Children’s Minister Frances Fitzgerald’s recent proposal to give adopted people greater access to information about their biological parents is a genuinely good idea. If they don’t run afoul of the constitutional right to privacy, Minister Fitzgerald’s proposals could end up 

So I’m curious as to why the same government currently advocating common-sense reforms helping many adoptees to trace their roots and discover their origins.

Minister Fitzgerald acknowledges (as, I hope, would most people) that forced adoptions were a terrible idea. Deliberately depriving a child of its biological parents is wrong. Even in standard adoption cases, we acknowledge that children have a right to know where they came from, where possible.like these, which acknowledge the importance of the natural ties, is simultaneously planning to pass a family law bill that almost completely ignores them?

But Justice Minister Alan Shatter’s proposed Family and Relationships Bill repeats all the mistakes of the past, but this time in the context of egg and sperm donation, and surrogacy.

Shatter’s bill will allow adults to ‘commission’ a child (the word the legislation uses) through surrogacy. Assuming all parties stick to the agreement, the child will then be deprived of any relationship with their birth mother (and possibly with the genetic mother too, if both egg donation and surrogacy are used). This isn’t like voluntary adoption, which is an attempt to provide a child with parents when their biological mother and father are dead or unable to raise them.

No, this is much more like forced adoption, where a group of adults decide to exclude a child’s natural mother or father by design. Not every surrogacy or gamete donation case will involve this, but there’s nothing in Shatter’s legislation to prevent it happening.

Shatter’s bill doesn’t even go as far as to give children of egg or sperm donation a right to know who their parents are. When asked about anonymous gamete donation on the Sean O’Rourke programme *Link*, Minister Shatter said that it was “a matter for the Department of Health”. If he was inclined to ban anonymous donation, it surely would have been a matter for the Justice Department – the fact that he’s kicking it over to James Reilly at Health is not a good sign.

Ministers Shatter, Fitzgerald, and Reilly need to sit down, have a long conversation, and start employing some joined-up thinking.