Ms Maree Ryan-O'Brien:

I thank the Chairman and all the members of the committee for their kind invitation to discuss our groundbreaking Adoptee Voices report. I would also like to thank the Minister, Deputy O’Gorman, for his and his Department’s work. While we might not agree with all aspects of this Bill, or indeed on terminology, we have found the Minister, Deputy O’Gorman, willing to engage and to listen.

Our Adoptee Voices report is based on three surveys we conducted to illustrate the intergenerational impacts of the polices of forced and coercive adoption and how adoption has real life, ongoing, consequences for both adoptees and their families. We are very strongly of the view that existing agencies are no longer fit for purpose and should be replaced by a new agency on the grounds of constitutional principles of fair procedures and centralisation. Many of these concerns are largely practical ones and health concerns for both themselves and their families are a significant issue. Adoptees may often be unaware that they have a full or half sibling who was also placed for adoption. This is information that is rarely directly disclosed but rather discovered through file cross-referencing or commercial DNA testing.

Our recommendations on terminology in the Adoptee Voices report was that research on this area should not be specific to one university but rather stakeholder-led. Our concern with regard to terminology being academic-led is that it gives a proprietorial interest in an issue in which the acedemics are not direct stakeholders. Given the historically privileged lens this issue has been viewed through, we feel that this approach is simply repeating the mistakes of the past. Individual preferences as regards terminology are a deeply personal issue and this is generally reflective of a number of factors. While there should always be scope within a personal context to respect preferred terms, the majority of respondents in our survey preferred the term "birth mother". The terms "first", "natural" and "real" were not terms generally favoured. Each of these terms are subjective and have a reverse implication as regards our adoptive families, as in: real-unreal, natural-unnatural, first-second. Terms used in legislation must be exact, not subjective, emotive, open to interpretation or contradictory.

The theme of our report is having courage to face up to the past and the social harm that adoption has caused and to change it. This courage needs to be coupled with the political will to transform, significantly, a deeply flawed construct that continues to impact negatively on the lives of adoptees and their children.

We would like to thank the committee staff for their assistance and the committee for the opportunity to discuss our report. We have also outlined in our report concerns as regards the birth information and tracing Bill 2021 and we welcome any questions the committee may have.