CHILDRENS MINISTER Barry Andrews has told an international conference that the Health Service Executive (HSE) is to hand over the responsibility for assessing adoption requests to new independent bodies.
At the International Adoption Association conference at the Carlton Hotel at Dublin Airport, Andrews said transferring the responsibility for assessing applications to adopt would allow the HSE to concentrate on child protection and family support work.
The changes will come into effect next month on foot of the enactment of the Adoption Act, passed by the Oireachtas on July 2 and signed by President McAleese on the 14th of that month.
The Act – which comes into effect on November 1 – concluded Ireland’s ratification of the Hague Convention of Inter-Country Adoptions, which requires each signatory state to establish an adoption authority.
The Irish Times reports that the Adoption Authority created under the act will be chaired by Geoffrey Shannon, who currently fulfils the same role at the Adoption Board
The enforcement of the act will mean, however, that Ireland – as a signatory to the convention – can only allow its citizens to adopt from other signatory states unless they have been given approval to adopt from elsewhere before November 1, when the new rules take effect.
As a result, Irish people will not be able to adopt children from countries including Vietnam, Russia and Ethiopia – none of which have yet signed up to the international agreement.
Andrews told the conference, however, that he was currently in negotiations with Russia in an attempt to reach a bilateral agreement on adoption from that country. He could not negotiate with Ethiopia, he said, because his office was only equipped to deal with one country at a time.
While South Africa – another country yet to sign up to the Hague Convention – was not interested in reaching a similar agreement at the moment, Andrews said the Vietnamese parliament was making progress in signing up to the convention in its own right, thus allowing Irish couples to adopt from that country once again.
Negotiations on a similar bilateral treaty with Vietnam had broken down in January, which led to Ireland having to bar adoptions from that country as it was unable to guarantee certain safeguards. 60% of overseas adoptions by Irish people before the ban were from Vietnam.
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