Ms Eileen Molloy:

For me, personally, it would open up my past. I do not know if any of the committee have ever lived in a haze about something that happened, when they were supposed to be there but were not there, and it was not until afterwards that the reality of the matter hit them. We do not have that. We just went through the motions. We were told by the redress board what was required of us. Some solicitors went and got the information without consulting the survivors and gave it directly to the redress board because most of the survivors could not cope. I ran a support group for survivors in Tralee. We had to go personally to the redress board with some of the survivors because they just could not handle it, and we barely could ourselves.

I have a family of five - three girls and two boys. I have five grandchildren. The personal information is a particular concern. I was very moody when I got married. I do not know how my husband put up with me, but he did. We were talking about this recently. My family knows a lot about where I came from but they do not know everything. I feel it would give them a better understanding as to why I was moody. They would cut me some slack sometimes.

I believe many survivors who went through the same thing might be able to open up more to their families with a clearer understanding of where they came from. When we went through the Ryan commission and the redress board, some hid that trauma from their families. They just could not open up and tell about it. This might be the door that we need to go through, and as somebody said, we can just reveal everything and deal with it. We are pushing on in years. I do not want to die without knowing the answers. If the answers are going to be locked up for 75 years, my children will most likely not see them and I do not know if my grandchildren will. I really do not think the Oireachtas should deny us this. It is a human right. We are not statistics but human beings.