Ms Susan Lohan:

Participating in this meeting with me is Ms Steed, our US co-ordinator. We are pleased to make this submission on the proposed birth information and tracing Bill 2021. It is 20 years for me and more than 20 years for Ms Steed since we first engaged with legislators in this House on such legislation. In my most cynical moments, even I could not have foreseen that I would still be repeating the same mantras 20 years later. As such, I hope that the committee will take into account our comments and fears about the Bill and act accordingly.

Ms Steed and I have worked in the area of advocacy of adopted people's rights for several decades. We bring to the debate our personal experiences as adopted people. Ms Steed was trafficked to the US from the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home. She was also a victim of illegal vaccine trials prior to her trafficking to the US.

I was adopted from a private infant hospital, which is not included in the commission of investigation’s terms of reference of the commission and excluded from the terms of this Bill. It seems that once again the Minister and Department have sought to divide the communities of people who may access the information set out in this Bill so once again, I find myself excluded. Ms Steed and I and others at Adoption Rights Alliance have carried out years of research and evidence gathering. Unfortunately, many adopted people have died during the decades of inaction on the State’s part to recognise their rights as Irish citizens and as adopted people. This inaction is a serious abuse of our human rights and presents ongoing discrimination, all of which has been noted by the IHREC, the ICCL and special rapporteurs at the UN. Most importantly, it stands in conflict with Article 8 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

While we recognise that this Bill represents a significant advancement in the view of the State on the rights of adopted people to identity and personal information, several key sections of the Bill remain problematic for us. First, as I referenced earlier, a huge percentage of those boarded out, sent out to nurse or adopted legally or illegally who were born in State and private hospitals are not included in the information sharing set out in this Bill. Equally, anyone who spent time in the care of a private infant hospital, which would include St. Patrick's Infant Hospital in Blackrock, County Dublin, which was run by one of the most notorious disgraced adoption agencies, St. Patrick's Guild. We can safely say that unconditional access to information and birth certificates is not unfettered. It is not unconditional for all. We reject the notion that if a natural parent has registered a "no contact" preference, the adopted person, their son or daughter, would be subject to what can only be described as a labyrinthine process to access his or her information. Access to personal information and records is also not for all. It excludes the categories of people I mentioned earlier.

The definitions of information are conflicting and are not rigorous. This includes birth, early care and medical information. In an attempt to include everything, the Bill has ended up being overly and unnecessarily prescriptive. Anyone applying for information should be given the content of his or her files, full stop.

The relatives of those who died in institutions were surprised and shocked to realise that they may not apply for their deceased relative’s information. Given the circumstances behind Ireland's forced and closed adoption system, this is deeply disturbing. As it stands, this Bill does not even put us on parity with other Irish citizens. At the very least, we should expect extraordinary and additional measures to go some way to redress the faults of the past. When it comes to siblings, we were shocked to discover that an adopted person or somebody who had been boarded out will only be told that he or she has a sibling and the gender and age of that sibling. This is all public domain information. To suggest that somebody who might have experienced years of delay at the hands of Tusla or the Adoption Authority now has to go and research information on his or her siblings when it is publicly available is frankly unacceptable.

We also object to the tone and language of the Bill, which is certainly not representative of a transitional justice approach. It does not reflect the grave human rights abuse suffered by natural mothers and their children in various institutions. I concur with the previous speaker that Tusla and the Adoption Authority of Ireland need to have their systems radically overhauled. In particular, those of Tusla are frankly not fit for purpose. I have witnessed this. Tusla managers came in to give a presentation to the collaborative forum, which is a group of individuals who offer advice to the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. They have a very disturbing view on adopted people or anybody applying for personal information through their offices.

We are very grateful to our Clann Project colleagues, who will present later on in this session. They have produced a comprehensive list of amendments to the Bill as it stands. We have echoed these same elements in our own submission but the details can be found within the Clann submission. We wish to confirm that those elements and detailed amendments set out in the Clann submission are fully in alignment with the position of Adoption Rights Alliance.