Referendum may be required on adoption issues

A referendum may be required to ensure children given up for adoption can access more information about their birth parents, Enda Kenny has insisted.

Speaking in the wake of the mother-and-baby home scandal, the Taoiseach said the Government was working on a new law to improve the situation for adoptive children, but the area was fraught with legal difficulties given the right to privacy in the Constitution.

“It would appear that a referendum might actually be required to deal with some of the issues involved. It’s not as simple as it looks,” Mr Kenny told the Dáil.

Labour leadership contender Joan Burton, who was herself adopted, said people like herself should be allowed access to their birth certificates.

“That legislation has existed in Scotland for decades, and in the UK.

“I think there has been a enormous amount of work done on it and there are different points of view.

“One is that the issue can be addressed legally and the other that a constitutional referendum is required,” Ms Burton told Newstalk Breakfast.

The intervention came as the Dáil again debated the mother-and-baby home controversy with Independent TD Richard Boyd Barrett saying he “escaped” from such an institution.

The People Before Profit TD said the system had “echoes and elements” of Nazi Germany in the Second World War.

“I was born in a mother and baby scheme. I was adopted, I am a product of this system, and I was one of the lucky ones who escaped out of the mother and baby home, but others suffered a terrible fate, children being used as guinea pigs, children dying of starvation,” Mr Boyd Barrett told the Dáil.

Sinn Féin TD Mary Lou McDonald said that mothers and babies were abused and degraded in the religious-run homes and that women were “punished for being pregnant.”

“We want to know the truth about forced adoption and vaccine trials,” Ms McDonald told TDs as she said the women and children involved were robbed of their human rights and dignity.