Everything I know about adoption, I learnt from Kateri. This knowledge, has made me, if possible, even more outraged by the case of Tristan Dowse. Tristan was adopted in Indonesia by an Irish-Azerbaijani couple when he was 2 months old. At that time they thought they couldn’t have children of their own. In fact, they had a daughter just before Tristan’s first birthday. By the time he was nearly two, Tristan’s parents decided that the whole adoption thing wasn’t working out and dumped him in an orphanage in Indonesia and never saw him again.
The case was covered extensively in the Irish media at the time but, reading the details in the high court judgement, if anything, makes the whole thing seem more grim, depressing and inexplicable. The only rays of sunshine are an eventual happy ending for Tristan and the fact that the Irish public services appear to have covered themselves in glory.
