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

This section refers to another significant improvement of the legislation between the initial heads of the Bill and the final draft following the pre-legislative scrutiny, PLS, process, which is to provide a relevant person who is an adopted person with medical information about a deceased relative.

Again this is important information and where it is available it should be provided but with a relative who is still living, some protections still have to be placed on the release of that medical information because it is personal information. Again, this section was designed in consultation with both the Office of the Attorney General and the Data Protection Commissioner. That is important in the context of making provision for what we want to achieve here, which is the release of information. We get the release of this information but it is conditional on the medical history being relevant to the applicant's own medical history. We have discussed earlier on the definition of relevance and how relevance can be expanded upon in guidelines, but it is relevant to hereditary conditions and not relevant to one specific illness or disease.

Second, this information will be conveyed through the relevant person's GP and that is again a necessary protection put in to recognise the sensitivity of providing a person with somebody else's medical information. I am not in a position to accept this set of amendments.