Picture this. You and your husband have unsuccessfully tried to have a child of your own. Fertility treatments haven’t worked. It simply hasn’t happened for you. You apply to be assessed for adoption. It is a gruelling process. Four years later, you are readying yourself to go to Vietnam and bring home an abandoned child who desperately needs a home.

You then hear that Vietnam has closed itself to prospective Irish parents. You still don’t know why. Russia, one of the few countries that Irish people can continue to adopt from, has also closed. Welcome to the world of intercountry adoption in Ireland.

The blacklisting of Ireland by Russian authorities and the failure to agree a new interim agreement with Vietnam have made headlines in recent weeks, and caused adoptive parents throughout Ireland untold heartache.

The interim bilateral agreement with Vietnam expired on May 1, and no new agreement has been put in place. Russia has also in large part been closed off, due to delays and problems in processing paperwork in Ireland.

Last year, the 286 adoptions from Vietnam and 125 adoptions from Russia represented more than four out of five intercountry adoptions registered in Ireland. So the current situation threatens to effectively bring intercountry adoption to a standstill.

Couples say they don’t know where to turn; the latest problems are yet another source of frustration to people who widely believe the system for intercountry adoption in Ireland is at worst a national disgrace, and at best in need of a radical overhaul.

Adoptive parents speak almost unanimously of an intercountry adoption process that is overly bureaucratic and riddled with delays. ‘‘I run my own business and if I ran my business the way Ireland runs its intercountry adoption service, I would have gone bust and would have been hit by a few legal challenges along the way,” says one businessman.

He is one of a number of adoptive parents who spoke to this newspaper on condition of anonymity. Some, understandably, don’t want their personal stories and those of their children to be the stuff of media fodder.

Others believe the risks are too high, and worry about criticising the adoption process in case it antagonises the powers that be. The fear among Irish adoptive parents is palpable and considerable.

‘‘We have to be anonymous,” says one man. ‘‘We don’t want to jeopardise our chances of being approved by social workers.” The process of assessing people in Ireland who want to adopt seems fairly seamless, but the experience of many adoptive parents suggests otherwise.

‘‘We began the adoption process in 2002, by applying to the Department of Health and Children. We were notified that there was a long waiting list, and we would be kept informed as to when we would be admitted to a pre-adoption course,” says one man who, with his wife, has adopted a child from Russia.

‘‘We were told that, due to staff shortages, the wait would be approximately two years. Finally, almost three and a half years later, we began the pre-adoption course in 2005.”

The couple received a declaration to adopt at the end of 2005 and brought their son home from Russia in 2006. It took them just under four years.

‘‘They are delaying people from becoming parents. But, more importantly, they are stopping a little fellow or a little girl from coming out of an institution and into a loving home,” he says.

Couples cite waiting periods of up to five years, with Dublin, Wicklow and Kildare being notoriously slow. Many describe a process that they believe is overly intrusive and arbitrary, and claim that the work practices of social workers are not standardised.

Senior social worker Catherine Burke of the Health Service Executive (HSE) says she understands the pain and fear that parents have. ‘‘People have their homes and their marriages, but they press the button to have kids and it doesn’t happen. People are desperate. This is the last chance they have to have a child and there is so much riding on it,” she says.

‘‘But there is no need for them to be so worried. We don’t expect perfection. We want people who have had to overcome obstacles, and we continually tell people that.”

The statistics support Burke’s claim. About 95 per cent of applicants are successful in getting a positive social worker recommendation, according to the HSE.

Burke insists that there is a standardised framework to ensure that everyone across the country gets the same deliverance of service, and that everyone is measured against the same criteria. She says about 400 people are currently on the waiting list to get onto the preparation course for Dublin, Wicklow and Kildare.

By her own admission, people wait a little under four years in the greater Dublin area before they receive a declaration of eligibility and suitability. In the west, the waiting period can be as short as 18months - a huge time differential that doesn’t quite sit with the notion of a standardised service.

‘‘We cover a large catchment area in greater Dublin - a third of the population. The area tends to have more fertility problems, as people are waiting longer to have children,” she says.

John Collins, chief executive of the Adoption Board, believes the long delays are ‘‘not acceptable’’, and that they can negatively affect family formation, as they can potentially limit the number of children that people can adopt. He directly contradicts the statements made by Burke, and says that assessments are not standardised throughout the country.

Critics also allege that current work practices are out of kilter with the rest of society. ‘‘There are some very good people, but there is nowhere else on the planet that they would get away with doing so little,” says one well-informed source.

‘‘On average, social workers see between ten and 12 applicants a year. Given that there are 52 weeks in the year, I cannot fathom how they aren’t dealing with more. They do have to carry out post-placement assessments and some would run preparatory courses, but it still does not add up.”

His comments are backed up by HSE figures which show that the Dublin service has 17 whole time equivalents and approved 171 people last year.

Either way, the system looks set for a dramatic overhaul. Minister for Children Barry Andrews has vowed to reduce the time it takes to be assessed, and is, by his own admission, ‘‘very open’’ to the setting-up of a not-for-profit organisation that would carry out assessments for the state under the auspices of the International Adoption Association.

The Adoption Board is also analysing a proposal to establish an intermediary agency that would help parents through the adoption process and help with post-placement reports. There is already one accredited mediation agency, Helping Hands, which assists parents who are trying to adopt from Vietnam.

But it’s not just the assessment process that causes adoptive parents such angst. Carol Reddy Locke and her husband received a referral (a match to a child) for their daughter Mai in 2007 - some six years after first making contact with the HSE.

The referral contained details about Mai’s medical history and a photograph. ‘‘You are told not to bond with the child when you receive the photograph, but the reality is that that’s impossible,” says Reddy Locke.

A life-threatening illness called rhinovirus then broke out in Vietnam, and Reddy Locke knew that the Lang Son region where Mai lived was affected. She wanted to buy Mai an antibiotic or enable her to seek medical attention, but was refused, on the grounds that Mai was not yet her child.

Reddy Locke went one step further and offered to buy antibiotics for 100 children. Again, she was prevented from doing so. ‘‘We were tortured. The lack of information was nerve wracking,” she says.

She and her husband brought Mai back to Carlow in May 2008.Mai is now one and a half years old, or, as her mother says, ‘‘one and a half years of pure joy. She has slotted in like a piece in a jigsaw’’.

Some of the experience of adoptive parents in Ireland are far from unique. Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet is faculty director of the child advocacy programme at that university and has begun a campaign aimed at getting leading global human rights lawyers to sign an International Adoption Policy Statement that says international adoption should ‘‘be an integral part of a comprehensive strategy to address the problems of unparented children’’.

She says that, in recent years, ‘‘the typical pattern has been for countries which do open up to close down again, either by prohibiting international adoption, or by creating restrictions that limit the number of children placed and increase the waiting periods those children spend in institutions’’.

China was once the leading destination for Irish people seeking to adopt. But, in May 2007, the country’s government brought in new legislation that requires, among other things, that adoptive parents be married, under 50, not classified as clinically obese, not have taken antidepressant medications in the past two years, not have facial deformities, and meet certain educational and economic requirements.

‘‘Much of South and Central America has been closed off. There is so much hypocrisy about this,” says Bartholet. ‘‘Guatemala has closed off intercountry adoptions, yet allows surrogacy.”

Bartholet says eastern Europe is another case in point. International adoption was closed down in Romania after baby-buying allegations surfaced in 2000. It remained shut for years, and was subsequently closed permanently as the European Parliament made many east European countries, including Romania, agree to outlaw international adoption as a condition of joining the European Union.

In 2006, an advertisement titled ‘Romania’s concealed childcare crisis’ appeared in the Financial Times. It was published by 33 non-governmental organisations, and denounced the child protection system in Romania for ignoring Romanian orphans. It pointed out that EU officials had no idea about the traumas that orphans were subjected to in Romanian institutions.

In their statement, the organisations said: ‘‘Abandoned babies are often confined to steel cribs 23+ hours a day for months or years. Without normal stimuli, without the ability to crawl, play, interact or be loved, they suffer immense, often irreversible psychological and physical damage.”

Some advocates blame the decline in intercountry adoption on Unicef. The United Nations Children’s Fund has been heavily criticised by the pro-adoption lobby for the emphasis it places on maintaining cultural and geographic ties rather than the child’s overall wellbeing and right to a loving and nurturing home.

In an interview with Newsweek magazine, Thomas Atwood, the president of the US’s National Council for Adoption, said:

‘‘Unicef’s almost exclusive focus on domestic programmes amounts to an obstacle to international adoption, and prevents untold numbers of children from improving their lives through international adoption.”

Critics claim that Unicef plays up cases of abuse and corruption, and actively discourages developing countries from making more abandoned children available.

Unicef counter-claims that it is not against intercountry adoption - merely that intercountry adoption is not a main focus. This is partly because it fears that it can be mired in corruption. It is especially concerned where private companies are involved in the transactions, as it believes that profit margins can create a financial incentive and a market where one did not exist before.

It also fears that if developing countries become increasingly reliant on intercountry adoption, they will do less to improve their own child welfare systems.

Elizabeth Bartholet says that repeated research on orphanages has shown ‘‘how devastatingly harmful institutional life is for children’’.

By contrast, she says, countless surveys show that ‘‘children placed early in life in international adoptive homes are likely to do essentially as well in their families and in life as children raised by their biological parents in those receiving countries’’.

An Irish study that was commissioned by the Adoption Board and carried out by the Children’s Research Centre at Trinity College Dublin between 2004 and 2007 concluded that ‘‘intercountry adoption [provided] a very striking example of the resilience of children despite early adversity’’.

It said: ‘‘The majority of the children in this study have demonstrated a remarkable capacity to achieve and develop to their full potential once they were given the opportunity of a normal, loving and supportive home.”

It went on to say that, ‘‘in general, the children felt very positive about being adopted’’.

John Collins, chief executive of the Adoption Board, says the board has applied for funding from the Department of Health to do a follow-up report on the children. Critics of intercountry adoption believe that children are best served in their country of origin, where they can enjoy their own racial, ethnic and national heritage.

But Bartholet questions how children growing up on streets or in orphanages can enjoy their heritage in a meaningful way.

‘‘I have been researching this for a long time and I have lost patience with these arguments. Do children not have a human right to a home? There is not a shred of evidence in the entire body of social science studies following trans-racial adoptees from infancy into adulthood . . . that any harm comes to children from being raised by parents of a different racial or ethnic background,” she says.

International adoption is not a panacea and it goes without saying that solving problems of social and economic injustice is a preferable solution, but that does not look even remotely likely.

There are some 100million children with no available caregivers: 65 million in Asia, 34 million in Africa, and eight million in Latin America and the Caribbean. Unicef estimates that at least 2.6 million children worldwide live in institutional care, noting that this is an under-estimate. The figures speak for themselves.

Shane Downer, chief executive of the International Adoption Association, which provides supports to families, says intercountry adoption will never be a completely flawless process. ‘‘We must legislate as best we can, but issues will emerge,” he says. Downer hopes the crisis over Vietnamese and Russian adoptions will be used to redress the inherent problems in the Irish system.

He says waiting times need to be addressed and that the assessment process, where ‘‘the five standards are not applied to all people in the same way’’, needs improvement.

‘‘Minister Barry Andrews has an opportunity to make a real difference and to do the right thing. We should not shut down the opportunity for children today while trying to improve the system,” he says.