how decisions were made and how it changed over the 70 years from 1952 to 2022. 

The first part of the report contains 12 narrative chapters – one per participant - while the second part provides an analysis of the interviews, describing the main themes arising from the study. These themes include the all-pervading persistent culture of secrecy, the power of adoption-related information, and how a number of people used personal agency to drive change in Irish adoption. 

The full report is available here.