She was speaking in Boston at a conference on transitional justice and Irish institutional abuse.
She said the Adoption (Information and Tracing) Bill before the Dáil is built on the presumption of a desire to share and grant access to information. However, she said that there are difficulties in granting unfettered access to adoption records because of the constitutional right to privacy of the natural mother.
This constitutional right is a barrier to adopted people getting full access to their birth record and information, she claimed.
She said she has worked with the Attorney General on the matter, and they had “come as far as we can”. “Taking the matter any further may need a constitutional referendum”, she said.
However, a lecturer in constitutional law commented that there is no need for a referendum.
In 1988, the Supreme Court ruled that the natural mother’s constitutional right to privacy had to be balanced against the adopted child’s constitutional right to identity.
Conor O’Mahony, a senior lecturer in constitutional law at University College Cork, has said that calls for a referendum do “not survive scrutiny”.
The Supreme Court judgment in 1998 left the issue open for the Oireachtas to legislate, he said. “There is simply no question of a constitutional impediment arising to the extent that a referendum is required to pave the way for reform,” he said.