Clann Project Report slams State over adoption

The State is “perpetuating the abuse” suffered by victims of forced and illegal adoptions by refusing to grant adopted people full access to their personal files and birth records.

That is according to the final report of the Clann Project, a joint study which examined Ireland’s forced, secret adoption system and related historical abuses.

The 154-page study was carried out by the Adoption Rights Alliance, Justice for Magdalenes Research, and global law firm Hogan Lovells over a three-year period. It draws on 77 witness statements extracted from conversations with 164 people separated from their family through adoption.

While the report addresses historic abuses, it also details the present-day failure of the State towards natural mothers, adopted people, and family members by “the continuing lack of access to information concerning personal and family histories”.

The report states: “The abuses committed in the past are perpetuated in the present due to the Irish State’s denial of information rights to adopted people and natural parents. The impact of these ongoing violations of human rights is inter-generational and is not restricted to those directly involved.

Through witness statements and other evidence, the report found that from the perspective of adopted people and natural parents seeking information or contact in the present day, Ireland’s adoption system is “opaque, discriminatory, prejudicial, and often unprofessional and obstructive”.

Adopted people are denied the right to know their own names and to access records pertaining to their adoptions. Due to a lack of effective investigation and the absence of rights to information, mothers and other family members remain unable to discover what became of their relatives who disappeared through institutionalisation and/or forced separation, says the report.

The report highlights the lack of an independent system in Ireland to ensure that survivors of related institutional and historical abuses are provided with their records. These records continue to be held by the religious and private bodies, State agencies, and Government departments involved.

The study hits out at the fact that women whose children were forcibly taken from them have to rely on the discretion of private bodies that managed the institutions or social workers operating ad hoc when looking for information about their past treatment.

Equally, family members of children and adults who died in institutions and who may still lie in unmarked graves also do not have a statutory right to their relative’s personal records.

The report makes a total of eight recommendations to the mother and baby homes commission. These include a new process of investigation to be opened and a State apology to all those affected.

It calls for redress and reparations, and an introduction of statutory rights and services for adopted people, natural parents, relatives of the deceased, and all individuals who experienced abuse, including centralised records and access to archives and tracing services.

Clann Project co-director Claire McGettrick said the report shows that the State is failing the victims of forced and illegal adoptions by refusing to allow them access to their information

The Clann Project witnesses describe a situation of marginalisation, powerlessness, and discrimination that persists in 21st-century Ireland because private, religious, and State bodies are withholding personal and family records,” she said.

“In addition, the administrative records held by the State and private bodies are being kept entirely secret. This is compounding the abuse suffered in the past. No other form of redress will be meaningful without first abandoning this insistence on secrecy and treating people with dignity.”