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I WAS BORN in 1973 and adopted at six weeks old through St Patrick’s Guild Adoption Society. I reunited with my mother when I was 20.
Although I have known my original identity since then, I have nonetheless spent my entire adult life in a battle of wills, at first with St Patrick’s Guild and more recently with Tusla, to obtain my adoption file. Like every other adopted person in Ireland, I am discriminated against simply because I am adopted.
I have spent the past 20 years campaigning on this issue with Adoption Rights Alliance, the Clann Project and our predecessor organisations.
Roderic O’Gorman is the ninth Minister for Children we’ve engaged with; the Birth (Information and Tracing) Bill 2022 is our fourth information bill. I think it’s beyond time for our rights to be recognised in law.
Latest legislation
However, within minutes of reading the Minister’s latest draft Bill, published on 12 January, I knew we had another fight on our hands: under this draft Bill, some adopted people will still have to attend an offensive Information Session before they can get their birth certificates, and the Bill once again wants to take away adopted people’s rights to their personal data—rights only recently affirmed through the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
And there are myriad other concerns, including the absence of information rights for mothers (save for those women whose children died in certain institutions), and there is no mechanism to access the administrative files of institutions, agencies and individuals involved in forced family separation.
If this Bill becomes law, an adopted person who applies for their birth certificate or ‘birth information’ but whose parent has registered a ‘no contact’ preference on the new Contact Preference Register must attend a mandatory Information Session. One of the express purposes of the Information Session is to inform the adopted person of ‘the importance of… respecting the privacy rights’ of their parent.
It should go without saying but adopted people do not require assistance in understanding the concept of privacy.
Rights of access
Birth certificates have been public documents for over 150 years. Any person can visit the Research Room of the General Register Office (GRO) and view the indexes to the Registers of Births. Members of the public using the GRO’s research services—including adopted people—do not have to attend compulsory meetings to have the importance of respecting people’s privacy explained to them.
It is also important to note that adopted people can already access their birth certificates. They have been doing so since the 1990s by navigating public civil registration records in the GRO. The sun has not fallen out of the sky as a result.
Some adopted people upon obtaining their information discreetly seek out family members, others do not. There is no evidence to suggest that adopted people do anything other than respect family members’ wishes when they decline contact requests. The fact that we are adopted does not cancel out our capacity for care and empathy.
The Minister, like his predecessors, is operating under the mistaken assumption that adopted people and their mothers are on opposing sides. He has repeatedly insisted that the proposed Information Session must remain in the legislation or run the risk of legal challenges as to the Bill’s constitutionality. Yet the Minister does not seem at all worried about constitutional challenges from adopted people whose rights are jeopardised in the current Bill.
‘Mothers in fear’
Some media commentators continue to perpetuate the myth that many mothers are petrified of their daughter or son making contact with them. Some claimed this was going to cause difficulty for many women. These assertions are utterly contradicted by facts in the public domain.
For example, data released by the Adoption Authority to the Clann Project indicates that over the past 17 years, just 5% of mothers (128 women) who registered on the National Adoption Contact Preference Register stated that they wish to have no contact with their daughter or son.
The Minister has portrayed the Bill as ‘landmark legislation’ that will vindicate people’s ‘fundamental rights to information’. But instead of putting in place a mechanism whereby adopted people’s GDPR rights to their personal data can be clearly met, the Bill eviscerates those rights by re-defining information and limiting access under certain categories, such as ‘early life’, ‘medical’, and ‘care’ information.
This means in effect that adopted people will have no automatic right to all personal data in their files. Civil servants will determine access to records under these categories of data as they see fit. The categories of information are open to a range of different interpretations; it is certain that much personal data will be held back. Our rights are not being enshrined in law, rather, they are in grave danger under this Bill.
There is a good reason why adopted people say we want ‘the file, the whole file and nothing but the file’. The adoption file represents a crucial component of an adopted person’s personal history. Without us, there is no file at all.
Our records are our story
When combined, the records form a narrative of how we came to inhabit our current identities; for example, how and why we were separated from our mothers, how we came to be placed with our adoptive families. In some cases, the files will also expose illegal activity.
Thus, our adoption files are inextricably linked to our identities. Apart from records that are solely our mothers’ data (for example, our mothers’ medical records), our files are our personal data as defined under the GDPR: they are part of our physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural and social identity.
Minister O’Gorman is asking adopted people to accept a law that singles us out as different, less than equal to non-adopted people and once again undermines our information rights.
This Bill has been decades in the making and the pressure to support it is enormous. But adopted people deserve better. Mothers and relatives deserve better too. Adopted people’s identities were obliterated to facilitate closed secret adoptions. As infants, none of us had any choice in the matter.
The unconditional restoration of our information rights is the very least the State can do. It is impossible to characterise Minister O’Gorman’s Bill as a justice measure. This Bill does not have the support of the people it is supposed to serve because it undermines their rights.
Thankfully it’s not too late to rectify the situation. Minister O’Gorman has it within his power to amend this Bill to ensure that it is truly a ground-breaking piece of legislation. But that will not happen if the Minister continues not to listen to those most affected.
Claire McGettrick is an Irish Research Council postgraduate scholar at the School of Sociology at University College Dublin. She is co-founder of Adoption Rights Alliance and Justice for Magdalenes Research and co-director of the multi-award-winning Clann Project.
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How do they get away with selling rotten fruit n veg?
Biggest eyesore of a street in the country.
@Fergus Fring: What ,what Fergus. One would want to pull one’s neck out.
@The Viking: It’s hideous. Cheap tat, cash for gold, second hand electronics shops and the street itself is constantly littered from street traders…
Next time you walk down it, take a look at these buildings with ‘historical significance’. Most of them have visible concrete blocks behind the windows on the second floor. Obviously no one living there because they’re so derelict and decrepit.
The street should be leveled and regenerated.
@Fergus Fring: Stay in Dundrum Town Centre if you don’t like character.
Quite a few negative comments on here. A bustling lively market is an asset to a city, an facility for shoppers and an attraction to tourists and in fact Dublin Tourism promotes the market but the reality must be disappointing to visitors. The market is being deliberately run down in order to facilitate the huge shopping centre plan — what some of the “level it and redevelop it” brigade no doubt would like — which is what most people do NOT want (and the Save Moore Street From Demolition campaign have the signatures to prove it).
Most of the street traders on Moore Street are fourth generation — one or two are fifth. The Council does not supply water, heating or light, only the meagre shelter of the stands. As Mary Kelly noted, no toilets either. They have a hard life and as Marie Cullen said, their children would not want it. But others might. However Dublin City Council will not issue any new licenses.
The small business shopkeepers also struggle, particularly those from the junction with Henry Place going north.
The Council provided large bins along the street and also street cleaning teams go up and down regularly (their depot is in Nos. 24/25). Recently they removed most of the bins and of course, cardboard boxes and paper do pile up and also blow along.
The buildings are deteriorating because the property speculator is waiting to demolish them (all except Nos.14-17, which are owned by the State).
An upgraded market and a walk-through historical experience in the upper floors would boost the area enormously. Kilmainham Jail, which the State was going to demolish until a community group began to renovate it, now attracts so many paying visitors that one needs to book or to check on line for a free space to chance turning up. That site requires a bus journey whereas Moore Street is right in the City Centre. There is a lot to attract visitors from other parts of Ireland and from abroad (who rate culture and history much higher than shopping in all surveys): a site where an actual battle took place, where the HQ of the Rising was relocated for two days, where 150 men and women fought the last days of a rising against the largest empire the world has seen and against the butchery of World War and where at last they surrendered. A street and lane-ways where civilians and Volunteers were shot down and where no less than five of the seven signatories of the Proclamation spent their last days of freedom.
Conserving and regenerating the Moore Street Quarter could also contribute to the regeneration of the north city centre as a whole, especially at night. Shopping centres might look busy in the day but at night they are wastelands.
I fully agree that the street should be leveled and regenerated.
Alas the State would have to pay compensation to the large number of illegal cigarette/tobacco vendors. Judging by the amount of sellers and the brisk trade they do, the compensation would run into the €millions.
The law is an ass:
It is hard to believe you can bury your head in the sand regarding the cigarette and tobacco sales that are costing the state and me the taxpayer billions over the years.
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