An independent statutory body should be established to deal with the needs of adult adopted people, a Dail committee was told yesterday. The Adopted People's Association said the existing services were "ad hoc and unsatisfactory."
There are 18 agencies, each with differing codes of practice, Ms Patricia Murray of the APA told the Joint Committee on Health and Children. The APA is calling for a post-adoption services board, to provide a "professionally structured, coherent and equitable system" to ensure adopted people got information about their origins. The board would consider birth parents' and children's requests for information about their birth relations in order to reunite them if possible, Ms Murray said.
Legislation should deter the use of private detectives to locate birth parents and children. Detectives were often "insensitive and exploitative" of birth mothers and sometimes introduced children to their wrong birth parents, she said. There had been situations where there had been "people standing crying at the wrong graves."