Senator Jillian van Turnhout Statement on Adoption 24 January 2014 I recently saw the film Philomena in my local cinema.

It tells a personal story about a sorry chapter in Irish history where babies and children were sent to America, but in fact were sold to good Catholic families for a better life. I do not think anyone who has seen the film was not angered and saddened by the Son Michaels (originally named Anthony) fruitless attempts to uncover his identity. While this shameful legacy that prevailed until the early 1970s is no longer a feature of adoption in Ireland, the fact that we have approximately 50,000 adopted people with no automatic legal right to their birth certificate, medical information or history, and no legal right to tracing information about their identity is a serious concern to me. The reason this information is not automatically available to adopted people is because Ireland has a closed adoption system. This means that where a child is adopted by another family the record of the biological parent/s is kept sealed. For me, this system supports the misconception that adoption is the right of adults who wish to have a child, rather than the right of a child who is in need of a permanent alternative family arrangement. I favour an open system of adoption whereby the biological and adoptive families have access to varying degrees of each others personal information and have an option of contact. In my experience children can cope and distinguish in these scenarios. It is us adults who tie ourselves in knots. The open system of adoption is much more appropriate to applying the best interests of the child to individual cases. It would also be compatible with Irelands international legal obligations to children to ensure their right to identity, preservation of their identity and contact with their parent/s. Aspects will inevitably need to be addresses at Constitutional level. I called for the right to identity to be addressed by the Childrens Referendum back in October 2012. I feel it was a missed opportunity.