The recently published DNA Working Group Final Report considers the use of DNA testing in tracing under the Birth Information and Tracing Act 2022, including the role of commercial genetic genealogy services. The report’s recommendations will inform how DNA and information generated through genetic genealogy are approached within statutory tracing services. The following are preliminary observations rather than a considered response. However, there are several aspects of the report that raise immediate concern.

One thing that is immediately apparent is the composition of the Working Group itself. The report indicates that it comprised representatives of the Adoption Authority, Tusla and the Adoption Policy Unit at the Department of Children, Disability and Equality. There is no indication that affected people were involved in the Group or consulted as part of its work. This is a significant omission, particularly given that the report makes assessments about the possible personal and relational consequences of DNA discoveries and the kinds of support people may require. The Clann Project has been raising concerns since the legislation was progressing through the Oireachtas about the exclusion of affected people from the Birth Information and Tracing Act Implementation Group, which continues to be the case.

Some of the assumptions underpinning the discussion of commercial genetic genealogy, particularly those concerning affected people raise further significant concern. The report refers, for example, to information coming to light through DNA testing as potentially ‘rewriting’ a person’s family narrative, negatively affecting personal relationships or affecting ‘the stability of their family’. This kind of conjecture is a deeply inappropriate (not to mention inaccurate) way to frame access to information about a person’s own familial relationships. It appears to position the acquisition of such knowledge as a potential source of disruption to an existing family order, rather than asking what it means for people to have been denied, or to have had limited access to, knowledge about their own origins and familial relationships in the first place. It also fails to recognise what we have seen in practice: in many cases, when families learn of the existence of a previously unknown relative, it is an overwhelmingly positive development. That doesn’t mean that such discoveries can never be complex or require sensitive handling, but complexity is not the same thing as harm or family instability. Moreover, affected people are more adept than most at understanding how to approach these situations.

This situation is particularly concerning given that affected people do not appear to have been involved in the Working Group. Simply put, professional judgements about what constitutes risk, stability and appropriate support are being used in this report to define the impact and meaning of discoveries made using DNA services on behalf of the people most affected. Given the history of adoption in Ireland, and the longstanding role of the State and adoption professionals in controlling access to information and mediating familial relationships, considerably greater care is required here.

The report’s treatment of information generated by people themselves through commercial genetic genealogy is also deeply troublesome. The report acknowledges that people undertake their own research and that the information they obtain can assist a statutory trace. However, that information is then subject to assessment by the tracing body as to its relevance, while the recommendations envisage the Adoption Authority and Tusla determining the information and ‘weight of evidence’ required to establish a match. One-to-one DNA testing is presented as a means of providing institutional certainty where other evidence is considered insufficient.

An apparent hierarchy of knowledge is being created here. Information about their own familial relationships generated by affected people outside the statutory service may be useful, but it is the statutory bodies that ultimately determine whether that information is sufficiently credible to be acted upon. There seems to be very little consideration of the considerable expertise that affected people themselves have developed in genetic genealogy and tracing (indeed, they frequently beat State services to the post), or of why people have turned to these services in the first place, including where official records are incomplete, inaccurate or simply do not provide the answers they are seeking. Moreover, the fact that information has been generated outside a statutory tracing process should not, in itself, make it subordinate to information generated or validated by a State body. The Working Group would have benefited considerably from engaging with people who actually use these technologies and taking seriously the knowledge and expertise they have developed through doing so.

Finally, the recommendations also raise significant concerns. These will directly inform practices that impact people’s lives and familial relationships, yet affected people appear to have had no involvement in developing them, as evidenced in the report’s framing of affected people. In this context, Recommendation 6, which proposes that the State provide information to applicants about how they might ‘prepare for contact with birth relatives’ is particularly alarming. This is especially striking given the assumptions made about affected people elsewhere in the report and its earlier distinction between the ‘enthusiastic, family researcher’ engaged in genealogical exploration and an affected person seeking information about and contact with their own relatives. The former is apparently understood as someone simply pursuing a legitimate personal interest; the latter is repeatedly positioned as requiring professional support and preparation for the possible consequences of doing something substantially similar.

There is a long history in Irish adoption practice of State and professional involvement extending beyond the provision of information or practical assistance into the management of how adopted people approach and conduct their own familial relationships. Unfortunately it appears that this dynamic is being reproduced here. Adults seeking information about and contact with their own relatives should not, simply by virtue of having been affected by adoption, be constituted as a distinctive population requiring management and preparation by the State for relationships that other adults are permitted to navigate for themselves.

Unfortunately, the key takeaway from this initial reading is that while the legislative landscape may have changed significantly with the enactment of the Birth Information and Tracing Act, many of the same outdated assumptions about affected people seem to persist and find their way into adoption practice.