Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputies Boyd Barrett and Clare Daly.

I welcome the publication of the interdepartmental report, which is very much a Civil Service report. I understand it will be a help in forming the terms of reference, but that is all it will be and there will have to be significant political input. I also welcome the fact we have been continually briefed. It is very important that the scope will be wide enough. I understand it must be focused, but it must also be wide enough in order that we do not require further reports. We have had the Ryan, Ferns and McAleese reports, and it is quite damaging to society that we must continually go back. The terms of reference for this must be ambitious to deal with these legacy issues once and for all. It must be powerful and the terms of reference must be very well considered. We are all capable of giving it time to ensure we get this part of it right.

Many countries successfully come from a dark past. Most of these were brutal totalitarian regimes, but our regime was pretty brutal. We need to be courageous and confront the legacy. The Minister is right to speak about looking at society, as it is very important that we have context, although it also translates to current culture. We need to be quite courageous in confronting the legacy of the brutality, misogyny, violence and abuse which appear to have infested the first decades following independence. As we know, it was mostly women and children who were the unfortunate victims. We speak about survivors, and if one happened to be born to an unmarried woman, one had to survive the State.

The Tuam report has prompted this action. What is quite shocking is the statistic in the document produced and published yesterday that of the 1,101 births in the home, 796 died there. I still find it quite difficult to accept the method of burial as it was relayed in the media. Yesterday, remains were unearthed outside Trinity College. We are not sure whether they are human remains, but one can see the difference between the approach taken there and the approach in Tuam, where there is something less than a cemetery. For me it is a potential crime scene and I do not understand why, so many weeks later, we are flailing around on the issue.

We have a tendency to work backwards from problems, and the UN report mentions that redress looks back, rather than putting in place systems to ensure they do not happen again.

Those lessons have to be learned from this because there are current lessons also.

The cost will tell us a lot when it comes to that projection into the future. It will be essential that sufficient resources are put in place to have an archive that is properly resourced and properly run. When we consider how under-resourced the National Archives of Ireland is, it will not be possible to do that there.

I am dealing with a person who is a survivor of the Magdalen laundries. She has been through the whole process and because the records do not support what she is saying, the institution's records are what are believed. Going through that has been a really damaging experience for her. We need to think that kind of thing through. We cannot afford to add further damage by not dealing with the record aspect in a comprehensive way because that is what will allow people to put the jigsaw puzzle together for themselves.

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