Birth information: ‘Tusla knows I met my birth mother — and I still have not got my files’
One adoptee, now a mum herself, says: 'When my daughter was born in 1998 she had a simple medical issue. But I was unaware I had the same one and I was hospitalised and treated for that.' Stock picture
WHEN Martina Power held her firstborn child in her arms, the bond was stronger than anything she had ever felt before.
Here was a tiny little person who had her blood coursing through her veins and who could perhaps one day look and sound just like her.
Not only that but this little person was the first blood relative she had ever met.
When her newborn baby suffered a minor illness in her early days, Martina had no idea that she herself had gone through the same when she was an infant.
That’s because Martina was informally adopted in Waterford in 1979, and recalls her adoptive parents formally signing the adoption order for her when she was 13 years old, during a trip to Dublin.
Now, Martina is one of the thousands waiting and hoping for information on their lives to be made available to them through the Birth Information and Tracing Act.
She applied for access to her records on October 3, the first day that people could apply for information under the new legislation.
The details are to be released within 30 days of receipt of a completed application, or within 90 days in cases where the search and gathering of records take extra work.
Martina received an email from Tusla at the end of October outlining a 90-day period needed to process her application.
She also received one from the Adoption Authority of Ireland, stating it would be autumn 2023 when she would get information from the authority.
Confused by the delays, Martina says her case is “not complex by any means”. She says:
Tusla knows I have met my birth mother. I have been in Tusla’s office — I only live five minutes away from Tusla — and I still have not got my files.
“They [Tusla and the Adoption Authority] should have resources and enough staff to deal with all these people applying.
"I don’t think they expected so many, which is crazy.”
Martina, now 42 years old, points out that she has been looking for information since she was a teenager, after her adoptive mother gave her the original birth file.
She craves details about her first year, as she knows she was with a foster family for that period, but does not know where or who the family was.
Details about her birth family’s medical history are also very important to her.
“When my daughter was born in 1998 she had a simple medical issue,” she said. “But I was unaware that I had the same one and I was hospitalised and treated for that.
It is hereditary. It was a simple little thing but I still want to find out.
She only discovered in 2010 that she had the same condition as her daughter.
“Since the birth of my second child, I have suffered from a lot of medical issues, for years and years.”
While medics have been fantastic, she has been working off a blank sheet because she is unaware of any medical history in her own background.
Some doctors do not know how to respond to her when she tells them that she does not have her family’s medical history because of her adoption.
She recalls one doctor apologising to her.
“He didn’t know what to say or do,” she said.
Martina is luckier than some, in that she has managed to meet both of her birth parents. She learned from her birth mother that she has rheumatoid arthritis and discovered a history of cancer in the family.
Such knowledge is important to know.
I am one of the lucky ones because I am after finding out so much myself. It is worse for the older people who don’t, perhaps, have a year to wait.
Then there are the simpler things, such as what weight she was when she was born.
“When I had my second daughter in 2003, I was very sick afterward, so I wrote to Tusla to see if there was any information on my file with regards to the medical history of my birth mother or my birth father.
“They told me one or two things, like arthritis.”
In 2018, she did a DNA test to see what ethnicity she had. Against expectations, she found her birth father’s family through a DNA database over a two-year period.
“The rest is history,” she says.
Her birth father sent a text message to say he was willing to do a DNA test, which provided definitive proof.
“We have a fantastic relationship now. But they are the steps I had to go through to find out who I was. He was able to give me some family medical history but, as regards what is in my files, I don’t have a clue what is in them.
“I have done it all by myself but I want to get the files. People are amazed by what they are getting back in their files — little bits of history that they never knew about themselves, or that they have siblings that they didn’t know.”
Martina is among more than 6,250 people who applied for access to files under the new legislation, with almost two thirds of the applications being received in the first two weeks after the law was introduced last year.
A statement from the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration, and Youth said that processing the initial volume of requests for information is “proving to be a challenge”.
But, by January 10, more than 1,000 applicants had received their information.
“In addition, the Adoption Authority of Ireland (AAI) has successfully identified 196 matches on the Contact Preference Register for people seeking to contact relatives and are working with the matched people to facilitate contact, with contact having been facilitated between 49 pairs of relatives so far,” the Department said in a statement.
An additional €1.05m was provided to the AAI and funding of €3m was provided to Tusla Adoption Services last year for extra staff, including genealogical and archival expertise and support, to help process applications.
A public information campaign to create awareness of the new legislation was also undertaken.
Both organisations ran recruitment campaigns, trained and brought on additional staff in advance of the opening of information and tracing services, said the department.
The interim chief executive of the AAI, Philip Crosby, said: “We have a team working full-time and exclusively on processing, checking and managing our 2600+ applications along with responding to phone, post, and email queries.”
Mr Crosby explained applications for information are complex, with details spread across hardcopy files, letters/memos, databases, and historical bound volumes.
He noted there are also different agencies that were involved at different times in maintaining records, including An Bord Uchtála, the Adoption Authority, and registered/accredited adoption societies.
“It is essential that Authority staff conduct detailed searches of all our record formats and information sources in order to ensure we send applicants all relevant data which may exist,” he said.
“We have also received a very large number of queries and review requests from applicants, arising from the release of their information.
“Adoptees, those nursed out or boarded out, and those subject to illegal birth registration, have understandable questions about their information and records and we are endeavouring to reply to all of these as quickly as possible.
“This, however, is also impacting on the rate at which we can complete applications for the release of information.”
Claire McGettrick of the support groups, the Clann Project and the Adoption Rights Alliance, says there are issues with the legislation which make it difficult to meet the 30-day and 90-day deadlines included in the Act.
She says the steps required to obtain a birth certificate are “arduous” and “convoluted” and the definition of the word “information” in the legislation is restrictive.
People have no way of finding out if or what details or documents are being withheld from them, Ms McGettrick adds.
Everything on an adoption file, aside from the medical notes relating to the birth itself, relates to the adopted person and should be available, she argues.
“Quite frankly, the file would not exist without the adopted person. If there was not a child to be adopted, the file would not exist, so all of the information on the file is either about our adoption, the process of our adoption, the process that led us to take on our adoptive identities.
It is about us. Every single bit is about us. There is very little on the file that doesn’t relate to us.
The “convoluted set of guidelines” accompanying the Birth Information and Tracing Act means that staff of Tusla and the AAI have to go through various definitions relating to what information can be released.
“That takes an awful lot of time — going through a file often with handwritten notes. It is a massive undertaking, the way it is prescribed under the legislation.”
Ms McGettrick says there was not enough input from adopted people in drafting the legislation.
This is rebutted by the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration, and Youth.
The department says: “The Implementation Group was formed of members from the Department, the Adoption Authority of Ireland, and Tusla.
“The purpose of the group was to support the relevant bodies as defined under this legislation (Tusla/AAI) to prepare operationally to implement the new services as established under the Act.
“A Stakeholder Reference Group was formed in early 2022, with the assistance of Tusla and the Adoption Authority of Ireland.
“The purpose of the group is to ensure that the implementation of the Birth Information and Tracing legislation is informed by the voice and views of those who are centrally affected by the legislation.
“The Stakeholder Reference Group was consulted on various items, including public communications and guidelines and the design of application processes, which fed directly into the work of the Implementation Group.
“Membership of the Stakeholder Reference Group included persons who were adopted, boarded out, subject to an illegal birth registration, and mothers.”
Alan Bigger and the mystery photograph
When Alan Bigger looks at a photo of his infant self, the hands which are holding him in that moment of time hold his fascination.
Now a man of more than 70 years, he is no nearer to finding out who was keeping him upright in that sepia-stained image.
For most people, staring at such a photo from their first year of life, there would be someone to ask about the identity of the hidden person, the hands that are barely visible in the picture.
There would be a sibling who may have an idea or an older relative with stories to tell, the identification of the person who helped commit to posterity a photo of a smiling infant, the child the grew to become a man known as Alan Bigger.
When and where that photo was taken is a mystery for Alan, then called Albert.
He is desperate to find out what happened in his early years — the ones before he was brought across the border from Belfast to Dublin in 1950 — and had hoped the new Birth Information and Tracing Act would enable him to uncover details of those missing years.
Born in the workhouse in Belfast in July 1948, he knows for sure that he was brought to Miss Carr’s Home in Dublin, in or around October 1950. But anything between his birth and his arrival at Miss Carr’s Home is a mystery.
Alan, who now lives in the US, says: “I have been in contact innumerable times with the Adoption Authority of Ireland and the Belfast Trust and have never received satisfactory information from them for that period.
“I did use birthinfo.ie and Tusla and I did receive a package that conveniently omitted documentation as to what happened in between.
“It did include that I was delivered to Miss Carr’s Home around October 1950 but no documentation from 1948 to 1950, other than I was born in the workhouse in Belfast in 1948.
"Most of that I actually found out myself."
He now knows the name of the person who took him to Miss Carr’s Home but has not been able to find out more about her, or his connection to her. He also knows that a relative of his birth mother drove him from Belfast to Dublin some time between 1948 and 1950, but he wonders:
How did I cross the border and why was it not documented?
As a result of years of work, trying to find out his history, he managed to track down the families of both his birth father and birth mother and found out he had 15 half-siblings.
Since 2011, he has had numerous meetings with members of his birth family and feels lucky to have them in his life. But his hopes of finding out information about the first two years and three months of his life through the Birth Information and Tracing Act have failed.
He said he has received 153 pages through the process but nothing was new to him.
The crucial part of his information is missing — anything to tell him where he spent the first years of his life before arriving to Miss Carr’s Home.
He realises there may only be limited documentation relating to his case but he is disappointed that there appears to be none from those first years before he became part of his adopted family.
He questions whether the lack of information may be because his adoption was a Protestant one.
“I don’t know,” he said, still craving closure, but somehow trying to accept there may forever be a gap in his story.
