Mr. Paul Redmond:

The new Bill was always going to be contentious, welcomed by some and detested by others, and it was always going to fail to meet many expectations. However, it is by and large a common sense Bill within the existing constitutional and Supreme Court limits. It is also a reasonable and good faith attempt to address many of the issues that have been deliberately stalled and swept under the carpet by successive Governments. The inclusion and recognition of the illegally adopted people in our community is to be welcomed alongside the long overdue collection and safeguarding of adoption files currently in private hands. With some goodwill on the part of this committee and the Minister, Deputy James Reilly, and with the active participation of the adoption community, the Bill can move significantly closer to fulfilling the realistic expectations of the people it affects.

The one-year lead-in is a major problem. Members of the adoption community are elderly and getting older by the day. As somebody pointed out to me earlier, seven people in the community have died since the commission of inquiry into mother and baby homes started in January. The longer the delay continues, the more people will fail to have reunions or any options. Because of and during the one-year lead-in, both adoptees and natural parents will end up reuniting with headstones in cold and lonely graveyards. The solution is to reduce the lead-in to the bare minimum, perhaps 30 to 60 days. The resources that are to be allocated for use over a year should be put into a more intensive information campaign as soon as possible.

I have a major problem with Parts 4 and 5 of the Bill which deal with informal adoption and wrongful registration and are sorely missing the real point here. “Informal adoption” and “wrongful registration” are a polite way describing the most serious criminal actions, including illegal adoptions, potentially baby trafficking and even child abduction. These criminal actions, by their very nature, leave little or no paperwork and what little may exist is usually fraudulent. This matter needs to be taken far more seriously and the State needs to accept that where it failed in the past, it needs to correct matters proactively now and into the future.

Illegal adoptees are in the worst position of all adoptees, and that is if they are the lucky ones who know they are adopted. What is to be done about the people who are illegally adopted and do not even know they are adopted? This echoes what Ms McManus said. The State has a duty of care to tell people they are adopted if they do not know. While the issue of adoptees, legal and illegal, having no medical history is bad enough, those who do not know they are adopted at all have unknowingly given false medical histories to their doctors and thereby risked their lives and health. It is more than likely that innocent people have died because of false medical information they provided in good faith. Without proactive intervention by the Government, they will continue unwittingly to pass on false medical histories, including to their children, with potentially lethal consequences.

Section 4 of head 23 in Part 5 states an “Agency must take all steps it considers reasonable” to locate natural parents on behalf of an illegal adoptee. It is too little, too late. What is needed is a small, dedicated team of civil servants and gardaí, with modest resources, to investigate actively the case of any illegal adoptee who applies to the unit. If, in the course of any investigation, any evidence comes to light regarding other illegally adopted persons, the team shall discreetly approach any person it believes to be illegally adopted and inform him or her of that fact, in line with the State’s duty of care to people who are the unwitting victims of a crime. I fully concur with what Ms McManus said on this. All the actions needed by illegally adopted people must also be applied to natural mothers and fathers whose children were taken against their will and-or forcibly adopted. This applies to the great majority of illegally adopted people.

Despite the fact it runs to 200 pages, there are still some omissions in the Bill, including unenumerated forced relinquishment in modern Ireland. Although it is not mentioned in the Bill, there is one major outstanding matter in contemporary adoption in Ireland that needs to be addressed and included. We have a ridiculous and woefully outdated provision in current adoption law known as the “step-parent adoption process”. This provision forces a parent who wishes to unite his or her family legally, usually after a marriage, to relinquish his or her child legally in order that the child can be re-adopted by the relinquishing parent along with the new spouse. A natural mother must become an adoptive mother under the law. We still have an odious form of forced relinquishment in Ireland which demands a natural parent to sign away his or her child and transform into an adoptive parent. There are no plans to change this bizarre provision. The Bill is the ideal opportunity to shelve this degrading anomaly. It is a simple enough matter to include in the new Bill, would also certainly be cost neutral and may save the State money and the valuable time of social workers and gardaí in vetting and paperwork.

Appended to this submission is a link to a public petition initiated by Milana Kearns, a dedicated and loving mother unwilling to sign away her children for anyone or anything. Milana is caught between wanting to unite her family and her principled stand against signing away her own child. CMABS fully supports Milana’s fight for a fair and just system to be put in place. The public comments on the petition clearly record the anger of a selection of members of the public who have been caught in this legal anomaly and their desire for a fair and just reworking of the system to recognise legally the reality of the many new and loving families who simply want to be recognised and accommodated. It is abundantly clear that many families are caught in this legal quandary and the numbers are likely to increase.

I urge the committee to recommend that the Minister include a couple of brief paragraphs in the new adoption Bill that would sort this problem instantly. There are no major principles or constitutional issues at stake. It means the General Register Office would produce a new template certificate for use in such situations. People have been talking about the future regarding surrogacy. In such situations, we need a certificate headed “Birth and Adoption Certificate” which would reflect the new reality of life in modern Ireland.

The no-contact veto is the most publicly contentious provision of this Bill. I represent an umbrella group of several different adoption campaign groups and there are widely differing opinions on this veto. It is impossible to represent the community fully without noting all sides of this argument. I will briefly run through them. There are civil and human rights arguments againstthe veto by those who feel passionately that adoptees should be able to access their personal original birth certificates without any restrictions of any kind whatsoever. Some members of the community will never accept this veto and will continue to fight it on principle into the future regardless of whether this Bill is passed. As part of this side of the argument, Adopted Illegally Ireland would like to point out to the committee that, "Adopted Illegally Ireland notes that the eighth amendment to the Irish Constitution gives the life of an unborn child equal status to the right to life of the mother, why then doesn't that same child have equal rights to an identity and know their mother ... in life."

Then there are those, and I include myself among them, who accept this Bill and the no-contact veto simply because of the reality of the current legal restrictions imposed by the Supreme Court's ruling in the I. O’T case. The argument is that they can see no other way to balance the rights of adoptees and natural mothers and thereby ensure this Bill is constitutional. They also argue that the idea that a no-contact veto is discriminatory is a relatively new idea that originated approximately 20 years ago in America, and as Ireland has a distinctly different Constitution and specifically a unique Supreme Court ruling on the balance of rights of adoptees and natural mothers, this idea is simply incompatible with our legal system as it stands. This does not mean it is impossible to change the veto but we argue that it can only be very slightly modified at present and not dropped as any Bill such as this is legally obliged to protect the constitutional right to privacy of natural mothers.