Ms Catherine Hynes:

The winning design was only suitable for a particular site, that is the Garden of Remembrance. We had an excellent memorial committee chaired by Sean Benton. After the planning process there was a final report, one of the suggestions in which was to hold negotiations with Dublin City Council to see if there were alternative sites but none was possible because of the fact that the original design was site-specific. The winning design followed a protracted international competition but the memorial committee considered that only one of the designs submitted was suitable to be built. There was no need for a second round and no other design was even ranked in second place. We considered running another international competition but it would have been another four-year process and we decided our energies would be better directed towards looking at alternatives. We looked at a permanent exhibition to tell the stories of survivors as a permanent memorial to what happened to people who lived in institutional care in Ireland. Our next step will be to see if the memorial committee would be interested in exploring this possibility.