Réada Cronin (Kildare North, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Our birth certificate is the fundamental document that testifies to our arrival into this world. Having automatic access to that fundamental document must be a fundamental and automatic right - a right that is both claimed and fulfilled without obstacle, qualification or hindrance. Quite simply, the days of adoptee apartheid in our civil and public life must be over.

This morning I was contacted by a woman who was adopted in 1961. She is still looking for her birth certificate - imagine 60 years and no trace of it. I commend my comrade, Deputy Funchion, for her work to right this wrong. That we in Sinn Féin have to propose this Bill shows that our work in modernising our State is not over. The work is not done when a person's right to have and to hold his or her birth certificate is dependent on a patronising, patriarchal politics and system of government, one that, when it came to documenting its children, saw some as more equal than others, with greater equality signified by a gold ring on the hand or a papal blessing on the wall. Our national obsession with respectability saw us create a subclass of person who was entitled to less information, less respect, less dignity and fewer rights. No word has done more damage to our society than that of "respectability".

None of this is the Minister's fault. This is my third or fourth time talking to the Minister about this matter. The greatest trick Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael pulled on the Green Party in the negotiations to form a Government was to land the toxic, misogynistic, woman-and-child-hating legacy of their century of patriarchal rule in this State at the Minister's feet.

They have the Minister trying to guard the door to the skeletons in their closet. They are not going back in, yet he is expected to stand here week after week trying to defend the indefensible. It might not be the fault of the Minister but it is his now responsibility to do the right thing. I urge him and all parties in the House to put politics aside and put our people first, the people this State put away and put down. In our postcolonial delirium the respectable always needed a group at which they could point as being less so that they could feel they were more. I ask the Minister to do the truly respectable thing now. Not only should he not oppose the Bill but he should support it and the rights of our adoptees to their birth certificates because they deserve nothing less.

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