Professor Ray Murphy:

I thank the Deputy for his question. At the outset I say “No”. The legislation is seriously deficient in a number of respects. Broadly speaking, it needs to be redrafted so that it has a clearer human rights and equality framework. In listing the more specific deficiencies that we have identified in our broader report, the 70-year time limit in the legislation should be removed or reconsidered because this could exclude any sites prior to 1950 from exhumations and that, at the outset, does not seem to be an appropriate way to proceed given the historical nature of the mass graves and the mother and baby homes.

The views of the survivors and family members must play a central role and must be enshrined in the legislation and that is not something that must be done just as a courtesy. They must be given this statutory right.

The coroner needs to have a recognised jurisdiction over burial sites and in the absence of the coroner having such jurisdiction, whatever is put in place has to be an effective mechanism to determine the cause of death. There has to be, and it is critical, as the previous session identified, that in order to comply with Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights there is an effective mechanism to investigate the cause and nature of the deaths.

In the agency being proposed in the legislation, it is important that it would be overseen by the Oireachtas rather than by the relevant Minister so that for transparency and openness purposes any reports made by the director of the agency on its work should be made to the Oireachtas as a whole.

Likewise, the remains and any personal artefacts should be returned to families and there should be a statutory obligation that unclaimed and unidentified remains should also be traceable. It will almost certainly be the case that there will be a large number of remains that may not be identified and, therefore, when these remains are being reinterred and buried with the dignity that was denied them in the first instance, it is critical that this be done in a methodical and organised way to, perhaps, allow in the future for those remains to be exhumed at a later stage, should the possibility of identification arise. Safeguards need to be taken around retention, storage, sharing and destruction of DNA and other records. We also want to ensure that the proposed pilot programme for identifying victims must not in any way interfere with the State’s obligation to make the best efforts to identify and return those found in mass graves to families. That is just an overview of some of the issues and the report is quite comprehensive in this regard.