Ms Susan Lohan:

I thank the committee for the chance to discuss the Bill. We welcome any discussion on a Bill that would address the question of adoption information because the Adoption Rights Alliance and our predecessor group, Adoption Ireland, have been campaigning on this since 1999. I will go through the headings I have included in my speaking notes. I will not read out my submission verbatim but it will be available afterwards. We have a separate document from Monday that we will make available to the committee and in which we address each head individually.

The first point that occurred to us on reading the Bill was that there was no real sense that its authors had faced up to the background of Ireland's rather flawed adoption industry. There is no reference to criminality, illegal adoptions or those children who were trafficked to the United States. On the question of illegal adoptions, there are two false assumptions, one being that there is no paper trail for illegal adoptions. It very much depends where and through which agency a child was illegally adopted. St. Patrick's Guild has a file on every person it placed for adoption, be it legally, illegally or before the enactment of the Adoption Act 1952. Therefore, there will be two sets of people whose information will have to be handled under that heading.

I thank my colleague Ms Mari Steed, my opposite number in the United States who is a member of a group called Banished Babies, and other groups representing people trafficked from Ireland to the United States. They are astonished that they have been totally ignored in the provisions of this Bill. Given that speakers from the Department of Children and Youth Affairs referred to "Philomena", it is astonishing that they chose to omit this whole category of people from the Bill. Ms Steed has some questions she would like the committee to consider.

Also on top of our list is the misinterpretation of the I. O'T. v. B. Supreme Court case. There have been false assumptions about that case for many years. There is a pretence that the vast majority of women were promised privacy when in fact the opposite seems to have prevailed in that women were forced to sign away their rights to their children rather than having been guaranteed any specific rights themselves. I commend Mr. Geoffrey Shannon, the reappointed chairman of the Adoption Authority of Ireland, on his salient comments on this matter on 22 October. I will repeat them for the record:

A possible interpretation of the judgment in the case of I. O'T v. B is that the right to information about a child's identity is a freestanding entitlement that does not depend on the existence or necessarily the enforcement of the maintenance of a relationship between parent and child. That is worth considering when it comes to legislating. This judgment has been held up as a roadblock to legislating in this area. I take the view that it should not present a roadblock and it is not of huge relevance in the area.

When considering the question of privacy, members should realise it is a two-way street and that, as it stands, because adoptive people are denied access to their information and knowledge about their families of origin, the State is positively impeding their right to lead a private life. I cited the relevant article from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I would like the committee to consider that.

We also want the committee to consider whether the Bill's provisions are discriminatory as no other children in the history of this State have been denied access to their birth and early care information to the same extent as adopted people. A blanket ban has prevailed in this area, for both marital and non-marital children. I would like the committee to consider in particular the reciprocal arrangements in the Good Friday Agreement, under which the Irish Human Rights Commission was set up. The commission's brief is to ensure Irish citizens, both north and south of the Border, enjoy the same rights. Our Northern Ireland counterparts have enjoyed open access to their adoption records since 1987.

I will not refer to counselling and support, as Ms Gilmartin has done, because I believe the Minister should seriously consider decoupling identity information from contact and tracing provisions. That would make the entire job of this committee and Houses so much simpler.

I commend Senators Jillian van Turnhout and Averil Power on their work on the Adoption (Identity and Information) Bill that was presented to the Seanad last year. It ran to only 16 pages and very few of us had a problem with its content. I commend Dr. Fergus Ryan, who will be speaking to the committee today, on his work on that. Our fifth recommendation is for the committee is to consider the Oregon law on the handling of adoption information.

I will now move on to particular objections to sections of the Bill. There are very limited statutory rights for adopted people in the Bill. They are limited by access conditions in addition to veto conditions. We must be very up-front and name them. There is not an automatic right to information; there are absolute vetoes in place. I ask the committee to consider either having a firm definition of "compelling reasons" or, as we recommend, setting it aside completely because we can see it being abused at a very high level.

We also have concerns about Tusla. We do not believe social workers are best placed to trace natural parents as they have neither the resources nor the expertise. If the Minister is insisting on leaving information and tracing provisions together in this Bill, we want to see a completely rewritten model involving family law experts and experts in data mining.

Let me refer to the files. The details on how an adopted person would gain access to his or her file are scant. We will discover in the end that a further layer of information vetoes will attach to the access provisions for files. There are at least five files that any particular adopted person might have. Only one of them could really be called an adoption file, that is, the file of the Adoption Authority of Ireland. Every member of the population should have the same level of access to all files.

Ms Patricia White from Barnardos will be speaking to the committee later. That organisation runs the Origins project for people who were separated from their family through incarceration in industrial homes. There are no compelling reasons, or statutory declarations, to be signed for accessing its database. Adopted people should not be treated differently in this regard.

I wish to talk about the prejudice and discrimination that pervade this Bill. Some of the language is highly offensive if one considers that an adopted person may be denied the right to discover his or her identity because of "compelling reasons" based on the view that the discovery of that identity "may endanger the life of a person". This is confirmed by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs. It is very inflammatory language and it will not make adopted people feel any better about the Bill.

I have identified other issues in this part of the Bill and they are contained in page 11 of my notes under the heading "Prejudice and Discrimination towards Adopted People - Past & Present". I concur with Ms Gilmartin and other speakers that the notion that adopted people would be charged fees is abhorrent.

Clarifying the numbers is important because neither Tusla nor any other service provider could be in a position to adjudicate on how well placed it is to offer the service until we actually assess the numbers of people using it. We estimate the number is approximately 90,000.

Would this Bill have assisted Philomena and Anthony Lee? Our conclusion is that it would not. Were he alive today, Anthony Lee would be appalled at how this Bill does not even stop to consider him and his 2,000 counterparts. He would be appalled at how the Government has squandered the publicity dividend that his story and that of his mother generated. He would be appalled the database of his files, and those of the other banished babies, have been moved to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade where there are no systems in place to allow access. He would be appalled to discover the extent to which the Irish State co-operated in trafficking children to the US. It is only because of the international embarrassment caused by the film, “Philomena”, that we are even sitting discussing this matter. Yet, Philomena and Anthony Lee will not be assisted one iota by this Bill.