Ms Susan Lohan:

I want to highlight to committee members that in December 2018 I asked Tusla managers to attend a session of the collaborative forum. As I mentioned, this is a dedicated group of the survivors of mother and baby homes, county homes and Bethany homes and their advocates. It advises the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth on matters of interest and concern. The performance of Tusla on that particular date still resonates with members of the collaborative forum. Managers from Tusla spoke about having to gauge the amount of harm that an adopted person having access to their own information would cause third parties. This, incredibly, included relatives of the natural mother who probably had no prior knowledge of the existence of a child simply by virtue of the distance in the relationship. As far as I know, Tusla is still doing this. It is contacting cousins of deceased natural parents to find out what their view would be on an adopted person getting personal information. They are allowing these random people to exercise a veto over adopted people and those boarded out getting access to their own information. The Tusla managers also expressed a very surprising view on our files. Somebody from the collaborative forum put it to them that a new body might well be suggested to take over the supervision and dissemination of information from these files.