Dr. Maeve O'Rourke:

I thank the Senator for the question. What is behind it is power and the issue of accountability, and the State not wanting to accept any. We talk about redress. We hear a great deal about redress. What redress means is not airy-fairy from a human rights perspective and in hard law, according to the European Court of Human Rights interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights, which Ireland ratified in 1953 and which, one would imagine, might be the interpretation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court if anybody was ever able to get to court but which, without records and with the Statute of Limitations, he or she cannot.

The right to redress is not only about money. For massive human rights violations involving torture, arbitrary detention - we also see this in many of the other institutions, and this will serve as a model, which is my massive concern too - violations of the right to life, where people die in institutions and nothing is known of their fate or whereabouts or they are separated from family members, redress means accountability, ideally, in court. It means truth-telling. It means national, public truth-telling, not just truth-telling to the person individually. Again, that is something that is clear in European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence. Where there have been systematic and gross human rights violations, the right to truth is not just a very important right of the individual, it is also a societal right, because it is connected to another element of the right to redress, which is guarantees of non-repetition and education of state personnel. The reason people have spoken out and the reason everybody is here today is for dignity, to feel that they matter and to make sure that it does not happen again.

It was asked what the net effect of this would be. It would be a massive ongoing violation of human rights, a risk that this is now how all of the records of the mother and baby homes commission of investigation will be dealt with, and a risk that the Department of the Taoiseach thinks it is okay to continue to hold all of the records from State bodies relating to the Magdalen laundries, even though I cannot see the legal reason for that and they should be in the National Archives. Ultimately, it would be a massive risk that we do not learn what is in, unfortunately, our national DNA, not that we are that different from anybody else, but that we do not learn how institutionalisation works, how massive discrimination against certain groups and socio-economic difference is exploited, and the types of things that we are doing still today that we choose not to stop because we refuse to deal with the entire 20th century habits that we had.