This article examines the activities of the Children's Committee of the London County Council (LCC) and what a contemporary newspaper referred to as a ‘daring experiment’: its efforts to discharge children from public care to Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s. Archival evidence reveals how Irish children were identified and separated from English children in care and, in many instances, sent to Ireland. It is maintained the dominant constructions of ‘Ireland’ played a role in the scheme. In addition, the LCC policy is examined and viewed in the context of other exclusionary practices centred on Irish people in Britain in the mid-twentieth century.