Mr. Cormac Quinlan:

Absolutely. With the information campaign, we must differentiate between the right to identity and the right to contact. People should understand there are differentiations and we should consider how to support people in that regard as well as advising people of their rights and protection in some circumstances. In the 12-month period proposed, we want people to engage with us early and well. There is indication of a kind of confidential helpline for people who may be ambivalent. We want to be able to support people and talk them through their worries in order to give them every opportunity to express their preference early so we can begin our work early. In that, we want to make them aware of their choices, and I am particularly conscious of choices in the context of adoption. Many of these parents or adopted persons did not have a choice at certain points in their lives, so we must ensure that we can now facilitate them with a sense of choice and power. With choice comes responsibility for that choice and that has implications for some people. With new adoptions, we want an open approach from the outset.

With respect to information and tracing, we hope the majority of cases will involve a level of consent. There will be cases where people are ambivalent, as Ms Mugan mentioned. We need to engage with these people, support them and help to communicate where the adoptive person or birth parent is at. Through a dialogue and consultation with the parties, it is hoped we will be able to overcome barriers, as we have done already. People have established defence mechanisms over much time and when these are taken down, those people can become vulnerable, so we must be conscious of that. We do not want to delay people's access to information or damage any future potential for contact in identifying information.

People have spoken about compelling reasons. Within the proposed Bill, it is clear there is an indication of a level of threshold - that might be endangerment to life - but Ms Mugan has spoken about other circumstances. If we are making an assessment within a period, some issues will require a more specialist assessment. A social worker has absolute skill and ability to do this and there are very experienced social workers in the adoption service. In some cases, we may need additional support and that is why we are seeking clarification in that regard. We very much see this as a journey for people and they will have access to different types of information at different stages in the journey. The people from the Department spoke about that on the last day.

On the centralisation of records, we were very keen to achieve this on a number of fronts. The first is the protection of records, as some are very historical, and we want to ensure they are safe and secure. We have spoken about how we are centralising our service nationally to provide a more streamlined service.

We want to maximise the use of clerical administrative staff to make sure they do the searching and the social workers’ time is focused on the direct contact with adopted persons or birth parents to maximise our ability to get a better response to those cases.