Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)
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101. To ask the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth further to Parliamentary Question No. 546 of 17 May 2022, the expected timeline for the establishment of the specialist tracing service; the resources allocated thereto; the membership, working methods and objectives of the service; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [36523/22]

Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)
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In March 2021, following publication of the Independent Review into Illegal Birth Registration, I asked Professor Conor O’Mahony, the Special Rapporteur on Child Protection, to consider the significant complexities and challenges which arise in relation to the issue of illegal birth registrations, and to provide a report proposing an appropriate course of action. On 14 March 2022, I published the report which sets out 17 numbered recommendations.

Recommendations 8–12 relate to creating a Specialist Tracing Service that would take a two-pronged approach to identifying further cases of illegal birth registration.

Firstly, it recommends a review and trace of the files flagged by Tusla during the Independent Review as raising suspicions of illegal birth registration, but which fell short of the amount of evidence in the St. Patrick Guild files. Secondly, it recommends creating a right of expedited review for persons who hold reasonable suspicions that they may have been the subject of an illegal birth registration.

I accepted these recommendations and amended the Birth Information and Tracing Bill accordingly to provide a legal basis for a specialist tracing service. That legislation was signed into law by the President on 30 June 2022 and I commenced the first suite of provisions on 01 July to pave the way for information and tracing services to open in October 2022.

I ensured that, alongside the establishment of the Contact Preference Register and the information campaign, provisions to establish the specialist tracing service for illegal birth registrations were also commenced. With this legislative framework in place, and in line with the Special Rapporteur’s recommendations, I intend to formally request a review of files flagged by Tusla as raising suspicions of illegal birth registration.