AT this time 12 years ago, the prayers and the pity of the Irish people went out to what we called Romanian orphans. Everyone had been horrified by television pictures of neglected and seemingly abandoned Romanian children living in squalid institutions in their own country as it emerged from the shadow of the Iron Curtain.

According to Department of Health figures, 644 Romanian children have been adopted into Ireland since 1990. Of these, roughly 40% were adopted by people who already had children. The rest went to couples who suffered from that increasingly common western complaint - childlessness.

What could be a better gift than to rescue a destitute Romanian baby from deprivation? Many of the adoptive parents of these children remain highly motivated and involved with providing aid to Romania, and work for organisations to help Romanian children both at home and in Ireland. But now a debate is beginning, and not just in Romania, about the ethics of foreign adoption.

This is a debate in which both sides have the welfare of the world's children as their goal. It is a debate that questions easy definitions of nationality, of identity, of belonging and of parenthood itself.

The Irish are not the biggest foreign adopters per head of population - that title belongs to the Scandinavian countries. But in the last 40 years, Ireland - probably uniquely in Europe - has gone from being a net exporter of babies and young children to being a net importer of babies as its prosperity has soared and its religious taboos against sex have plumetted.

Nico and Raluca O'Driscoll, and Gaby Bourke, are three bright and happy children who live in Co Cork. Nico and Raluca have a brother and two sisters.

Their youngest sister, Elena, is called after Nico's birth mother, who lives in Romania and with whom his adoptive mother, Sharon O'Driscoll, is in regular contact. Nico is Elena's fifth child.

According to Sharon O'Driscoll, Elena gave Nico up for adoption "due to poverty. I don't want to go into the details because they are private to Nico." Sharon, who still travels to Romania up to five times per year, has no details on her daughter Raluca, who was adopted when she was threeand-a-half. Gaby Bourke, meanwhile, now has four brothers and sisters. "Gaby has very positive feelings towards Romania, " says his father, John Bourke, a GP in Newmarket, Co Cork. "We all cheer on Romania at soccer."

Romania, however, has less positive feelings about the foreign adoptions of its citizens.

For almost two years, there has been a moratorium on Romanian children being brought out oftheir native country. The moratorium is overseen by the High Level Group For Romanian Children which is co-chaired by the British Liberal Democrat peer, Baroness Emma Nicholson, and the Romanian prime minister Adrian Nastase.

Significantly, the third important member of the group is Gunter Verheugen, the European Commissioner for Enlargement. Romania is very eager to join the European Community.

On meeting Nastase shortly after he came to power, Emma Nicholson, a rapporteur to the European Parliament on the issue of child welfare, raised the subject of child trafficking and foreign adoption with the new prime minister: "I knew the prime minister was determined to enter the EU and I made it clear that this activity is abhorrent to the Union. To my delight I found a willing listener. The Romanian politicians should not be denigrated for jumping on a bandwagon. Many of them, like the Romanian Orthodox Church, have been opposed to this practice for years. When we approached the Romanian Orthodox Church, it said 'You are preaching our sermon. What can we do to help?'" President Iliescu was the country's leader in 1991, when foreign adoption arrived in Romania. The current prime minister, Adrian Nastase, was then his foreign minister. Iliescu brought in a moratorium on all foreign adoptions of Romanian children, but it collapsed after only a few weeks due to what Nicholson calls "enormous external pressure from America, Spain, France and Israel to re-start the flow of children."

She is determined that the same will not happen this time.

"The political will is there. The problem is that the Romanians are getting as much criticism now for doing the right thing as they were in the past for doing the wrong thing."

Spain, says Nicolson, "is ferocious in demanding children. It has a zero fertility rate. It says that these are Latin babies and that they belong in Spain. This is colonialism in its most aggressive form." During the 1990s, hundreds of Romanian children were sent to Spain and vanished, she says.

In response to the new moratorium, some representatives of American Congress signed a letter saying that if Romania was not fit to run an inter-country adoption system, then Congress would have severe doubts as to whether it was competent to join Nato. "This is shameful, " says Emma Nicholson.

Sharon O'Driscoll, like John Bourke, is a member of the Inter Country Adoption Support Group. She doesn't approve of Baroness Nicholson at all.

"She's closed down Romania, " says O'Driscoll. "It's a country struggling to make ends meet and there are children in institutions there when they could have families here. Every child has a right to a family."

As Romania's prosperity has increased, the proportion of Romanian children being adopted into Ireland has fallen.

In 1997, 41 Romanian children were adopted by Irish people, and only four Russian children.

By 1999, the year before the Romanian moratorium on foreign adoption kicked in, 56 Romanian children were adopted into Ireland, and 74 Russian children. Over the same period, adoptions from Thailand, Vietnam and South America have sharply increased.

John Bourke found Gaby in an orphanage - "a good orphanage" - in Bucharest. John and his wife Suzanne had asked for a child with "a correctable physical handicap". It transpired that Gaby's physical problems were due to minor kidney trouble, but he was already traumatised. "I honestly believe that if we hadn't taken him, he would have died, " says John.

Sharon O'Driscoll doesn't want to meet Emma Nicholson.

"I'd be afraid I'd kill her, " she says.

Nicholson is opposed to intercountry adoption on principle.

The only possible exception she might make, she says, is for children from Kenya, where Aids has orphaned hundreds of thousands of children, and wiped out the entire generation that could have been expected to care for them.

Even children from war zones, she thinks, are better off in their own country. One of the few follow-up studies done on foreign adoptions, she says, was done on Vietnamese children adopted into Switzerland during the Vietnam war. The results were not a success.

(In Ireland, foreign adoptions are subject to the same supervision and after-care that national adoptions would be. This includes follow-up visits. ) The UN Charter on the Rights of Children, Nicholson points out, says that a child's culture, language and community must be given priority over a foreign family, no matter how loving.

Furthermore, the charter also states that, contrary to public sentiment, institutional care is no reason for inter-country adoption.

Before she became an MP in 1987, Nicholson had worked for 30 years for Save The Children and Dr Barnardos in the UK.

Both organisations opposed inter-country adoption.

"I accepted that policy unquestioningly because at that time, in the 1980s, inter-country adoption was so rare, " she says.

"The explosion of inter-country adoption which happened subsequently has been driven by the USA. There is a global movement of hundreds of thousands of children from country to country. Inter-country adoption has been hijacked by the child traffickers."

The Hague Convention on child protection is opposed to such adoptions because, she says, "Broadly speaking it is depriving poor countries and poor families of their children.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child says that it is the final step, when all other options have been exhausted."

The search for white babies is constantly spreading to countries with weak or non-existent welfare systems. "It is in Bulgaria now, and I am getting calls from Russia, where people are desperately worried. You can adopt a Russian child on the internet. A child that is under 10, guaranteed white, guaranteed perfect, guaranteed a virgin.

This really is the predatory west at its worst, " says Nicholson.

This seems a long way from adoption into the home of a loving couple but, says Nicholson, the baby and child trade will sell to anyone and couples looking for foreign children are unwittingly supporting crime.

"At the end of this line there are other victims, exactly the kind of loving couples you describe, " she says.

There are no orphans in Romania, she says, but children who have been taken from their mothers by intimidation, poverty and strong-arm tactics. The total population is 20 million, of which over six million are children. Only 80,000 of these are in care, half in foster care or with their extended families, and half in "institutions which are superb".

The child adoption businesses are run by lawyers who, she says, are corrupt. "Paying any money into this system is immoral. They tell fictitious stories about how the children came to be available, " says Nicholson.

One American man brought two young brothers, aged seven and nine, back to the US on the understanding that their parents in Romania were dead.

Once the boys had learned some English, they told him they wanted to go back to their mother. Their father was indeed dead and their mother, who was very poor, had temporarily placed them in an institution (a common practice in Romania) while she fought to earn a living. Corrupt personnel had them adopted without their mother's permission, for hard cash.

At the moment, the World Bank is facilitating the setting up of a child-benefit payment for Romanian mothers. Emma Nicholson completely rejects O'Driscoll and Bourke's assertion that gypsy babies are available for adoption because Romanian people will not adopt them. "Nonsense. Michaela [a little disabled girl who has been brought to Ireland five times, and brought back to foster care by the Romanian government] is, by the look of her, a Roma child. She is with a loving family."

The system, says Nicholson, is corrupt and throughout the 1990s, huge money - more than $150m - was made by the local authorities within a poor country from the sale of children.

Bourke says that he welcomes the discussion on the morality and ethics of inter-country adoption. Romania now is like the Ireland of the '50s - when lots of Irish babies were adopted abroad. It will take time before Romania catches up.

"And what happens to children in orphanages in the meantime?" he says.

Nicholson is sympathetic to couples who are childless, and to those like the O'Driscolls and the Bourkes who are motivated by philanthropy. "But if Irish people really want to help, " she says, "they could pay for a social worker or health visitor for a year. We've got to help these children where they are."