Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I take the point the Deputy is making. This issue has been ignored for decades, but I am determined to put an end to this. My view continues to be that an adopted person over the age of 18 years should have an unrestricted right to attain a copy of his or her birth certificate and that an adopted person under 18 years should have a qualified right, perhaps subject to the consent of his or her adoptive parents. However, unlike in the United Kingdom, serious constitutional issues arise. There is strong advice from a previous Attorney General that because of the constitutional position of the family, in respect of open access to birth certificates for adopted persons, constitutional difficulties arise. What I want to do and what I am discussing with the Attorney General is bring forward legislation that will give scope to adopted persons to track their records and have access to as much of the information as possible, but I will be limited in what I can do by constitutional constraints. The current Attorney General has been examining these issues also and advises me on these constitutional limitations. We are in a different situation from that in the North of Ireland or elsewhere in the United Kingdom, which we must keep in mind. I want to bring forward legislation as strong as I possibly can make it, but the judgment in a Supreme Court case in the 1980s made it very clear that the mother's right to privacy would have to be balanced against the adopted person's right to know.

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