IT is a year and three months since the Tanaiste made an admirable pledge concerning the export, up to the 1970s, of thousands of babies to adoptive parents in the United States. He said he hoped it would quickly be possible to make information available to people who wanted help in being reconciled and reunited. His statement brought great hope to adopted people and to their birth parents who have been denied information about their origins. The Tanaiste, so far as is known, has done nothing since then, nor has the Department of Health which apparently has been looking into this issue for over a year.
There is a special irony in the Tanaiste's inaction as he also presides over the Department of Foreign Affairs which, as the Department of External Affairs, was deeply implicated in the export of so called illegitimate babies from this State, a traffic based on the supposition that it was better to send them to Catholic families in the United States than to allow Protestant families to adopt them in Ireland. Perhaps one of the saddest signs of inaction was the announcement by Barnardo's that an extra counselling service, which it established last year in the wake of the controversy over American adoptions, must close it closed last Friday - because it cannot get the £20,000 grant for this service renewed.
It may be argued that birth mothers will suffer enormous distress in their lives if a past, which they have hidden, should come to light through the provision of, say, original birth certificates, to the children they gave up for adoption. Yet many European countries have given adopted people access to their adoption records for decades without tragic consequences. It may equally strongly be argued that birth mothers and adopted people suffer far more anguish from the present callous system of denying them information about each other than they would suffer if information was made available.
What should be done? First, there can be no reason for not creating an official contact register in which birth mothers and the adopted could enter their names if they wished to be contacted. The work of maintaining such a register could be contracted out to Barnardo's, a highly professional organisation which has won the trust and admiration of adopted people and birth parents alike. Second, a PostAdoption and Fostering Services Board, as recommended by the Adopted and Fostered Persons' Association of Ireland, should be established. The first task of such a board should be to work out and adopt a protocol for the provision of information to the adopted and birth mothers to enable them to make contact with each other.
Third, every person born in the State should be given a right to his or her original birth certificate. If it is thought that this should be accompanied by counselling, this could be administered by the PostAdoption and Fostering Services Board. These three steps, if taken, would do much to heal the hurt created by an intolerant society in the past, a society whose victims continue to suffer pain in the present.