Dr. Conor O'Mahony:

Good afternoon. I thank the members for the invitation to speak today. I warmly welcome the Bill. It is long overdue and has been a long time coming. I am conscious that it is not the first version of it. I previously addressed this committee in 2015 regarding an earlier version, which never made its way across the line to become an Act of the Oireachtas. I very much hope the process will result in a successful outcome on this occasion. Ireland is currently an outlier in not making provision for adopted people to access their birth information records. It is one of only two countries in the European Union that does not make provision in this regard. Our obligations under international human rights law are clear in that every person, including every child, has a right to identity. Our international human rights obligations compel us to enact laws to address the gap that currently exists in the legal provision in this area.

For all these reasons I welcome the fact that the Bill makes provision to allow for access to birth certificates and other early-life information. I welcome the provisions on the contact preference register and the legal basis for information-sharing, which has been mentioned several times already, and also the provisions on rectifying the register where there is evidence of incorrect or illegal registrations. I welcome the register of acknowledged identity, which would allow people to continue to use an identity they have used all their lives unaware that the original registration had been illegal or incorrect.

The core of the Bill is generally strong, which I warmly welcome. At the periphery of the Bill, there are some issues that might benefit from some further consideration. The main issue I would like to raise concerns where the records would be maintained. The Bill takes the approach of keeping all the records where they currently are. That is perhaps not the best approach in the sense that it leads to fragmentation of records, both physically and between different agencies and bodies. There is a risk, when it comes to providing a tracing service, that this approach creates logistical difficulties, notwithstanding that the Bill makes provision for information-sharing. We may encounter logistical issues in providing a tracing service that has to access and cross-reference records across several locations and agencies. A lot of difficulty is caused for adopted persons by lengthy delays in accessing a tracing service. This does not seem likely to be helped by the fragmentation of the records. It is likely that there would be a more efficient service if the records were centralised within a single agency and, ideally, if they were digitised to allow for maximum searchability. I acknowledge the latter would involve a very significant project but it would be the most efficient way of dealing with searches. I acknowledge there is some very specialist knowledge in respect of particular archives. There are staff members who care for certain archives who have special knowledge of their nuances.

If it were deemed necessary for some staff to migrate with the records, as it were, perhaps that should be considered.

I will briefly mention an issue relating to head 2 where it deals with incorrect birth registration. That is linked to head 29, which allows for rectification of the register. That deals with cases where the identity of the parent is incorrect in the birth registration. It does not deal with situations where the date of birth is incorrect. There is evidence that is one of the things that was done in some cases historically. In order to impede efforts at tracing, incorrect dates of birth were entered in the register. Ideally, development heads would include that within their scope so that issue could be rectified, as well as situations in which the identity of the parents is incorrect.

The Bill currently addresses provision for information meetings and counselling supports, as were mentioned earlier, only in respect of adopted persons whose birth parents had registered a preference for no contact. As has already been mentioned, there is scope to consider whether it would be worth looking at extending that provision, whether on an optional or compulsory basis. There is room for discussion there. It seems as if there are no good reasons why supports which are made available in the category of cases where a preference for no contact is stated would not be made available in cases where a contact preference or no preference is stated.

The issue of a minimum age for access to records will be applicable to future adoptions. The minimum age before someone can seek to access records is proposed to be 16. International human rights law is very clear in providing that the right to identity is not a right which crystalises upon entry to adulthood. The right to identity is a right of children as children. For that reason, setting a minimum age of 16 is inconsistent with international human rights law in that respect. We should, of course, acknowledge that parents have a role in guiding children's right to identity with other rights while they are still children. I have made recommendations elsewhere in respect of Government services and donor-assisted human reproduction to the effect that records should be available to parents on behalf of children up to the age of 12 and directly to the child from the age of 12 on. I repeat that recommendation in respect of access to adoption records in this Bill.

There is a discrete issue in head 13, which deals with requests for information made by the Adoption Authority of Ireland or Tusla and our direction to provide information to them. There is no enforcement mechanism in that head. There is a gap there. If an adoption society did not comply with a request for information under head 13, there is no way of enforcing that request. That would ideally be addressed.

Those are the issues I would like to highlight and I am happy to discuss them all further as the meeting progresses.