Robbie Gallagher (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I would like to thank Mr. Cronin, Dr. Lodato and those with them for being here this morning and for sharing their experience with us. I find the entire presentation very depressing and heartbreaking. For what it is worth, I offer my deepest sympathy to the witnesses and all survivors. Some of my colleagues have touched on some of the subject matter that I was going to talk about. As I listened to the contributions, I was reminded in many ways of our leaders in these Houses, and how the media give great praise when our politicians and leaders stand up and apologise, and rightly so, for past wrongs. The media cover that and give it a great platform, which is only right. Sometimes, however, the words are not backed up by actions, and this is another example of that. We are very quick to clap ourselves on the back when it comes to social changes and we have had a welcome number of them in recent times in our country. We can stand up in these Houses and tell the world how we are the leading lights when it comes to these issues.

On the other hand, there is evidence to the contrary, which we listened to this morning and which was laid out in great detail. The witnesses are at a crossroads. Mr. Cronin said that he has been on this road for more than 20 years. It has come to a point where the State is either serious about tackling and addressing this issue, and undoing this wrong, or it is not. The evidence to date, unfortunately, would indicate that so far, and I hope this changes, the intent has not been there, or to my eyes anyway. If we are serious about getting to the bottom of it and addressing it, somebody needs to lead on this. The most important people we have to listen to are the survivors. Unless we are serious about that, we may park this process and stop fooling people that we are serious about trying to address it. That is the first thing. Somebody needs to lead this process and somebody needs to have the intent to address the issue once and for all, and put whatever measures are practical and reasonable and which satisfy the survivors in that process.

The first thing that must be done is to lance this boil, to get that hurt out. As far as I am concerned, the survivors are the stakeholders in this process. Unless it addresses what they are hoping to achieve, this train will never leave the station. We have been parked at the station for a long time now.

Do we have any idea how many survivors we are talking about here? Do we have any idea where they are all located, in different parts of the world? Deputy Catherine Martin made the point earlier that for those who were unfortunate enough to go abroad and live their lives as best they could, despite all the hurt that was caused to them in their country of birth, I am sure there is part of them that would like to come back and put that to rest before the man above calls them off the field of play. We need to reach out to those people. I want to know roughly how many people we are talking about. For this process to be done properly, what kind of timeframe would we need to allocate in order to do this properly? If the Minister for Education and Skills or the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, was sitting in this room this morning, what would the witnesses say to him?