Report calls for a referendum to give adoptees the right to files about their birth
IRELAND should hold a referendum to give adoptees the right to access their birth information, according to the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes.
But the Government claimed that a referendum was not required, and that it could legislate to give people access to their birth records under GDPR. People who were adopted from the deeply controversial religious institutions have repeatedly criticised the State for not granting them the right to access their correct birth records.
In a wide-ranging report published yesterday, the commission said: “Many adopted people think there is considerably more information about them in institutional and other records than is actually the case”. It said that while the information available was “very limited”, this was not relevant “to the issue of whether or not there should be a right of access”.
While the issue has been considered since the 1990s, it has never been legislated for. The commission said the Attorney General had advised it would be unconstitutional to allow “unrestricted access to birth information for adopted people”.
“The commission considers that there should be such a right even though it is acutely conscious of the concerns expressed by some birth mothers about this. If, as seems likely, a referendum is required to allow for the necessary legislation, then one should be held,” the report said.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin said his Government believed it would be able to pass an adoption and tracing bill without needing to hold a referendum. Mr Martin said such a law could be passed in line with GDPR.
Caitríona Palmer, an adoptee and journalist based in the US, said that, despite being an Irish citizen, she still cannot access her birth records.
She said Ireland’s proposed adoption legislation was “blocking Irish adoptees rights to basic information, such as a birth certificate and early-life files”.
“The Irish State demonises adoptees as a threat to their natural parents’ wellbeing and keeps them, in the interests of Catholic ‘respectability’, shut out from the facts of their own life. Thousands of Irish adoptees simply want to know their own story, and yet they are infantilised, pathologised, and ostracised, excluded from a closed bureaucratic system that insists on silence and that remains indifferent to human suffering,” Ms Palmer said.
“A dedicated independent archive of institutional and care-related records must be established to give explicit rights of access to personal files for all those who were institutionalised in any setting, to all adopted people and others put in informal care, and for all parents whose children were taken from them.”
A collaborative forum on mother and baby homes, which includes former residents of the institutions, compiled a separate report that harshly criticised Tusla’s handling of survivors’ data and said the State agency should be “ruled out” of managing a database of information from the homes. The Commission appeared to reject this criticism from former residents.
“Tusla is implementing the law and has no choice about doing so. The problem is not with Tusla, it is with the law. Any other agency providing information and tracing services would be in the same position,” the commission said.