Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I thank Deputy O'Sullivan for putting forward these amendments. They would provide a comprehensive structure in Ireland for the first time that would allow adopted people obtain information about their origins. Much of it is a desire for family medical information for themselves and for their children.

I am disappointed at the response of the Minister of State and his approach to this area. I expected him to be a person of greater courage than he has shown to date in respect of the arrangements on post-adoption services. There is a great deal of literature from around the world on post-adoption services, ranging from Australia and New Zealand to British Columbia and other areas, including the UK. In these countries and regions there has long been a structured system to provide post-adoption information and it has been the norm for a long time to give children access to that information and their original birth certificate, or details of that certificate, when they become adults. These arrangements have been studied and reported on for at least several decades. It is very clear what they show.

Many people who are adopted, especially women, want to get information about their background, their parentage and their medical history from the time they are older teenagers or young adults. This desire increases when they get married or enter into a long relationship and it increases even more when they become parents. These are the critical points in life where people want to get information about their backgrounds. Anyone who has been to school in the past 20 years will know from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that the right to information about one's origins and medical history is part of a fundamental set of human rights. The Minister of State owes an explanation to this House on why Ireland continues to have a patriarchal, secretive approach to the fundamental rights of a particular group of people in Irish society. UN conventions and international best practice endorse that entitlement to the information.

Most girls who are adopted seek the information at some point. The evidence on adopted men is different. Many men do not want to have that information. International studies show that men tend to want that information somewhat later, if at all. It is the right of an adopted person to decide whether he or she wants the information.

We are looking for a solid foundation which was set out by the amendments put forward by Deputy O'Sullivan. They are not unduly prescriptive. They are extremely sensitive to the issues affecting all of the people in the adoption process. There are at least five people involved in the adoption process, namely, the birth parents, the adopted child and the adoptive parents. In my experience, the majority of adoptive parents, who love their children to such a degree that it may be difficult for natural parents, for whom parenthood may come much easier, to understand how terribly important their adopted children are, completely endorse their adopted children being given this information. The international evidence supports this.

For parents who have given up their children, in some cases the fathers may never know for certain that they have been fathers. They may know in other cases.

It may have been done with their consent. I have helped many people. It was the custom in Ireland approximately 50 years ago that if a couple, particularly a couple from farming families, intended to get married but jumped the gun and had a baby before marriage that the baby, on the diktat of local clergy, do-gooders and busybodies was given up for adoption because of what was deemed to be the shame associated with it. In many cases, that couple successfully went on to marry and have other children. One speaks to people in that situation - a child who has searched and to the parents who gave up a child - who only want reconnection to find out what happened to each other.

Nobody expects a fairy story with a happy ever after ending. A child is given up for adoption based on a decision made by a birth mother; she may have been badly advised on it but she has made the decision. The adopted child moves on to another life, usually with very loving adoptive parents. What we want in this legislation is recognition that this society has come of age and that like other societies we can deal with the complexities and the human intensity of this issue for all of the parties to it. I have been helped by people in a number of the organisations referred to, including the Adopted People's Association and the Adoption Rights Alliance and they all have one message for the Government.

We are having this debate in the context of the Ryan and Murphy reports. We must remember that adoption here was almost exclusively designed by and dictated by the Catholic Church, and by the Church of Ireland in the case of people who were Protestant. The churches had a somewhat negative approach to adoption. If one reads the Oireachtas debates at the time of the Adoption Act, the big issue was whether a child would be placed in a home of the birth mother's faith or would he or she be potentially lost to the Catholic Church. Various Senators spoke about the fear of strangers going into a house. We have moved on so far from that, and the Bill and statements made by the Minister of State recognise that.

This is the last step the Minister of State has to make. In the late life of the Government - we are more than three years into its term of office - there is no way, even if the Minister of State laid siege to the Cabinet room, that he will produce another Bill that will deal with adoption in the lifetime of the 30th Dáil. I can tell him about legislation that is waiting seven years in the queue. If he thinks his Cabinet colleagues will give him another Bill in the maximum two years left in the life of this Dáil he is wrong.

I ask the Minister of State to be courageous and to go with it. I can tell him what the experience is like and I am sure others have told him. I am one of those people and I went in to the offices when I was in my twenties. I went in when I was getting married to ask whether a letter could go to my birth family just to say that I was getting married, that I was alive and that I was all right. The answer was "No".

The very simple position of the traditional adoption societies of all faiths was to tell one to be happy, that one was adopted, that one had two arms and legs and what more did one want. The answer is that people want to know. That may seem unreasonable to the people in the Department of Justice, and Law Reform who ran the Adoption Board, to social workers who think they know better than people who have been adopted and, in particular, to the religious orders who still have issues with adoption arising from their role in dealing with children who in various ways ended up in institutions. For the most part, people allowed to trace their relatives find that it gives them the information they require. In a percentage of cases very good connections are built up with birth families. In other cases the contact does not really work out and it is informational only. That is life; there is no guarantee of a happy ever after.

I do not generally speak about this in the House but I have listened with increasing concern for the people who contact me. A woman contacted me last week and commented that I had been through it. She has been diagnosed with a particular condition and she wants to know whether it is hereditary and whether other members of her birth family have suffered from it so that she can be helped with the difficulties she faces. Under this rule and the lack of action in the Bill, it is not possible for her to proceed because although she has some contact with the birth family there is no mechanism by which to reach a conclusion.

I plead with the Minister of State to take his courage in his hands and address this issue. Other countries with an English legal tradition have done this very successfully for decades. People who are adopted are realistic and do not expect a magic wand solution. It is so important for children who have been adopted in recent years from overseas countries that there is absolutely full commitment, as there is in most modern adoption arrangements, to continuing reports and feedback on how the child is doing. In open adoption there are very good arrangements for periodic contact and information sharing between the adopting family and the original birth mother and that is as it should be. The people involved in adoption administration in Ireland, with the number of overseas adoptions in this country over the past 20 years, are perfectly familiar with these arrangements and they know how good arrangements can work very well to the benefit of everybody involved in adoption, namely the child, the adoptive parents and the birth parents.

Until relatively recently it was always nuns who decided that children could not have information. It is a product of the era of secrecy that arose through the Catholic Church's control of institutions and the adoption process. We have much information from birth mothers who say their consent was not fully given and that they, if approached now, would wish to have contact and information about their birth children. We have good models from many countries of how that can be managed and it is at the choice of the various individuals. I have had nuns tell me, with regard to my situation and with regard to people I helped and advised, that they gave solemn oaths to mothers giving up their children. I do not know whether they really did give solemn oaths; maybe that is what many of those nuns were made to believe, and in their time they believed it was the best thing for the children, but it is not appropriate now. The Minister of State has it within his power to address this issue.

The biggest problem in Ireland now is that we have more than 5,000 children in foster care. Modern adoption is infinitely better than it was and because we have quasi open adoption there is a huge amount of information. However, there is a backlog of 40,000 to 50,000 people and their parents, although many parents are now dead, and extended families who want information. I have told the Minister of State previously that the voluntary contact register established some years ago at God only knows what cost was effectively useless. Everybody in the country was written to and 10,000 or 12,000 people made contact with it. That money was spent because it was available at the time.

I plead with the Minister of State to address this issue now. The business of lack of post-adoption contact in Ireland belongs to our secret past. It is not about privacy; everybody has a right to privacy and to structures around privacy.

There is a difference for many people who are adopted when it come to secrecy about some of the information that is vital to their social and health well-being. That is the net issue. The Minister of State should take courage from the countries where this has been handled successfully. We have more than two or three decades of experience of that.

The Minister should have a look at Mike Leigh's film "Secrets and Lies", which is probably the best film ever made about adoption and the most famous work on the subject. It will tell him what it is like. It is like life itself. It is good and bad, but that is how people live life. They do things, they want to find out things and they want to express themselves as human beings. The amendments tabled by Deputy O'Sullivan give that opportunity. It is then up to the Minister of State's Department to have appropriate regulations and structures.

This is long past being done in this country. I am shocked that the Minister of State has not reached to do this now, because if he is telling us he will draft a Bill in a short period of time he should forget it. That is dishonest. We are now three years into this Dáil and there is no way the Minister of State will get Government time for another Bill on adoption.

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