CLAIMS that religious and other institutions illegally provided false names for the birth certificates of so called illegitimate children were supported last night by the Adoption Board.
The board has called for birth records and counselling to be offered to adopted people and birth parents who cannot contact each bother because of the practice.
The Fine Gael TD and family lawyer, Mr Alan Shatter, has called on the Minister for Health to establish a national contact register immediately.
The practice came to light when Ms Norah Gibbons of Barnardos said attempts to establish the origins of children sent to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s were hampered in some cases because their birth certificates carried false names.
Ms Gibbons said yesterday that the practice also affected many adopted people in Ireland. In some cases pregnant mothers arriving at mother and child homes run by religious orders were given new names on arrival.
"They were told you are Mary Murphy," she said.
A Munster solicitor who did not want to be identified because his wife is adopted said he had seen a register with his wife's original name crossed out and a false name written in.
Sister Gabriel, of Saint Patrick's Guild, one of the country's main adoption societies, said she had come across false names on birth certificates on occasions. She assumed the false information had been given by the mothers. We would never have had any experience in registering births," she said. The false names sometimes made it impossible to trace the birth mothers, she said.
Ms Gibbons said she believed that in some instances the adoption societies had the original information containing the correct names of children and their parents but were unwilling to provide it.
Mr Shatter said the Minister for Health should establish whether the adoption societies had this information.
The Adoption Board said "The board is aware from inquiries received from adoptees and birth parents that in some instances the births of children born to single mothers were ink correctly registered. Some children were registered by their birth mothers or institutions under assumed names. Other were registered directly under the names of the married couple in whose care they were placed.
"This was and remains illegal. The board is aware of the distress caused to birth parents and adoptees who cannot now identify each other."
The way forward, it said, was through "access to birth records, the establishment of a national contact register and the availability of necessary counselling."
Ms Gibbons said Barnardos was being contacted by birth mothers who gave false names under pressure years ago and who now want to contact their children.
A contact register should be set up and should encompass children adopted and those raised in care, she said.
The Adoption Board yesterday said no statistics were available as to how many Irish children were sent to the United States in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. The board was not involved, it said, and no statistics were available. Sister Gabriel said her society placed about 400 Irish children in the United States.
The Minister of State for Health, Mr Austin Currie, said in a statement yesterday that the question of an adopted person's right of access to his or her original birth records would be considered in the context of a commitment in the Department's health strategy "to introduce changes in adoptive law and procedure to provide arrangements to facilitate contact between adopted persons and their birth parents."