Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 28 September 2021

Joint Committee On Children, Equality, Disability, Integration And Youth

General Scheme of the Birth Information and Tracing Bill 2021: Discussion (Resumed)

Photo of Cathal CroweCathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I probably will not take all of my time because I will be running over to the Chamber in a moment. I will raise a few points. I thank the Minister for his engagement with us today. This has been a very long and protracted process. I note from his opening statement that he said the group of women we met - many of them as witnesses in front of this Oireachtas committee and many of them at the gate of Leinster House and in our constituencies - are not homogenous. Their concerns, at times, are conflicting, as the Minister has mentioned. I welcome the fact he is trying balance the right of a mother who does not want her identity known versus that of a child who for decades has craved to know who his or her mother is. It is so important that names are released following the information session as outlined by the Minister.

I was asked this question over the summer and it was one I was not able to properly answer; has this legislation looked at all scenarios in which the maiden name of a mother must be disclosed? Nearly every month, we have to fill in various forms of paperwork. It could be a passport application or a school enrolment. There is a plethora of situations in Irish life where you are required to state your mother's maiden name. Many adoptees do not know what that is and this legislation paves the way for them to know it. Does this legislation square off all the scenarios where you may need to go back to correct a mother's name? Will this be a requirement? I had not thought of this scenario until it came up during the summer. Someone came to a clinic in my constituency and said that this throws open many scenarios whereby he may have to go back to correct information, potentially, for children and grandchildren. It is almost a trickle-down of information that may have to be corrected.

The removal of social workers in every case was something we heard about in one of our last public sessions before the summer recess. I have also heard from people during the summer break that, at the other end of the spectrum, we have many foster parents in Ireland. I have spoken to the Minister about foster parents who are going through the process of trying to legally copper-fasten adoption. Some are waiting six or seven years to do so. They are concerned that we are very soon going to have two processes going through the same funnel of the State in trying to have recognition and securing that legal copper-fastening. They are worried that there may not be enough social workers to hear their cases or to be assigned to them. The two processes may conflict with each other, meaning that their caseloads are kicked further along the road. I hope I have correctly captured their concern and I hope the Minister might be able to allay it.

My final point is one I made many months ago. There has been all sorts of commentary in the media about this legislation looking, at times, patriarchal, something I refute. If anything, it looks matriarchal because, and I ask people to bear with me, each section of this refers to mothers and babies. It is impossible to capture but I want to say again, as a male member of this committee, men are written out of this legislation. What I mean by that is from the 1940s to the 1970s, men who got a girl in their local community pregnant bought a ticket for the ferry and went off to Wales or America. They are mentioned nowhere by our committee. They cannot attend as witnesses because they have chosen anonymity from the get-go, running out of town and running away from responsibilities. Some of them still live up boreens and laneways in the west and east of Ireland. Much of their motivation in running away from the girl they got pregnant was to protect farms, landholdings and not to fall foul of church and State. They had a whole mishmash of messed up reasons for not standing by the girl they got pregnant. We cannot fully capture all of that in law. It cannot be written into section 1, section 2 and so on and so forth. There is a lot of commentary in the media about this legislation. It pains me time and time again as a father to three young children. I have many friends who are fathers, and some who are not, but there is a lot to be said for someone who stands by children, both in the modern day and in the past. This legislation and the volume of work the committee has undertaken so far has failed to capture that. I want to put that on record in some shape or form.

Comments

No comments

Log in or join to post a public comment.