Only 1% of adopted trace their identity via register

Just 1% of an estimated 60,000 adopted people in Ireland have traced their identity through the system the Government plans to introduce on a statutory basis so adopted people and natural parents can find each other.

The National Contact Preference Register (NACPR), which is run by the Adoption Authority (AAI), was introduced in 2005 on a non-statutory basis and since then has matched a little more than 600 people out of an estimated 60,000 adopted people — a success rate of 1%.

Even when you take into account the fact that a little more than 10,000 adopted people and natural parents have signed up to the register, this success rate rises to just 5%.

Despite this, the NACPR, which for years has been criticised as an “abject failure” by adopted people and natural parents, is the system Children’s Minister Frances Fitzgerald intends to enshrine in tracing and information legislation.

The Government is under increasing pressure from the US to fully open adoption records on the back of the hugely successful film Philomena, which tells the story of Philomena Lee whose son was taken from her and given up for adoption in 1952.

Tracing and information legislation has bee repeat-edly due to the apparent complexity of balancing the right of natural parents to privacy against the right of adopted people to know their identity.

It is often cited that natural parents were guaranteed the right to confidentiality and anonymity when they gave up their children for adoption. However, groups representing natural mothers and adopted people say no evidence of this guarantee has ever been provided.

Now Justice Minister Alan Shatter described the issue in 2010 as “not rocket science”, while in 1997 Ms Fitzgerald said denial of access to information about one’s identity was “denial of a basic human right”.

Commenting on the plans to place the NACPR on a statutory footing, Susan Lohan of the Adoption Rights Alliance said the register was already “an abject failure” and that the minister was displaying “an incredible level of ignorance” about the original intention of the register when it was introduced in 2005.

“It was only ever intended to be an interim measure, a stop-gap ahead of legislation, which of course was never delivered,” she said.

“Internationally, contact registers are also only ever used as a complimentary measure to a robust, fully funded, national tracing service, which runs in tandem with a regime of open records.”

She said the alliance and representatives for natural parents warned at the time that unless the NACPR was advertised internationally, many of the women who fled Ireland after losing their children would not be aware of its existence. This is now reflected in the fact that the number of adopted people on the register is three times that of natural mothers.

“Crucially, many of these women will not wish to engage with the body that had arranged the life-long separation from their child,” she said.

“Also, people matched on the register are sent back to the very agencies they sought to avoid in the first place in order to avoid micro-management and delays lasting years. It’s clear the minister has no understanding of how such registers operate internationally. I’m happy to meet her and show her the final reports of the steering group, which included comments on the inherent weaknesses of the register she is placing so much store in.”