Clare Daly (Dublin North, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing my time with Deputy Finian McGrath.

I appreciate the Minister's motivation in introducing the legislation. I pass no judgment on the families concerned but believe the legislation raises a number of ethical issues and issues of social policy that I would like to explore briefly. All Deputies know people who may not be able to have children or who have no children of their own who would desperately like to give a loving home to a child and to be a good adoptive parent. We hear that view many times. I appreciate the views of and know people in these circumstances.

We must, above all, look at this from the viewpoint of the child, not the prospective parent. Adoption should be about providing homes for children and not providing children for parents. To be quite honest, the international adoption market - and I do not use that word lightly - has become a vehicle for providing children to parents. In essence, there are unscrupulous characters out there who are exploiting the desperation of genuine people who want to have and raise a child of their own, and they are profiting from that desperation to the detriment of the natural parents and, more importantly, the children involved. Too often in this country we focus on the interests of adopted parents in Ireland and not enough on the children who are being taken from their own countries. Again, I stress that I am not saying this in a derogatory manner about the couples involved in this scenario. However, we must ask whether we will continue to change the law and write amendments for other groups of people who want to adopt from non-Hague countries. It took us long enough to sign up to the Hague Convention to begin with. What is the point in signing up to that convention if we are going to continue to make exceptions? We must be very careful in that regard. It took us almost 17 years to ratify the agreement in the first instance. We were one of the last significant receiving countries to do so. The ratification of the Hague Convention by certain countries has meant that the figures for potential adoptive children have plummeted. That was the experience in China, where the number of children available for adoption dropped dramatically after it signed the convention. Why is that the case? Obviously some children were never really legitimately available for adoption. There were other interests at play. Stricter regulation is critical in this regard.

There was a justifiable outcry about the fact that thousands of Irish children were exported from Ireland, sometimes illegally, in the 1950s and 1960s and ended up in the US. The children we are talking about now in some other countries are the equivalent of those Irish children of past generations. We would have wanted other people to stand up for the rights of those Irish children, and we must stand up for the rights of others now. Quite often it is the social conditions in countries that fuel illegal adoptions. In Ireland, for example, 97% of children born to non-marital parents used to be adopted, but when the lone parent allowance was introduced in 1972 the situation normalised completely. There are very worrying trends emerging in countries such as America, where people are unscrupulously adopting children through the international adoption scene, which is quite unregulated. Loopholes are being exploited and tens of thousands of children are being brought to America for adoption but are not ending up in the homes of the people who wanted to adopt them. Some of the families involved are not being checked out properly either. There is a distinct lack of regulation in the area and links to people-trafficking cannot be ignored. There is much testimony from children in countries such as Ethiopia who were living with their parents when unscrupulous rogue adoption agents came to their villages and conned their parents into believing that their children would be educated in the West that the children were adopted unlawfully. We must be very careful here.

Fair dues to the Minister, who has rushed through this legislation on the last sitting day of the year, but what about all those people who are waiting to claim their identity from Ireland? Time is not on their side either. That issue must be addressed. If we are widening the market for prospective adoptive parents, we must be very careful about the regulations and must ensure that everything is done in the best interests of the child. There is an imbalance, in an Irish context, when we discuss these issues, which is why I am making this point now. I am not opposing the legislation, but we must be very careful. The Deputies who are strongly lobbying on this issue must be particularly careful, in my opinion.

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