Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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155. To ask the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth when the attention of his Department was drawn to the issue of illegal birth registrations; the person or body that drew the attention of his Department to the matter; and the actions that were taken by his Department at the time. [13757/21]

Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)
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In 2018, Tusla the Child and Family Agency alerted the Department to concerns of cases of illegal birth registration in the St Patrick Guild files. 126 cases were subsequently confirmed as illegal birth registrations, and the process of informing the individuals concerned commenced. The number of confirmed cases from those files has now increased to 151.

While there have been suspicions about the practice of illegal or incorrect registrations for many years, and indeed the Department was informed of such suspicions, it is very difficult to confirm cases of illegal birth registrations. This is due to a number of factors including the historic nature of the cases, and the fact that, as falsely registering a birth is and always has been an offence, it is very unlikely that records will be kept of the practice.

The State has a responsibility to reach a high level of certainty before it determines that births have been illegally registered and proceeds to contact the individuals concerned. The cases uncovered in the St Patricks Guild files were confirmed once a rigorous process was completed to ensure that the State could be as confident as possible that these individuals' births were in fact illegally registered. To the Department's knowledge, the cases announced in May 2018 represent the first time the required threshold of a high level of certainty was reached on the basis of the information on the files, and in particular the existence of a marker "adopted from birth”. There is no guarantee that the same level of evidence is to be found in relation to other historic adoption records, that would allow a suspicion to be confirmed as an illegal birth registration.

Following the discovery of evidence of illegal birth registration in the St. Patrick Guild files, an independent review was commissioned in 2018 to investigate whether there are markers to indicate a practice of illegal birth registration in the records of other adoption agencies and similar institutions. The publication of this review, which took place yesterday, had to await the final report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission, as it encroached on the work of that Commission. A copy of that report is available on my Department's website.