How long more must adopted people have to wait?

As the law stands, an adopted person has no way of accessing their medical history. They have no way of finding out if there’s a history of heart disease in the family. Or cancer or any number of hereditary diseases, writes Clodagh Finn.

It is a cruel thing to carry a question mark at the centre of your being for most of a lifetime, as adopted people in Ireland often do. I know that because, as one of those people, I knew next to nothing about how I came into the world until I was 26 years old.

After sending several requests for my birth records to the health board — as the HSE was then — I eventually got an answer to one of my letters seven years after it was written. It began: “We apologise for the delay in writing…” I rolled my eyes at that, but at least the single page of stiffly written correspondence opened a door that would lead to answers to the thousands of tiny questions that had built up over a lifetime.