Foreign adoption has long been a source of difficulty between would-be adopters and the health boards. This unhappy state of affairs is likely to continue, despite the publication of a report last week, designed to streamline the process. The main source of anger to would-be adoptive parents is the amount of time it takes to get through the assessment procedure. Only a minority of assessments are completed in less than a year while almost one-third take more than two years. Assessments generally involves a maximum of nine interviews with the prospective adoptees, except in the Eastern Health Board region where ten or more interviews are the norm.
Why this procedure should take two years to complete is baffling. So is the fact that couples, having gone through this long process, sometimes have to wait months for the final report to be drawn up for the committee which will make the ultimate decision. The report by UCD academics, Dr Valerie O'Brien and Dr Valerie Richardson, found that each social worker manages to complete, on average, 11 assessments a year. To people working in more rushed environments, this looks like an extraordinarily low output. Evidently the authors of the report think so too. They recommend that the number of interviews be reduced and the output per social worker increased to a still modest 18 to 24 assessments a year.
Standardising procedures across health boards is, of course, welcome, as are moves to ensure that assessments are completed more speedily. But a backlog of applications has already built up and the cost of providing extra staff to clear this will be substantially more than the £500,000 extra which the Minister, Mr Fahey, is providing for the purpose this year. The minister made it clear at last week's launch of the report that he must continue to give priority to child protection services. In turn, this means that backlogs will remain in foreign adoption assessments. Some progress is being made; the problem is that would-be adopters are unlikely to notice any change for some time.
One possible answer to the problem of delays would be to charge for the assessments; the cost, the report estimates, would be about £4,000 each. This, the theory goes, would enable health boards to employ more social workers to carry out assessments or to subcontract other agencies to carry them out. Mr Fahey made it clear last week that a system of charging people according to their means for the service was favoured. This proposal is now expected to be considered by an "implementation committee" which will prioritise and cost the report's recommendations.
It may be that this is the only way to deal with the backlog - it would be hard to justify the diversion of taxpayer's money from urgent child protection services to fund foreign adoption. The charge could be reduced or eliminated for those who cannot afford it. But that still leaves the adoptive parents facing charges of £10,000 and more which international adoption agencies and others will extract for arranging the actual adoption. The sooner Ireland ratifies the Hague Convention on inter-country adoption and restricts the making of arrangements for adoption to official bodies in countries which have signed up to the convention, the better.