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Roderic O'Gorman We hope today's legislation will right decades of wrongs against adopted people

Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman reacts to the new Birth Information and Tracing Bill launched today.

LAST UPDATE | 12 Jan 2022

FOR DECADES, ADOPTED people in Ireland have been denied a fundamental right many of us exercise without a second thought.

A court ruling in the late 1990s found that the adopted person’s right to information had to be balanced with their parent’s right to privacy.

In practice, this meant that adopted people who wanted to access their most basic documents – like their birth certificate – could be denied that on the basis it would be an infringement of their parent’s right to privacy.

Previous attempts by successive governments to legislate to change this faltered, and the situation has long since remained the same.

Today’s changes

Today, I believe we are on the cusp of righting this historic wrong. The Birth Information and Tracing Bill, published today, will provide a statutory right to every adopted person in Ireland, those adopted people now living abroad, and others with questions in relation to their origins, to full and complete information about their birth, their early life and their origins.

It will restore to adopted people, information that so many of us take for granted as part of our own, personal stories.

The legislation gives access to a wide range of critical information – including full and un-redacted access to birth certificates and baptismal certificates, something which has de facto been denied to thousands for decades.

As well as resolving the issue of access to personal information, the Bill establishes a national tracing service for the first time.

This will support adopted people, or those who have children who were adopted to others, to find, share information and make contact with family members, where that is the wish of both parties. This service will be used not just by a person who was adopted, boarded out or illegally registered, but also by their parents, grandparents, siblings, and other extended family and friends.

The new tracing service will work in conjunction with a new Contact Preference Register, whereby adopted people, those subject to illegal birth registrations, parents whose children were adopted and others can indicate if they would like to make contact, share information, or not have any contact.

How will this work in practice?

If the legislation is passed by the Dáil and the Seanad and signed into law, we will run a national information campaign, informing adopted people and their parents or siblings that they can register whether they wish to have contact with their relation.

After three months, an adopted person can request their information from Tusla or the Adoption Authority of Ireland. If that person’s parent has registered a no contact preference, the adopted person will receive a phone call informing them of that preference.

In this way, we are balancing those competing EU and constitutional rights of the person and their parent, but doing so in a manner that is fair, and will ensure people can always access their personal information.

The adopted person will then receive their information. While the legislation covers the most basic items of identity like birth certificates and baptism certs, it also covers much more.

It includes information about their early life circumstances, where they lived, if and when they were baptised, how long they spent with their mother and key medical information about themselves and their genetic relatives. It will also encompass any letters or mementoes that a parent may have left for their child.

Badly needed

Access to these vital records are long overdue for so many people, and I am determined to get this legislation passed as soon as possible. We will be bringing it into the Dáil next week and hope to see it passed and enacted within months.

In publishing this legislation today, it is important to acknowledge that we would not be at this point without the years of perseverance, campaigning and hard work of many thousands of adopted people in Ireland. This is a fight that they never should have had to engage in in the first place.

The State has, over decades, repeatedly failed to vindicate the most fundamental right of adopted people to know their origins. This bill represents a major step towards redressing this issue and finally providing adopted people with their full information.

Roderic O’Gorman is Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration, and Youth. He is Green Party TD for Dublin West.

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    Mute AnthonyK
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    Oct 1st 2024, 1:52 PM

    A precedence has been set with this. Well meaning as it is. Will not other survivors of state ineffectiveness want something similar.

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    Mute ben wu
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    Oct 1st 2024, 2:02 PM

    @AnthonyK: At a risk of sounding controversial, I think this should have been dealt with under some form of compensation or redress rather than some blanket thing.
    That it doesn’t preclude future settlements is an odd thing.
    However, I’m more onboard with the Gov actually doing something rather than nothing for those people it’s completely failed.

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    Mute Niall English
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    Oct 1st 2024, 2:00 PM

    maybe hold tony hoolahan to account? no, no, that would be too much to expect of this snide government.

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    Mute Jason Memail
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    Oct 1st 2024, 2:03 PM

    @Niall English: What specifically should he be held to account for?

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    Mute ....
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    Oct 1st 2024, 2:07 PM

    Are they going to do this for all individuals who have been failed by the state (and how is that defined)? There’s plenty of people who have suffered, including Stardust victims, people who can’t get or afford homes.

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    Mute Jason Memail
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    Oct 1st 2024, 2:06 PM

    The amount of misinformation out there around what happened with cervical check is mind-blowing. The way some people talk you’d swear that the testing service actually gave people cancer.

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    Mute Brian D'Arcy
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    Oct 1st 2024, 4:58 PM

    @Jason Memail: Quite the opposite, it didn’t tell them that they had cancer so they didn’t receive the treatment they needed, in a nutshell

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    Mute Jason Memail
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    Oct 2nd 2024, 12:37 AM

    @Brian D’Arcy: That’s absolutely false, and part of the misinformation that’s common on this subject. 1) These women received tests from cervical check which told them that cancer cells were not present. 2) These women subsequently developed cancer, and a review of their original tests was carried out. 3) The reviews showed that the earlier tests missed what may have been cancerous cells, with these reviews aided by the fact that the reviewers knew what they were looking for, since the patients had developed cancer.

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    Mute Jason Memail
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    Oct 2nd 2024, 12:37 AM

    @Jason Memail: 4) The decision was made, and this is the real crux of the issue, not to go back and tell those women that the earlier tests missed the potentially cancerous cells, mainly because what good would it do? They now had cancer and knowing an earlier test missed it wouldn’t change that. 5) Overall, the suggestion that cervical check didn’t tell these people they had cancer is demonstrably false, because the only reason the reviews were carried out on the initial tests is because they had cancer, which they knew about. 6) Going back and checking original tests when something like this happens is standard practice, and the right thing to do in order to improve future testing, but

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    Mute Jason Memail
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    Oct 2nd 2024, 12:37 AM

    @Jason Memail: 7) you can argue whether or not it was the right decision not to inform people about what the earlier tests missed, but it would not and could not have changed the fact that they now, sadly, had cancer, and 8) Knowing that an earlier test missed something could not have allowed them to start treatment earlier, because it’s in the oast. 9) If you want to know the specifics of it, I’d suggest checking out care2much on Twitter, who has written some incredibly detailed threads on the subject.

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    Mute silvery moon
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    Oct 1st 2024, 4:59 PM

    While this is welcome and like one commentor said that it should have been done with compensation.
    As a survivor of the industrial state/religious run institutions we never got compensation we were give an “Award” as if we won something, we cannot get enhanced medical cards that the survivors from the mother and baby home were afforded, we cannot get a contributary pension even though we had to work in these institutions, we now get another slap in the face by being excluded from theses tax benefits. I live in a council house and am grateful for that, I live with my ill husband and disabled totally dependant 23 year old son was told that I can purchase the house for a minimum of between 60 and 80 thousand euro, cannot get a mortgage as my husband is 70 as the cut off is 69 and we’ve have no where to go to help buy the house so our disabled son would have a roof over his head if anything happened to us.

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