Sir, - The so-called groundbreaking legislation on postadoption contact announced this week by Ms Mary Hanafin offers little advancement to the thousands of adult adopted people seeking information on their parentage.
Our new "rights" to our original birth certificates and non-identifying personal information are almost meaningless as the former can be readily obtained after some basic detective work and the latter (when available) has since the 1980s been revealed to adult adopted people by agencies who have embraced "good practice" principles.
The Minister and her Department are also well aware that in the vast majority of cases, the natural father's name is absent from our birth certificates and only the mother's is shown. In a weak attempt to defend her Department's failure to legislate for full disclosure of all adoption files, the Minister has sought to defend the natural fathers' rights to privacy. Ironically, only a tiny minority of natural fathers were ever consulted over their children's adoptions and so had neither verbal nor written guarantees on the question of privacy. Conversely, however she seems unconcerned about the natural mothers' same rights and equally unworried about adopted people's rights to identify their natural fathers and establish their lineage.
The Minister will also know that most adoption files contain scant medical information as the early practitioners in the adoption field attached little or no value to an adopted person's original background and many failed to collect data in the first instance.
The legislation's proposed voluntary contact register, state funded counselling service and state-funded tracing and reunion service, did at first glance appear to offer access to the information we so desperately seek. But on closer examination, they are exposed as raising more issues than they attempt to resolve.
Who will determine what tracing methods are used? How will the new Adoption Authority's effectiveness in tracing be measured? Will the authority have sufficient staff with appropriate training? Will adopted people seeking older natural parents get priority when the service becomes available? Will natural mothers who exercise their contact veto be pursued for information on their child's natural father? Where natural mothers cannot be contacted, will files be handed over to the adopted person seeking information ?
The legislation appears in spirit to have ignored those of us who were careless enough to have been born to now deceased, uncommunicative or untraceable mothers. We are utterly reliant on the contents of agency files to identify our ever-ageing natural fathers and extended families to establish our sense of self and family. The European Commission of Human Rights recognises our "right to establish and develop relationships with other human beings, especially in the emotional field for the development and fulfilment of one's own personality"; tragically, this legislation does not.
I suggest to Ms Hanafin that while her Government continues to delay enactment of this essential legislation, its members should reflect on Swift's Modest Proposal. They can consider that, had his proposal been acted upon, she and her colleagues, rather than legislating for basic human rights, could have instead devoted themselves to their heartfelt issues - rock concerts, State bashes for Catholic cardinals, amnesties for tax frauds, tribunals without outcomes, etc., etc. And we adopted people, like Swift, would be in that place where savage indignation could no longer pierce our hearts. - Yours, etc.,
Susan Lohan, (nee Elizabeth MacGinley), Killyon Road, Clapham, London SW8.