Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

This section is one of the most significant elements of the Bill. It speaks to one of the key issues raised by adopted people, namely, that they are denied information about their medical history that could be relevant to their health and that this occurs because they do not know who their parents are and they do not know their family medical history. It is very important to remember what we are providing for here. We are providing for a person to have a legal right to somebody else's medical information, which is the medical information of a third party. In the discussions on this, we all understand that the equivalence is drawn by saying we would know if our mothers had heart disease, a hereditary cancer or something like that. In most cases, that would be the case but none of us here has a legal right to our mother's or father's medical information. If a parent chose to withhold something from us for whatever reason, bizarre as that may seem, he or she has a right to do so.

We are providing for an adopted person to have a legal right to the medical information of somebody else. That limits the privacy rights of the other person. If we are to allow that interference with another person's privacy rights, some protections must be provided. The protections are that the information being given to the adopted person about his or her parent is relevant to the adopted person's health. Let us be very clear, "relevant" is not limited to a question about one illness or disease. "Relevant" means it is relevant to the person's health. Any genetic or hereditary condition that is on file about the parent falls within the definition of relevant and would be conveyed to the adopted person.

The second protection, which we will also cover later, is that this information is not conveyed directly to the adopted person but it would be conveyed to a medical practitioner in order that there will be an intermediary in the provision of such information. This is not the case when we are talking about the adopted person's own medical records, for which full release is provided, as we discussed earlier.

This provision is a dramatic but necessary interference with the privacy rights of the parents in these circumstances. When the medical information of the parents is shared with somebody else without consent or permission being given, there must be protections around that. We have engaged significantly with the Office of the Attorney General and the Data Protection Commission, and we have also spoken to mothers. The mothers who spoke to the committee raised their concerns about their medical information being released.

The protections provided are that the information conveyed must be relevant to the adopted person's health, with the word "relevant" being interpreted broadly, and that the process will involve the information being given to the adopted person's medical practitioner. I believe these two safeguards are necessary and will allow for the limitation of the privacy rights of the parent. This is what we have been advised legally from a data protection position. It also reflects the concerns about this particular point raised by the mothers who appeared before the committee.

I am not able to accept these amendments. To do so would put at risk the entire goal we are trying to achieve, namely, to enable adopted persons to get health information that is relevant to them.