Full trawl of adoption records needed, says Clare Daly

A full trawl of hundreds of thousands of records, rather than a sample exercise, is needed to establish the facts in the illegal adoptions scandal, says Independents4-Change TD Clare Daly.

In the Dáil, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar accepted the revelations could be only the tip of the iceberg and Ms Daly called on him to dispense with the scoping exercise and commit to the full trawl immediately.

“We have been raising it since June 2011, we have a lot of evidence that this is quite a widespread practice. Documents showing altered records at Bessborough have been in the hands of the HSE since 2011. In 2012, a HSE report warned that death certificates at Bessborough may have been altered,” she said.