Some Irish children are less equal than others

As an Irish adoptee I would like to concur with Clare McGettrick’s letter (January 28) on the raw deal Irish adopted people are still getting.

The lack of legislation to guarantee adoptees the right to their own birth certificate is nothing short of a national disgrace and shows a callous disregard for their rights by this and previous Irish governments.

In no other country in the EU that I am aware of are citizens of their respective countries denied the basic right of access to their original birth cert.

A birth cert is a public acknowledgement by a civil society that you were born and exist. It is a passport to citizenship of your country — a public, legal acknowledgement of your identity and who your parents are.

Irish adoptees are denied, by circumstances of birth, the right to a public acknowledgement of that identity and where they came from.

Why in 2009 are thousands of Irish citizens still being discriminated against in such a fundamental way? Have we really travelled all that far since the removal of the bastardy laws in the 1980s?

It is more than 90 years since the independence proclamation pledged us “to cherish all the children of the nation equally”.

This evidently still has not been achieved and is an indictment of Irish society’s failure to deal with this issue. We still have not thrown off the shackles of the oppressive British common law in this area and it weighs heavily on the shoulders of many Irish citizens.

John Dill

Dunmanus

Banduff

Ballyvolane

Cork