Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

We would like to share time.

I wish the Minister well in her new responsibilities. I know she is somebody who has expressed views and has been involved in work in the area concerned with children and children's development. I wish her well.

I am deeply disappointed that another adoption Bill fails to address the right of adopted people to trace their origins. This is a major failure in this legislation and one that I believe the Dáil should remedy. Adoption in Ireland is regulated by the Adoption Acts of 1952 and 2010, which do not provide any statutory rights to information or records. Instead an ad hocsystem exists whereby adopted people can make requests to their adoption agency or the Adoption Authority of Ireland. The process is slow and cumbersome with people often having to wait years to even meet a social worker to start the process. It is often extremely difficult to get any access to records unless a natural mother expressly consents, or is deceased, meaning that an adopted person has no rights to basic information about their origin.

Speaking as somebody who was adopted, it took me years of slow and painstaking work to find out simple information about where I came from and who my parents were. I could not have done so without the help of then Adopted People's Association but it should not have been so difficult. I do not know what is wrong with this country that we talk about rights for almost everybody except adopted people. We are talking about other countries with the same legal structure as Ireland which have had tracing rights and legislation in law for 50 years or more. The approach in Ireland seems to be linked to promises made by Catholic adoption agents to single women, to unmarried mothers as they were described long ago, that they would maintain their privacy. I have had members of religious orders and nuns and priests tell me when seeking information for other people that on the Bible and on the far side of the grave promises were made that no information would ever be divulged.

This is done on behalf of mothers who had to give up their children, often in the most distressing of circumstances. We have enough testimony from people who gave up children that much of it was through coercion. However, it is rarely asked whether the mothers ever wanted such promises to be made or whether these promises should outweigh the rights of the adopted person. By contrast, in England and Wales an adopted person has a legal guarantee of access to his or her original birth certificate on reaching 18 years of age.

It is time to lift the veil of secrecy, another part of the hidden Ireland, that has been cast over this part of Irish history. The last Government, of which I was honoured to be a member, sought to shine a light into dark corners of other aspects of Irish history to do with the Magdalen laundries and people in institutions. The history of adoption is intimately linked with all of this, both for adopted children and their birth parents. The time has come for the same to happen to shine a light on the role of adoption in Irish history.

A right to know one's own origins has been recognised by the European Court of Human Rights and the Supreme Court. It may not be an absolute right, but it is for the Oireachtas - this House and the Seanad - to determine the balance required between it and any right to privacy a natural mother or father may wish to invoke. Other societies and legislatures have been able to deal with this. The recognition of a right to privacy for the natural mother should not act as an automatic veto on the right of an adopted person to information. The priority should always be to ensure an adopted person is able to obtain information on his or her origins, including access to the adoption files, where he or she wishes to do so, because not everybody who has been adopted wishes to trace.

As Tánaiste, I worked closely with the Attorney General and the previous Ministers for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy Charles Flanagan and former Deputy James Reilly, to make progress on the publication of the general scheme of the Adoption (Information and Tracing) Bill 2015. It made progress in key areas, but it was not perfect. It was far from being so. In the last Dáil the Joint Committee on Health and Children heard testimony from experts in this area and made some important recommendations for changes to the legislation. Its report was published in November 2015. I really cannot understand why the changes to the draft legislation cannot be made at this point. I do not understand why we are in a position where new adoption legislation is being brought through the House and it does not deal with the issue of information and tracing. It is not good enough for the Minister to say the Bill deals with different issues and that another Bill which is going to arrive mañana, mañana, mañanawill deal with it.

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