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

I thank the Senator for the questions. Like her, I acknowledge the additional hurt and anger that these actions have caused to survivors. In terms of the actions that I, as Minister, and the Government might take now, foremost in my mind is how we can most benefit survivors. I believe we can do that through the provision of a well-resourced unit that can give them the access to the information many of them have sought for decades and in the context of answering subject access requests, SARs, in a manner that is compatible with GDPR, aligned with the potential rectification elements that we can apply as well. That is crucial to giving survivors information that we do not have. It is key. We will provide from the archive information that they do not have and we will buttress that for groups of people outside of this particular group of survivors through the information and tracing legislation. I discussed this a number of times during the debate on the database legislation. We now have a commitment to heads of Bill being available by March or early April. Regarding the scale of that legislation, that is an extremely tight timeline, but we have put in additional resources with the support of the Attorney General's office. We have external counsel working on that legislation. Once the heads are ready, we can bring to this committee for extensive debate. Central my approach to that is the right of an individual to access personal information, including birth certificates and early life information. That is the position of Government on this particular issue. It is a GDPR-centred approach, not an approach anchored in previous drafts of legislation in this particular area.

The Senator referenced engagement with the congregations. I have written to them and there are a number of meetings with some of the congregations in place. She also referenced GlaxoSmithKline. I will write to the company and ask that it reflect on the chapter on vaccination and the lack of an ethnical framework and its breach of the regulatory framework in terms of how vaccination trials took place. I hope it will respond on that question. I have the ability to do that because of the content of the report. I can speak to the religious organisations and ask them to contribute to restorative recognition because we have the evidence from the report that 9,000 babies and children died in the institutions that they were running. We have clear evidence that GlaxoSmithKline breached ethical and regulatory standards. There are very legitimate criticisms of language that have been put forward, particularly about the executive summary and also other parts of the report, but the report gives the Government the basis upon which many of the 22 action points can be advanced.