Dear Senator Martin Conway - I'm somewhat at a loss abt your comments that a legislative change to facilitate the yearnings of 23 families is in any way linked to the best interests of Irish children. To create bespoke legislation to circumvent what was already regarded as a lax regulation (i.e. extending adoption passports from Oct 2010 to Oct 2013) sets an extremely worrying precedent for the Oireachtas. I suspect it is only matter of time before similar lobbying is engaged in by other prospective adoptive parents, upon discovering an untapped source of overseas, vulnerable, impoverished children from their overseas, vulnerable, impoverished families.
I hope that the 60,000+ adopted people who have been clamouring for decades for legislative change in order to discover their identities & increasingly the circumstances of their adoptions can rely on the a proportionate amount of sympathy from you when it comes to presurising Minister Fitzgerald to enact such open-records legislation? You can also add to that the ten's of thousands of unmarried mothers whose children were forcibly taken from them, in 100's of cases after many years of living with their children in Mother & Baby Homes.
With regards to your comment that you had "nothing more to say on this important legislation", I strongly recommend that you refocus your lobbying efforts on the best interests of the children in Russia, Ethiopia and the other corrupt regimes, that the Irish State seems to think it ok to import children from. Sponsorship is universally regarded as the best option for children whose wider families & wider communities cannot care for them; ICA is meant as a measure of last resort to avoid the widespread corruption & criminality that typically accompanies it. A senior advisor on child protection with UNICEF, Alexandria Yuster, argues that international adoption is now more about finding children for first world parents than finding homes for children.
Words cannot describe how I feel about the disproportionate effort the Houses of the Oireachtas have taken in this area; would that the rest of us were so well connected........
Susan Lohan
Posted on 20 Mar 2014 2:20 pm
Dear Senator Martin Conway - I'm somewhat at a loss abt your comments that a legislative change to facilitate the yearnings of 23 families is in any way linked to the best interests of Irish children. To create bespoke legislation to circumvent what was already regarded as a lax regulation (i.e. extending adoption passports from Oct 2010 to Oct 2013) sets an extremely worrying precedent for the Oireachtas. I suspect it is only matter of time before similar lobbying is engaged in by other prospective adoptive parents, upon discovering an untapped source of overseas, vulnerable, impoverished children from their overseas, vulnerable, impoverished families.
I hope that the 60,000+ adopted people who have been clamouring for decades for legislative change in order to discover their identities & increasingly the circumstances of their adoptions can rely on the a proportionate amount of sympathy from you when it comes to presurising Minister Fitzgerald to enact such open-records legislation? You can also add to that the ten's of thousands of unmarried mothers whose children were forcibly taken from them, in 100's of cases after many years of living with their children in Mother & Baby Homes.
With regards to your comment that you had "nothing more to say on this important legislation", I strongly recommend that you refocus your lobbying efforts on the best interests of the children in Russia, Ethiopia and the other corrupt regimes, that the Irish State seems to think it ok to import children from. Sponsorship is universally regarded as the best option for children whose wider families & wider communities cannot care for them; ICA is meant as a measure of last resort to avoid the widespread corruption & criminality that typically accompanies it. A senior advisor on child protection with UNICEF, Alexandria Yuster, argues that international adoption is now more about finding children for first world parents than finding homes for children.
Words cannot describe how I feel about the disproportionate effort the Houses of the Oireachtas have taken in this area; would that the rest of us were so well connected........