Holly Cairns (Cork South West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I do not think the Minister said how many of the applications are waiting for longer than the statutory time period, but maybe I missed it. That was one of my questions. We all knew there was going to be thousands of applications when the Minister set out the timeframes for responses. People have been waiting for decades to access this really basic information about themselves. Every time I and other members of the committee called for adoptive people to be included in the mother and baby homes redress scheme, the Minister constantly cited the birth information and tracing system as the key issue they wanted. Yet the system is not meeting the standards set by the Minister, it is failing to meet the needs of illegally adopted people and, ultimately, it is not providing the justice the Minister set out to be the main form of redress. The Minister said that if there was a particular case I should bring it to his attention. I will do so but it is not one specific case. There are a lot of people who spent a long time going to great lengths to try to get their information. More than one person, several people, have told me the information they got back is not near the information they managed to painstakingly gather themselves. That leaves people feeling like the system is not giving them all their information, which is the whole purpose of it, that is, that people would get all of their information. We highlighted that at the committee. How would one know what specifically there is to find unless one had spent that time searching?

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