Jillian van Turnhout (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is very welcome and I thank him for his co-operation in helping us bring this Bill to the House. I would also like to extend a welcome to our visitors in the Visitors Gallery from Adoption Rights Alliance Ireland and Dr. Fergus Ryan.
I thank Senator Averil Power for her tremendous work initiating the Bill and Senator Healy Eames for joining with us in bringing it forward today. A special thanks also to Dr. Fergus Ryan who drafted the Bill. I thank also the many colleagues who shared their personal stories with me over the past two weeks and the reason they support this Bill, which indicates that it reaches into every household in Ireland.
I feel very strongly about the Bill and it is an honour for me to second it in the House today. My intervention will focus on a critical component, which is all too readily brushed aside or diminished, that is, the right to identity. In 1976, Alex Haley, author of Roots: The Saga of an American Family, articulated what so many adoptive people in Ireland have described to me over the years when he stated: "In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage - to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning ... and the most disquieting loneliness". The right of people to know who they are is fundamental, necessary and basic.

Its absence can be a source of considerable pain and anguish. Its absence, where the necessary information exists but is being withheld, can leave people with a feeling of deep injury and injustice. By focusing on the right to identity I do not wish in any way to undermine or diminish the identity that an adopted person has developed in his or her life with his or her adoptive parents and families. There are many adopted people who have no desire whatsoever to access their birth information. However, there are many for whom the information is a burning need.
I have spoken in this House on several occasions about forced and illegal adoptions. All too often we have cloaked adoption in secrecy and as a society we have been complicit in suppressing women, their children and their respective rights. This is typified by a startling figure produced by Clare McGettrick of the Adoption Rights Alliance which shows that in 1967, a staggering 97% of all children born outside marriage were adopted. We cannot allow our shameful past, our fear that further shames may be exposed, to justify the perpetuation of a shameful practice against at least 50,000 people in Ireland and yet we do. That is why this Bill is so necessary, so important and is long overdue.
We need to fundamentally reconsider how we approach adoption in Ireland. Our current system of closed adoptions which automatically extinguishes the child's and the adult's right to his or her identity will ideally be changed to an open system where their biological and adoptive families have access to varying degrees of each other's personal information and have an option of contact from the outset. In the meantime, this Bill will ensure, however retrospectively, the adoptive person's right to identity.
We are on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. How fitting it will be if we can give life to the convention's expressed recognition of a child's right to know and to preserve his or her identity. This has been the law in Scotland since 1930 and in England and Wales since the mid-1970s, with no dire consequences or legal wrangling over rights to privacy.
According to the Supreme Court in I.O'T v. B, an adoptee's right to his or her identity is not absolute and is subject in particular to the right to privacy of the natural parent, about which we have heard much in the past 24 hours. However, it also pointed out that the right to privacy does not automatically trump the right to identity. The Supreme Court decided that the two rights must be balanced against each other. It is clear from the Supreme Court decisions in Tuohy v. Courtney, that the precise balance to be struck is a matter for the Oireachtas to determine. This Bill achieves that balance in a way that is sensitive to the needs of all parties.
We must let in the light and we must start now in a new era of openness and understanding. We should not stand in judgment and I believe that this Bill strikes the balance mooted by the Supreme Court and longed for by so many adoptive people, their families and friends. Let us do this now.