Bastard Nation: the Adoptee Rights Organization
PO Box 4607
New Windsor, New York 12553-7845
bastards.org 614-795-6819 @BastardsUnite
October 14, 2020
Dear Tds and Senators:
Bastard Nation: the Adoptee Rights Organization is the largest adoptee civil rights organization in the United States. We support only full unrestricted access for all adopted persons, to their original birth certificates and related documents. Our members include adopted persons who were born under the Mother and Baby Homes system, survived and were sent to the US. For 20 years we have supported their fight for justice for themselves and their families
Commission of Investigation of Mother and Baby Homes and Certain Related Matters Records Bill 2020 is not a “safeguard”
We are alarmed at the Commission of Investigation of Mother and Baby Homes and Certain Related Matters Records Bill 2020 currently being fast-tracked. The bill allows for the transfer, without keeping a copy, of some Commission’s records to TUSLA while the rest of the records, including the personal records of individuals and information on how the system of forced family separation operated, will be retained by the Minister’s archive and sealed.
The bill, promoted as a “safeguard, is in fact, about “who controls your information.” It is a blatant attempt to continue to protect the perpetrators of crimes against mothers and babies long consigned to anonymous exile and graves. These victims of forced family separation, church-state control, and anonymous death and burial are not, as some apparently hope, out of sight out of mind. They are real.
Survivors and families need and deserve the facts. The Records Bill 2020 scheme to split-and-seal records continues the systemic abuse, lies, and coverup. The bill tells survivors and family members–and the abused and dead— that their lives don’t count. Records Bill 2000 is not a safeguard. It is an erasure.
Records Bill 2020 as written, creates a gross human rights violation that the Republic’s lawmakers much less the Irish public should not condone and support.
Contradictions and Unpredictability
The bill contradicts current policies and promises:
- The 2019 Retention of Records Bill, which proposed sealing all records in the Ryan Commission’s archive for at least 75 years (even from survivors themselves) was found to be unacceptable.
- Bill 2020 breaks promises made just a couple of weeks ago by the Information Commissioner that all records would be made available to the parties to whom they pertain.
- Bill 2020 itself demonstrates that it is possible for the Oireachtas to ‘unseal’ the Commission’s archive if it wants to, since TULSA is already authorized to retain records and in theory, at least, give those records to the people to whom they pertain.
- The Information Commissioner found recently that the Department of the Taoiseach was acting unlawfully by claiming that it is holding the McAleese archive of state records on the Magdalene Laundries ‘for safekeeping’, rather than allowing access to the records under Freedom of Information.
TUSLA itself, however, is unreliable and biased, and in our opinion, not qualified to maintain records. It defines an adopted person’s birth name as “third party data” erasing them from their own adoption, and investigates the “risk assessment” of all adopted people who request access to their own records. TUSLA pathologizes adoptees and clearly sees us as dangerous and a threat to someone or something,
Moreover, the Collaborative Forum of Former Residents of Mother and Baby Homes, established to advise the government on access repeatedly advises that TUSLA should have no further role in adoption information and search. The number of complaints regarding TUSLA’s interference with records access is staggering and reported frequently by the Irish and even international press.
Support for Recommendations
This state secrecy must stop. This gross abuse of civil and human rights must stop.
Bastard National agrees with the Adoptee Rights Coalition and other Irish activists that Records Bill 2020 needs fixed immediately. We back the following statements from them:
- The Bill is amended so that the Minister takes custody of the whole archive and provides immediate access for affected individuals and families to all records concerning them or their disappeared relatives once he receives the records. In fact, this is currently required by Section 43 of the Commissions of Investigation Act 2004 and Section 198 of the Data Protection Act 2018.
- The Government commits to establishing a dedicated archive at Sean McDermott Street to provide national education and truth-telling regarding all connected forms of ‘historical’ institutional and adoption-based abuses. Administrative records can be anonymised as necessary to protect survivors, adopted people, natural mothers and relatives. Individuals should be entitled to voluntarily deposit their testimony.
The sealing of Commission records is a horrible abuse of the human rights of multiple thousands of victims of forced family separation in the past and currently—the living and the dead. Do not erase their experience, their names, their lives. Make all records available to all affected parties without restriction.
Yours truly,
Marley Greiner
Executive Chair
