Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

There has to be a full audit because the State has failed potentially thousands of people whose identities and records were, in some cases, falsified. In other cases we do not know if they were. That can have very serious implications at so many different levels for the people affected in terms of their right to their identities, medical histories and heritages. There is simply no alternative but to give the full audit that has been requested by those who have been campaigning for many years to bring this issue properly into the light and to have a full audit of the files carried out.

This scandal arises from the fact that the Catholic Church and religious bodies were given control over adoption services in this country and that control was exercised in a story of secrets, lies, cover-ups and, in many cases, almost certainly illegal activity. We have to get to the bottom of that. The saga has gone on for too long. The consequences for some can potentially be awful. It is not a story that is over. It is not past history for huge numbers of people but one that continues to work its way through their lives and existences now and which can have all sorts of implications.

In my case, as one who was adopted during that period, having talked to both my birth family and my adoptive family, both insisted that things were done correctly at the time at both ends of the process. The adoption papers are therefore in order and the original names went on the birth certificate. What none of them know, however, is what happened in between. That is the point over which neither the biological family nor the adoptive family, which would have acted in good faith, had any control. They would have had no control over what the church and its institutions were doing in the middle of the process and what was motivating them. As Deputy Barry said, in many cases their motivations were to protect the identities of prominent people, to hide more generally the reality of Irish society and to provide cover for an atmosphere and regime which they created and generated which in many cases forced women who had children outside marriage to give those children up, either by generally creating an atmosphere or often by directly physically pulling children out of the hands of their mothers.

In my case I was very lucky. I was adopted by a very loving family and was then lucky enough for my biological mother to also come and find me. I have two families, which is brilliant, but for many people the adoption may not have worked out so well. Perhaps they cannot find their biological families and they are blocked at every hand's turn. The absence of accurate records in many of those cases means that they may be frustrated and may never find out. There was absolute falsification in some cases. I am aware of some of those cases. There was absolutely blatant falsification to protect particular people. I do not believe there is any alternative but to have a full audit to do justice for those who are caught up in this crisis.

The last point I make is that this is, yet again, a reminder of the urgency of separating out church and State in all sorts of services, whether adoption, the welfare of children in our schools, or our hospitals. What is at the centre of this? It is that religious morality trumped people's rights and that the institutions to which the State had outsourced these absolutely critical services, as it continues to do in the cases of health and education, believed that their particular morality was more important than the law and than the rights of individual human beings. That lesson has to be learned and that separation has to be achieved. That is not a statement against people's religious faith by the way. I want to stress that. It is not an attack on people's Catholicism or whatever. It is about saying that religion is a private matter and that those institutions should not have control over vital services and over the lives of individuals.

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