The Irish Times view on the birth information Bill: the right to know

A law to enable adopted people access their birth certs and information about their early years has been many years in the making. Activists have been demanding one for much longer. So it is good news that the Government has published draft legislation that would allow an adopted person to access a full birth certificate, baptismal cert, information about their early childhood and medical records.

The failure for so long to vindicate the right to such basic personal information was a cruel insult to adopted people. If and when the Bill passes the Oireachtas – Minister for Children Roderic O'Gorman believes it could be enacted this year – a free tracing service will be set up to help people to find their family members. That will be a landmark for tens of thousands of people.

While the Bill addresses some of the concerns that campaigners voiced over previous iterations, questions will rightly be raised about certain provisions. For example, in cases where the mother does not wish to be contacted, the individual seeking their birth cert will have to take part in an information session, either in person or by phone, where the mother’s wish for privacy will be explained to them. This is an improvement on previous plans, which included criminal penalties and statutory declarations, but it still smacks of infantilisation. Do people really need the concept of privacy explained to them? The Government says it is attempting to balance the adopted person’s right to know with some mothers’ right to privacy, and it is indeed important that the latter right be upheld, but the claim that without this specific provision for an information session the legislation “may”, in O’Gorman’s words, be unconstitutional, sounds like a stretch.

Having come this far, it should be possible to remedy issues such as these and to get the Bill passed. The process that will then begin will not be easy; for some it will be very painful or will leave many questions unresolved. But the least the State can do is to give people the chance to seek an answer to that most fundamental human question: who am I?