THERE are legal difficulties in getting full access by interested parties to the foreign adoption files discovered in the national archives, the House was told.

The Minister of State, Mr Emmet Stagg, said preliminary legal advice indicated that there were impediments to making information on specific cases available to voluntary agencies. However, the possibility was being explored of releasing information to the individuals concerned with the permission of the persons to whom it directly related.

He added that legal advice on access to information was being sought by the Tanaiste, Mr Spring, and the Minister for Health, Mr Noonan.

Mr Stagg was replying, on the adjournment to Ms Frances Fitzgerald (FG, Dublin South East) who said the discovery of the files, taken with other cases, revealed the hidden side of Irishwomen's lives in particular. It was a society where people who did not fit into rigid roles were hidden away.

But, she added, it had to be acknowledged that many of the religious orders tried to provide what the civil authorities were not providing care and attention for many of the people who ended up in care.

Mr Stagg, who was deputising for the Tanaiste, said the treatment of children born outside of what was the conventional relationship was difficult to reconcile with a State founded on the principle of cherishing all of the children of the nation equally.

"It is also hard to reconcile it with our image of ourselves as a caring, and compassionate society.

He said it appeared that the great majority of foreign adoptions were undertaken by US based parents. Some files related to other countries such as Canada, Great Britain and South Africa, and a small number related to the adoption by Irish people living in Ireland of foreign children. Most adoptions appeared to have taken place in the 1950s.

Each file contained the name of the birth mother, the name and date of the birth of her child, the name of the adoption agency and its representatives, and the name and details of the adoptive parents. There was little detail of the birth mother and child apart from the birth mother's declaration of "surrender" of the child to the adoption agency.

There were no copies of the children's birth or baptismal certificates. The mothers appeared to be generally young and from different parts of the country, and the children seemed to have been adopted at age one or two. Some mothers appeared to have remained with their children until or near the time of adoption.

The file series continued until 1983, but the last adoption recorded of an Irish child by a foreign couple appeared to be 1972.

In a written reply to Ms Fitzgerald, the Tanaiste said most of the children seem to have been under the care of religious sisters in adoption societies throughout the country, and their legal guardians were the sisters in charge.

The files looked at contained little or no information about the circumstances in which the mothers made their sworn statements surrendering the children nor the way in which they were obtained.