Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate the Minister's bona fides in terms of his apologies and the actions of the Government. Ministers and Governments come and go and legislation stays, however, unless it is changed. I have not sought to delete the word "incorrect". I still have concerns.

I am speaking not in terms of consequence or prosecution but in terms of access points again. It is that same issue of access points. The fact is that somebody seeking to use this Bill will be describing a birth registration in relation to them, which may have been illegal, as incorrect with false or misleading information. That is how they will be describing it and how they will need to describe it in terms of accessing what is in the Bill. It will not be open to them to describe it as illegal adoption. This is about having an additional access point for those who, as I said, believe or know they have been subject to an illegal adoption. That additional access point might be true for somebody. That is what I was saying.

The fact is that when the Minister, whose understanding is that this was illegal, and his Government are gone, the legislation and how people describe the birth registration, and the Minister is right to frame it as birth registration rather than adoption, will be as an incorrect birth registration. That is how they will describe it when it may have been illegal. They will need to do so in order to access their various rights and entitlements.

My amendments were not about narrowing but an attempt to broaden by having an additional, separate mechanism whereby as well as being able to choose "incorrect" as the description, people would have another route of describing it as "illegal" when accessing their rights. It is one thing to use the word "illegal" many times in a speech and have it on the record. There are many things on the record but it is a great gap in the Bill that "unlawful or illegal" is not recognised. I worry that we will have multiple instances arising from this legislation where things that may have been illegal will be described as incorrect. One could maybe say separately they may be pursued as illegal and all of that, but they will have been described in a way that is inadequate and untrue. That is why I will not press many of these amendments but I am going to have to press a couple of them because I cannot in good conscience let the Bill go through without attempt to have illegality become one of the ways in which people are able to describe their experience in terms of accessing their rights under this Bill.