LEGISLATION to allow the children of married parents to be adopted is being prepared, according to Minister for Children Frances Fitzgerald.
She told The Irish Timesher department was working on adoption legislation to accompany the children's rights referendum.
“In Ireland historically there were a large number of children who might have been adopted but couldn’t be for constitutional reasons. Many were in very good foster homes where the foster parents wanted to adopt them,” she said.
“There will be a new situation if people pass the referendum,” she added.
Currently the adoption of the children of married parents is only possible where the parents have been found legally to have failed, or to be likely to fail, in their duties towards the child. This is not the case with the adoption of the children of unmarried parents, who can be voluntarily given up for adoption by their mother.
This means a woman who feels she is unable, for health or other reasons, to parent her child, and who is married to the father of the child who is, for example, in prison serving a long sentence, cannot opt to have the child adopted.
Ms Fitzgerald also said she is considering asking people seeking assessment for suitability for inter-country adoption to pay some of the cost of the assessment. This would facilitate the outsourcing of the assessments to non-governmental agencies.
At the moment these assessments are carried out by the HSE, which has been widely criticised by prospective adoptive parents for lengthy delays in carrying them out. The Adoption Act 2010 allows for the accrediting of outside agencies to do this work, and so far the Adoption Authority has accredited three. However, the HSE has so far not referred any applications to the agencies.
Ms Fitzgerald said the number of people applying for assessments had fallen significantly, delays had been greatly reduced as a result and the number of social workers involved had halved. “In general there is no waiting time for a second assessment [for those seeking to adopt a second child] across the HSE and in the wider Dublin area there is no waiting time for a first or second assessment,” she said.
When the assessment agencies were accredited it was envisaged the HSE would pay them for assessments, freeing up social workers for frontline work. She said the organisation’s head of childcare, Gordon Jeyes, was considering resource issues and a central part of this was whether applicants for adoption assessments should contribute to the cost, provided access and equity could be guaranteed.