Ms Rachel Downes:

As the Deputy stated, more than 15,000 people availed of redress. Caranua commissioned a report in early 2014 or 2015, which looked at the life expectancy of survivors and estimated how many people would apply to Caranua. At that stage, it was estimated that approximately 12,000 survivors were still alive. They were based all around the world, although the majority of them were in Ireland. As the operational costs come out of the fund, we always had to be very mindful of advertising. I will step back for a second. We were given just the names of the people who successfully applied for redress. We were able to use that information as proof of eligibility but we were not allowed to use the list to contact survivors. Caranua was not allowed to make first contact with a survivor. Obviously, it would have been ideal to send a letter to the survivors initially to state that Caranua was in existence and to ask whether they wished to apply to it. We were very much relying on advertisement and word of mouth. We ran a poster campaign that covered that every GP's office, social welfare office and many other offices. The campaign was repeated a couple of times through the years. However, we had to be very mindful that advertising is very expensive and that cost would have been removed from our fund.