Dan Boyle (Green Party)

It is the principle rather than the content of the decision. There should be a greater onus on Parliament to enact legislation on foot of discrepancies that have been identified through judicial decisions. We have not done that as well as we should have in the past.

My problem with this Bill is with the specific references about gender assignation. There is a far greater difficulty with the factual information about some of our citizens who are not being taken into account in the Bill. I put forward this argument during the debate on the Civil Registration Act 2004 when I was a Member of the Dáil. It relates to the identity details of adopted people. Passports and birth certificates contain the name of the person concerned as well as their date of birth. However, owing to administrative convenience and an existing mindset that people who are adopted should not be given too much information lest it triggers a need to find out more about their natural parents, the place of birth of adopted people is always listed as Dublin. On the adoptive certificate, it is listed as Dublin NC2, which is a fictitious post code which ensures people cannot even start from the right place if they happen to be from Dublin.

Not only do we have discrimination between adopted people and all other Irish citizens, there is also discrimination between people who are adopted through foreign born adoptions and Irish adopted children. Foreign born adopted children obviously would have their place of birth registered as part of their foreign adoption. We must move away from the mindset that adopted people should have as little information about themselves as possible. The Civil Registration Act 2004 reinforces that bias. Unfortunately, this Bill builds on that bias and if any attempt can be made to amend it, that area needs to be tackled. A number of adoption Bills have reinforced that mindset, but adoption legislation has been promised in the programme for Government. However, one sad aspect of this Bill is that we will be retrenching that particular bias in this legislation when we issue passports in future.

I ask the Minister of State to take this up with the Minister for Foreign Affairs and with the appropriate officials in his Department to ensure that when Irish citizens who are adopted present their documents to leave this State, the information on those documents should be truthful. We are doing a disservice to them and to the nature of the document itself by containing such information.

I welcome the Bill in general as I recognise the need for reforms in this area. I have a concern with the need for security on biometric information gathered for the issuing of passports. I particularly have a concern with ending discrimination against adopted people in our society. Until we end that, the hackneyed phrase of second class citizen will apply especially in this circumstance. I ask other Members to take that into consideration.