Ms Kathy McMahon:

I thank the Chairman, Deputies and Senators for giving us the opportunity to make a presentation on the heads of the Adoption (Information and Tracing) Bill 2015. We appreciate the work done to the heads of the Bill so far.

I am the founder of Irish First Mothers and I am a first mother. My first child was born in April 1974 after I had spent four months in the Good Shepherd convent in Dunboyne, County Meath. I was aged 18 years and nursed my child for seven days. On the day I was discharged from Holles Street Hospital, however, a nurse took my infant daughter without warning. I was later forced to sanction her adoption and I did not see my daughter for another 28 years. We reconnected through the adoption database, as we had both registered with it. I did not intend to include this in my opening statement, but it is important to recount my experience of connecting with my child through a register.

I previously worked in my community where I raised my subsequent three children.

In early 2014 I founded Irish First Mothers. I had been a member of the Adoption Rights Alliance, on and off, for a while and saw a need for a place where mothers could come together to share their experiences and help each other to overcome some of the damage done to them. In short, Irish First Mothers is a peer-to-peer mutual support group for women who have lost children to adoption. We have more than 50 verified members, ranging in age from their early 40s through to their mid-70s. Most of us were incarcerated in so-called mother and baby homes and I am here today to represent the majority view of members.

Public discussion of the proposed heads of the Bill has included reference to so-called privacy rights around access to adoption information, but commentators often confuse privacy in respect of information with privacy in regard to personal contact. Any citizen is entitled to privacy, but there are already well crafted laws to defend against unwanted intrusion on one's personal privacy. As such, the proposed sections of the Bill which use the contact veto to limit privacy intrusion are arguably redundant. Such privacy rights were not what the Supreme Court had in mind in the often quoted IOT v. B judgment. That case hinged on confidentiality in circumstances where a mother had been given specific guarantees about confidentiality regarding her participation in an adoption. I am here to advise the committee that we first mothers never sought confidentially, nor were we ever offered it. Instead, we were threatened against ever attempting to make contact with our children. My own abiding memory of my incarceration in a mother and baby home was of mothers screaming in anguish following the often forced removal of their babies. Our rights and welfare were not of paramount concern to those around us. None of our group was offered confidentiality. In the IOT v. B case the court relied on the existence of a cohort of women who had been given special confidentiality assurances. However, such a cohort of women simply do not exist.

The other, broader, confidentiality argument is that the natural mother and other parties had a general right to expect confidentiality in adoption proceedings. That might be true if Ireland's historical adoption practices had mostly been legal. However, the bulk of historical adoptions were the result of sustained coercion. Women were coerced into convents, coerced during pregnancy and birth, kept as mere dependent chattels and finally coerced into signing adoption consent forms which violated their parental rights and interfered with their infants' natural bonds. These unsound consents constituted a systemic fraud on the adoption process and rendered Ireland's historical adoption procedures substantially illegal and a violation of constitutional and international human rights. The relevant birth and adoption information records are not normal confidential records; they are evidence of the illegal acts to which we and our infants were subjected.

First mothers and injured adopted persons will likely never see prosecutions for these illegal adoptions. The very minimum we should offer all potential victims of this illegal process is prompt and unhindered access to the evidence, namely, the records of the crimes against their national identity. All parties to illegal historical adoptions - the child, the natural parents and the adoptive parents - have rights to available information on these adoptions. All the mothers in our group who expressed an opinion are opposed to vetos or excessive delays in adult adopted persons accessing their birth information. We estimate that some 98% of first mothers are open to reconnecting with their adopted children at some level, bearing in mind that access to information does not mean automatic contact.

The committee might find it useful to consider the recent experience of the state of Victoria in Australia which earlier this year passed the Adoption Amendment Bill 2015, which removes the reference to "contact preferences" from existing adoption laws. This removal does not affect a person's option to register his or her contact wishes on Victoria's adoption information register. In reference to the new law, the Victoria MP, Sam Hibbins, wrote:

[Contact statements] set up yet another barrier to contact between natural parents and adopted children being re-established. It is not appropriate when we are dealing with two adults who want to regulate contact with each other ... We should revert to the framework we had in place for 29 years where Victorian adults regulated contact between each other.

For 29 years in Victoria, adult adopted people, their natural parents and adopted parents had been able to access information once the adopted person reached the age of 18 years.

I was shunned, labelled and incarcerated because I was a so-called single mother. Nobody cared about the impact this would have, how labels, stigma and the treatment I received would affect my entire life. As natural first mothers, it was not as a result of our inability to parent a child with love that our children were taken from us. While it is true that adoptive parents can provide a loving home, so also can a single parent. I went on to have three more children, the youngest of whom, sadly, died in a road accident aged 16 years. My surviving marital children are upstanding members of society. The first mothers I know are caring, sensitive and capable. They deserve to have their parental rights defended.

I understand copies of our submission have been circulated to members.