Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Ward. The entire Government is absolutely committed to publishing the report as soon as possible. There is no desire to keep survivors of mother and baby homes and the county homes that were investigated waiting for the information one moment longer than is necessary. What is necessary is that my Department and the Attorney General carefully scrutinise the report and make sure it does not have any consequences for ongoing Garda investigations. It is necessary that there be nothing in it that would warrant its not being published or the redaction of any of it. We want to publish the report in full as soon as possible. It runs to 4,000 pages. The report is an incredibly extensive and detailed piece of work so we want to scrutinise it. We have, however, made extra resources available to make sure this can be done as quickly as possible. The unanimous view of the members of the Government is that they want to provide this as quickly as possible.

In response to Deputy Ward and Senator Seery Keanery, I cannot give an exact publication date but everybody across Government is working to get this report published as quickly as possible. Deputy Ward is right that doing so will be part of the process of rebuilding trust. That is a process that is needed.

As regards the legal basis for the Bill, the need for the Bill emerged from the sixth interim report and queries raised by the commission of investigation itself. It brought to the attention of the then Government the existence of the database, an incredibly valuable database linking thousands of women who had gone into mother and baby homes and their children who subsequently came out of them. The commission highlighted its view that, under existing legislation, it would be forced to redact the personal information in the database - all the names - which would basically render the database useless. The commission saw that the database would have genuine benefits in respect of the information and tracing purposes we discussed and advised that we needed legislation on that matter.

I have met the Attorney General about this Bill on a number of occasions since I became Minister and my officials have met with officials in the Attorney General's office. I do not have the dates of those meetings to hand but I and my officials have met him on a number of occasions.

We engaged extensively with the Data Protection Commissioner on this particular issue. We sent the draft data protection impact assessment to the commissioner in late September. I think my officials had a meeting with the commissioner in early October at which she asked for one change to the impact assessment. We made that change and the commissioner subsequently indicated that the commission was broadly satisfied with the data protection impact assessment.

On 19 October, the Data Protection Commissioner came back with a query. It did not relate to the Bill that was passed. It was about the interpretation of the Commission of Investigation Act 2004, whether it required an absolute sealing of the archive and that the general data protection regulations, GDPR, did not apply to the archive once it transferred to my Department. As soon as we got that query from the commissioner, we referred it to the Office of the Attorney General. The Attorney General gave oral advice to the Cabinet on 28 October, last Wednesday, and subsequently gave written advice to me. We announced that written advice that evening to the effect that the Attorney General advised that GDPR did apply to the archive once it transferred to my Department.