Welcome Minister.
Welcome visitors to the gallery.
I wish to thank Senator Averil Power for her tremendous work initiating the Bill and to Senator Fidelma Healy Eames for joining with us in bringing it forward.
A special thanks to Dr Fergus Ryan, law lecturer who drafted the Bill.
Thank you to so many of my colleagues who have spoken with me over the past two weeks and shared their stories and why they support this Bill.
I feel very strongly about the Bill and it is a real honour to second it in the House today.
There are a number of salient parts to the Bill, which my colleague Senator Power has already outlined and you will also hear shortly from Senator Healy Eames, who brings to the process her experience as an adoptive parent.
My intervention will focus on a critical component which is all too readily brushed aside diminished or dismissed… this is the right to identity.
In 1976, Alex Haley, author of Roots, articulated what so many adopted people in Ireland have described to me over the years, when he said “In all of us, there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning . . . and the most disquieting loneliness.”
The right to know who you are is so fundamental, so necessary and so basic. Its absence can be a source of considerable pain and anguish. Its absence, where the necessary information exists but is being withheld, can leave people with a feeling of deep injury and injustice.
By focusing on the right to identity I in no way wish to undermine or diminish the identity that an adopted person has developed in their life with their adopted parents and families.
There are many adopted people who have no desire whatsoever to access their birth information.
However, there are many for whom the information is a burning need.
I have spoken in this House on several occasions about forced and illegal adoption. All too often we have cloaked adoption in secrecy and as a society we have been complicit in supressing women, their children and their respective rights.
A startling figure by Claire McGettrick of the Adoptions Rights Alliance that in 1967, a staggering 96.95% of all children born outside marriage were adopted, typifies this.
We cannot allow our shameful past or fear that further shames may be exposed justify the perpetuation of a shameful practice against at least 50,000 people in Ireland. And yet we do?
This is why the Bill is so necessary, so important and indeed so overdue.
We need to fundamentally reconsider how we approach adoption in Ireland. Our current system of closed adoptions, which automatically extinguishes a child’s and then adult’s right to their identity, will ideally be changed to an open system where biological and adoptive families have access to varying degrees of each other’s personal information and have an option of contact from the outset.
In the meantime, this Bill will ensure, however retrospectively, the adopted person’s right to identity.
We are here on the eve of the 25th Anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. How fitting it will be if we can give life to the Convention’s express recognition of a child’s right to know and preserve his or her identity
This has been the law in Scotland since 1930 and in England and Wales since the mid-70s with no dire consequences or legal wrangling over rights to privacy.
According to the Supreme Court in I’OT v B, an adoptee’s right to their identity is not absolute and is subject, in particular, to the right to privacy of the natural parent. However, it also pointed out that the right to privacy does not automatically trump the right to identity. The court stated that the two rights must be balanced against each other. It is clear from Supreme Court decisions such as Tuohy v Courtney [1994] 3 IR 1 that the precise balance to be struck is a matter for the Oireachtas to determine. This bill achieves that balance in a way that is sensitive to the needs of all parties.
We must let in the light; we must start now in a new era of openness and understanding. We should not stand in judgement and I believe that this Bill strikes the balance, mooted by the Supreme Court, as longed for by many adopted people, their families and their friends.
Let’s do this. Let’s do this now.