Adoption Bill privacy concerns remain

CHILDREN’S Minister Katherine Zappone said she hopes to overcome the concerns over parent’s right to privacy in the Adoption Bill when she meets this week with the Attorney General.

Concerns about the parent’s right to privacy has been one of the key delays to the Adoption (Information and Tracing) Bill, which would grant adopted people easier access to information about their birth parents.

Ms Zappone is set to meet with the Attorney General and his team to try to work out a balance. ‘I am going to be meeting with the Attorney General and his officials this week and I intend to meet with the Opposition members subsequent to that before we continue our drafting of the committee amendments – as I said we would,’ she told the Irish Daily Mail.

In the Bill, the adopted person is being asked to agree to an undertaking ‘not to contact or attempt to contact his/her birth parent or not to ask anyone else to make or attempt to make contact on his/her behalf unless the birth parent is deceased or is seeking to have contact with or willing to be contacted by the adopted person’.

Ms Zappone said she is hopeful they can resolve the privacy issues without violating the Constitution.

‘I am very much hoping so. I have sent a letter to [the Attorney General] and I have outlined my views and position and reasons for us moving forward in relation to that.

‘We are in a new time, a new era, the Constitution is a living document, as I know,’ she said.