But it wasn't entirely inappropriate because, from the outset Tristan's adoption, like so many foreign adoptions these days, was very much a commercial transaction.

Tristan was taken from his mother Suryani by a maternity nurse and a woman called Rosdiana, a baby broker. Through a contact with an Indonesian-American, Rosdiana located Joe and Lala Dowse, who wanted to adopt a child.

Indonesia has very strict regulations about the adoption of its children by foreigners, but paying the right money to the right people ensured that paperwork was acquired and Tristan joined the Dowse household.

Those who arranged the adoption were not childcare experts and knew nothing about the rights of the child, but as Rosdiana was later to tell me, they all profited handsomely from the transaction.

Many of the details of Tristan's short life were outlined in the judgement delivered by judge John McMenamin to a packed courtroom on Thursday. As media and legal teams squeezed into the tiny family law room on the upper floor, I couldn't stop thinking of Tristan and Suryani, his mother, who now live in Tegal in Central Java. They did not know the court case was coming to a conclusion but it seemed they were finally getting some justice from a state that had done them few favours until then.

For so long the Irish state ignored Tristan's fate. Before his abandonment by Joe and Lala Dowse in an orphanage outside Jakarta, for example, a blind eye was turned to the paperwork which Joe Dowse used to register the adoption in Ireland. Dowse bypassed all the normal Indonesian procedures, yet the adoption was accepted as legal by the Irish Adoption Board.

For a document that goes into so much detail about Tristan's life story, the judgement seems to shy away from looking into the legality of his adoption.

"The court has not heard evidence from all witnesses as to the precise circumstances surrounding the adoption of Tristan nor how the [Dowses] established contact with him, " it says. "The court therefore has insufficient evidence to make any adjudication as to the circumstances of the adoption, " the judgment states.

Kiernan Gildea, registrar of the Irish Adoption Board, was similarly reticent when speaking to reporters outside the court. As ordered by the court, he said, the board would be removing Tristan's name from the register of foreign adoptions. However, questions about how his name came to be on the register in the first place, and whether the Adoption Board now accepts that Tristan's adoption was illegal, elicited a sharp "no comment" and signalled the end of media interviews.

The reluctance of the Irish establishment to tackle this aspect of the Tristan case is, in some ways, understandable. Foreign adoption is a mostly middle-class activity.

These adopters form effective lobby groups; they know to organise and they know how to make their voice heard.

However, foreign adoption also occurs mostly in deeply corrupt and impoverished countries. Every day, documents are being presented to the Irish Adoption Board from countries whose paperwork is not trusted on any other matter. This paperwork often says children are abandoned, unwanted, unloved or even dying and that foreign adoption is their only hope.

Last week, justice minister Michael McDowell robustly defended his department's refusal to accept applications from people living in China to join the gardai. A department official said they would be "stark raving mad" to accept such applications because they would be accompanied by forged paperwork.

However, the Adoption Board seems to have no such qualms about Chinese paperwork. It accept documents at face value from China, even though the adoption process costs large sums of money which is worth an absolute fortune in China.

For the moment, it seems there may be a happy ending to the saga of Tristan Dowse.

When I first broke the story there was a massive public response. Lots of couples and individuals phoned social services, newspapers and TV stations wishing to save the little boy with the sad eyes. It was a heartfelt reaction to a heart-wrenching story.

From the beginning, however, I knew there was one person whose voice was not being heard. As a journalist I wanted to hear from Suryani, Tristan Dowse's natural mother.

The adoption was illegal and Tristan was an Irish citizen. If the adoption had happened in Ireland, no expense or effort would have been spared in trying to locate the child's natural mother.

However, as McMenamin detailed in his judgement, the Irish authorities did not seem to investigate this option.

Instead they looked at the possibility of having him readopted by an American couple living in Indonesia, putting a lot of effort into trying to bring him to Ireland to have him readopted here.

Knowing she would probably have an interesting story to tell I approached RTE about making a documentary. The programme, The Search for Tristan's Mum, produced in association with Esras Films, eventually located Suryani. From her, I heard a familiar story, one I had heard from many natural mothers in the developing world.

She was preyed upon when she was vulnerable by people who were interested only in money, and she had never stopped thinking of Tristan. She wanted to see him again.

After a reunion closely monitored by Indonesian social services, Suryani was eventually allowed to take Tristan home. Today he is in Tegal with his mother and extended family.

They are not rich. When she can get work sewing pillowcases, Suryani earns the equivalent of 50 cent a day. With the few savings she had from working on a food stall in Jakarta she was able to help her family to install a water pump. They now have running water. Last week's judgement means they will be financially secure for the rest of Tristan's childhood.

If there was a redeeming feature in the evidence, Judge McMenamin said, "it is the knowledge we now have as to Tristan's well being and the fact that he has now been happily restored to the custody of his natural mother".

Suryani's mother is a religious woman in her 60s.

She reminded me of so many women of that age here in Ireland. She felt that her daughter having a baby outside marriage brought great shame on the family. That was before she met Tristan.

Now the family love him and life is becoming as normal as possible, given that they are at the centre of an international diplomatic and legal wrangle.

But questions about the integrity of the international adoption process remain, and while these questions go unanswered, we will not know how many other Tristans are out there.