Marie Louise O'Donnell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Title encompasses the heartbeat of the Bill. That is what we all want to speak to now. The specifics can come later. The Bill confuses the right to identity and giving adoptees their information with whether they desire to meet their biological parents. Senators Bacik and Norris mentioned this question of information as opposed to contact. Rights to identity and information are fundamental to equality. Why should a birth parent's objection deny the adoptee his or her birth certificate or information about his or her early life? There is no equality there. Forcing adoptees and birth parents into a quasi-legal process, which this Bill is doing, to argue their cases for or against release of information is fundamentally flawed, unfair and costly and it will cause extraordinary delays. A total of 15,000 people, birth parents and adoptees, are already on a contact register with the Adoption Authority of Ireland. Why set up a new register within Tusla? If this is going to be done, I hope the Minister will have both enough money and the 50 to 200 social workers necessary to carry out the kind of work and information seeking required in terms of the tracing process.

All the current information that the Adoption Authority holds on the 15,000 people in question will be lost or dormant as people are forced to re-register, as per the Bill, with Tusla. If the current register was placed on a statutory footing, active tracing and provision of information to those who request it could begin immediately. Natural parents - birth mothers - signed consent forms at the time of adoption. There is no evidence that they were given assurances of secrecy and privacy. This is a very important legal point. The Minister is very good at her job but I must point out to her that Tusla is not regulated for adoption services by the State regulator - namely, the Adoption Authority of Ireland - and, as a result, its adoption service would be unregulated. The Bill presumes that when adoptees receive information, this automatically leads to contact and reunion with their birth families. That is not the case. They will be seeking medical and social information but not necessarily contact, although that may happen. Adoptees must be given full access to their information, not a summary or a redacted version compiled by social workers.

I spent a long time in my office trying to telephone as many of the people who emailed me as possible. Those individuals put their hearts and souls into their emails about their lives and seeking their tribes. These people are not children; they are adults and they are not, as has been stated, simply going to rock up to others' front doors. They are in a state of crisis that has been ongoing for years. I do not want to read out all the emails I received. I have a file box full of them. This is a very important matter.

The Minister is one who defines equality in a thousand different ways in our society. I need her to define it in this instance because, at present, it is not defined correctly in the Title to the Bill. We need to find a balance. People have rights. We are talking here about the delicate nature of human beings. In that context, there is a need to reconsider what is proposed. As matters stand, I cannot vote for the Bill, especially in the context of section 5. The Title to the Bill, which I have tried to decipher, cannot be allowed to stand. There will be specific objections later, but those are my general objections. The Bill does not favour the adoptee. There must be a balance and no such balance exists at present. People have a right to know of their tribe. That is all I have to say at this point.