New bill seeks to improve access to information for the adopted

The Labour Party has urged the current Government to vindicate adopted people's right to information without further delay.

The State's Special Rapporteur on Child Protection has called for the immediate enactment of comprehensive tracing legislation to give adopted persons unconditional access to their birth and adoption records.

The Labour Party has introduced a bill to improve access to information for adopted people.

If enacted, the party's Adoption (Information and Tracing) Bill, which was first published in January, will amend the Adoption Act 2010 to provide adopted persons with the right to access their birth certificates.

Speaking in the Seanad, Labour senator Ivana Bacik noted a similar bill was published in 2019, and the need is now "urgent" for such legislation.

"It would simply allow adopted persons to request information from the index which maintains entries with the adoption register and birth register so they could access their original birth cert," she said.

This practice has been in place in the North since 1987.

"There has never been an absolute ban on providing this information," said Ms Bacik. "Both the Adoption Authority and a court have always been entitled to order the production of records that enable an applicant to trace the link.

We believe that current State policy is overly skewed towards privacy rights, with the presumed wish for privacy of a birth mother overriding the adopted adult’s right to know their own identity. Our bill would simply reverse that presumption."

She said successive governments have spent years examining how best to formulate such legislation, and urged the current Government to vindicate the right to information without further delay.

The State's Special Rapporteur on Child Protection has called for the immediate enactment of comprehensive tracing legislation to give adopted persons unconditional access to their birth and adoption records.

Such legislation was first announced 20 years ago and has not yet been acted upon. Current children's minister Roderic O'Gorman's department says it believes its own legislation will be ready later this year. Due to this fact, it is unlikely Ms Bacik's bill will succeed.

Seanad leader Regina Doherty said the illegal adoptions scandal highlights "the misogyny that the State, the Church and medical profession treated women with in this country for generations" and "looked forward regardless of whose bill we adopt in the next coming weeks".

These people who want their truth have waited far, far too long for any piece of legislation to give them access," she said.

The need for such legislation has been thrown back into the spotlight in the wake of the final report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission and the recent RTÉ Investigates programme which stated there were potentially hundreds of people in Ireland and elsewhere who were illegally adopted.