The Adoption Authority of Ireland (AAI) has launched a new research report entitled “Reflections on the Irish Domestic Adoption Process 1952–2022”

This report 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. It’s 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 provided an analysis of the interviews, describing the main themes arising from the study. You can read the report here.