Dr. Maeve O'Rourke:

I will give a couple of brief examples. The written joint submission from me, Máiréad Enright and Dr. Sinéad Ring, as well as Dr. James Gallen's submission, detail some of the comparative practice. We are always available and may well send further information to the committee by this evening.

It is important to look at Scotland and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, IICSA, in the UK. That is the UK's ongoing historical institutional child sexual abuse inquiry. It is much more liberal. As the inquiry is taking place many documents are produced to survivors. They work in groups with the legal team and are then able to suggest questions to the inquirer based on all the documents that are coming in. They participate in the inquiry in the first instance, which is their basic right under the European Convention on Human Rights and other international human rights treaties. When such serious things happen to somebody, the person's right to an investigation is a right to an effective investigation that safeguards the person's rights to the extent possible and involves the person. Unfortunately, we have not had that. However, one can deduce that because records have been produced in the course of the investigation they are therefore available after it too. It would be interesting for the committee not just to speak to people but also to look at detailed legal documents such as the protocol on redaction that the IICSA uses in the UK in the child sexual abuse inquiry and how and where to redact records that it is producing to the survivors' legal teams, which would be available to the public in the future. For example, if somebody has been convicted, the person's name can be released or the person is so notorious that there would be no point in redacting the person's name. Another question is whether the person is an employee. There are different approaches to whether to redact.

The Stasi files archive is an interesting example because it operates in Europe under the GDPR. A group of us here today and other colleagues are meeting in December in NUI Galway to look at drafting the legislation we would like to establish an annex to the National Archives of care related records. Somebody is coming from the Stasi files archive in Berlin to tell us how things work there and how it manages to be compliant with the GDPR so people can access their personal data about what was done to them during that period of time. We will find out more about general public access to archives as well.

Finland's national child abuse inquiry will make its anonymised archives available for historical research. In Australia, thousands of anonymised narratives constructed from testimony to the private sessions are published on the Australian royal commission's website. I will not say more, but we might supplement what we have written with more by this evening.