Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As I have said in response to others, the Deputy is absolutely right in his second point. As Fergus Finlay said this morning, this does not come as a surprise because people have been aware of illegal registrations and illegal adoptions in Ireland for a very long time, perhaps longer than 20 years. The number of people who participated in it, often the receiving parents, must add up to tens of thousands of people and when a new child arrives in a family without the mother being pregnant there must have been widespread knowledge across society of the existence of this practice. It must, in fact, have been commonplace in the past. Journalists have written about it, the Adoption Rights Alliance and others have raised it and it has been raised in the Dáil and the Seanad. What is different now is that, because of the analysis of these records, there was a marker on the records indicating "adopted from birth", meaning it was possible to identify that a person had been falsely registered as a birth child of parents who were not their birth parents. It may be harder to find evidence of other cases because they were concealed and records may not exist or have been falsified but we have to do our best to find out as much as we can and give it to the people who have, and always have had, a right to know their birth story, their identity, where they came from and who their parents are, as well as information about their medical history and that of their family.

There are 13,000 or 14,000 people who have come through St. Patrick's Guild and who must be concerned and have a lot of questions. I can tell them that if they have an adoption order they are not affected by this and are not one of the 126 people to whom we referred. If they were born before 1946 or after 1969, they are also not affected. If, however, they were born between those two dates and do not have an adoption order, they may well be affected. Conversations will need to take place with family members in the weeks and months ahead and there is a possibility they may be contacted by Tusla.

The Minister, Deputy Zappone, has met with the Adoption Rights Alliance and is very willing to do so again. We are very determined to pass the legislation but we are focused on giving our fellow citizens, those who were affected by this, information about their true identities and that is going to be the priority in the period ahead. If this is only the tip of the iceberg and it is a mammoth task, so be it. We have a duty to our citizens to do right by them, and we will.

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