Ms Catriona Crowe:

One reason is that the Roman Catholic Church has had disproportionate power in this country from Catholic emancipation in the 19th century up to very recently. The overhang of that power might still be affecting how our bureaucrats see things. However, there is more involved. There is the adamantine determination of the religious orders not to make their records available if they can avoid it, with some honourable exceptions. They do not accept that, effectively, they comprised a shadow state, particularly in respect of welfare matters for women and children. The State willingly handed over its responsibility for the welfare of vulnerable children and women to religious orders, who willingly took it on and were paid for it. A strong argument can be made, perhaps a legal argument although I cannot be sure as I am not a legal scholar, that these are State records. They are State records because these are State responsibilities being carried out on behalf of the State by religious orders, and they should be turned over to the State, archived and made accessible in the right way.

I stated earlier that we could lead the world in this. We have come through a unique set of commissions of inquiry, and we are in the middle of one at present, and they will produce extraordinary testimony of wrongdoing, bad behaviour and State absolution of itself in terms of looking after vulnerable women and children. We also have the records of the religious communities. We could put all of those together, along with court records, police records and all the material the wonderful people with me would wish to see. There are many records. There are also the records of the ISPCC, on which Dr. Sarah-Anne Buckley is an expert. Could we put all of them together in one place and make it a world-leading repository in terms of preservation of, and access to, records dealing with women and children in a newly independent State in the 20th century that is finding its feet, with a disproportionate amount of power, as we all know now, given to a particular religious denomination? That is what my dream would be and I believe it would be the dream of the survivors here. It would be everything that they might need, as well as what we as citizens and scholars need, to establish exactly what happened in all these places and why over a long period.

I doubt we will see it, but it is something to aim for. Regular top-level talks take place between the Government and the churches, including particularly the Catholic Church. I have recommended several times to the people who control those talks that they put the issue of what should happen to the religious records on the agenda. So far it has not appeared. Unfortunately, there is no great appetite on the part of the State to raise this issue either.