Ms Christine Hennessy:

I am speaking from the experience of managing and running birth mothers support groups in Barnardos since 1994. As we said in our submission, we have met with more than 1,200 women who have attended those groups and this issue was recently discussed at one of our support groups. We need to bear in mind that these are women who were strong enough to come along to a support group. There was a very wide range of views. Some women were very pleased to see the legislation and some women were very apprehensive and nervous as to what it was going to mean, and very apprehensive and nervous on behalf of the women who were perhaps not strong enough to come along to a Barnardos group.

Like Ms Connolly, I have been many years in the area and I am delighted to see legislation that is clearly coming down in favour of the rights of adopted people to information because other versions of legislation have fallen while this thorny issue was debated. For me, it is going to be all about communicating gently, carefully and accessibly, and for a much longer period than three months, to reach out to women around the country, not just through national media, but through local media, through radio, making friendly voices available for them to speak about their concerns, and not forcing them to engage with computerised systems to express their preferences. It is that kind of duty of careful care to encourage those frightened women to come forward in an empathetic way that is the way forward with this, and over a much longer period than three months. We are suggesting six months minimum. In the UK, it was two years, so three months is really not a sufficient period of time to allow that work to be done with the many nervous birth mothers around the country.