NEW laws on the right of adopted people to see their birth records and to contact their natural parents are to be brought forward as a priority by the Government.
The Government is awaiting the outcome of a forthcoming Supreme Court case on the right of the adopted to information before it proceeds, but preparations for the new "legal framework" are well advanced, according to the Minister of State for Health Mr Austin Currie.
The undertaking follows yesterday's revelation that one of the State's main adoption societies, St Patrick's Guild, had given misleading information to an unknown number of adopted people.
The new director of St Patrick's Guild, Sister Francis Ignatius, yesterday appealed to birth mothers to write to the society with up to date information on their whereabouts. She promised they would not be contacted if they did not want to be.
She also denied that the guild had deliberately misled the adopted over the years, saying that The Irish Times had misrepresented a sentence in her previous statement in which she said that "in order to safeguard the mothers' identity it was necessary to disguise certain information".
However, more adopted people contacted The Irish Times yesterday to say that they had been given contradictory information about their origins by St Patrick's Guild.
In a statement yesterday, Mr Currie said: "The establishment of a new and comprehensive legal framework for post adoption contact between both parents and adopted persons and access to birth records is a priority of the Government.
"It is the intention that the necessary enabling legislation will be brought forward as quickly as possible after a number of legal and constitutional issues have been clarified."
Mr Currie told The Irish Times that within the next few months the Supreme Court was expected to rule on the right of the adopted to information about their origins in cases where birth parents do not wish to be contacted.
It seemed sensible, he said, to await the outcome of the case.
He said he would shortly make an announcement on the establishment of a contact register in which birth parents and adopted people could indicate that they wished to contact each other.
The Adopted and Fostered Persons' Association of Ireland called on the State and the Adoption Board to see to it that "all files held by St Patrick's Guild and other agencies should immediately be copied and put into safe. hands".
It also called for the status of St Patrick's Guild as an adoption society to be revoked.