Sir, – I salute Eamon McGrane (Home News, February 7th), for sharing his story. As an adopted person I relate strongly to it.
Ireland is a changed place, different from the closed, secret and shameful society that forced single mothers into giving up their children for adoption, sent women to Magdalene Laundries, locked children up in industrial schools. It is time to embrace all those women who gave birth, who brought us into the world, then gave us as a gift to another family. It is time to thank them and to apologise for how they were treated.
Opening up files and records is not a threat to their privacy – it is about providing adopted people with information that is rightfully ours. This information is about our identity and origins and is to be treasured and treated with care and respect. The inalienable right of adopted people to access their own records which has long been effectively denied by the State, does not infringe upon the rights of our birth mothers not to be contacted if that is what they wish. – Yours, etc,
HILARY MINCH,
Summercove,
Kinsale, Co Cork.