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

I thank the Senator. We all agree about the failure of language and tone. When I first read the mother and baby homes report, I focused on the confidential committee. If one takes away the executive summary, the level of hurt and trauma that emerges from the confidential committee will always stick with me when I think of the report. It is the stories I read there that chilled us, as they did so many people, to our core.

The evidence that the Senator mentioned in the report, particularly relating to death, is enabling me to engage with the religious orders. The evidence relating to the pharmaceutical companies is different, as is the initial engagement, but I take the Senator's point. I am structuring it in asking them to see what engagement and reparation they feel is necessary, in light of the very clear statements of failure to adhere to international ethical standards and regulatory standards. Some of these vaccine trials happened in the 1930s and 1940s but there were both regulatory and ethical standards at play then that were very clearly ignored. There needs to be a recognition of that. I hope to see the Attorney General reply in the near future. He has always been extremely good and efficient in coming back to us quickly. The information unit, as the Senator said, gives us the opportunity to start to provide very real and badly needed information for survivors.

As regards the national archive, my Department and other Departments will engage with the Department of the Taoiseach on how that project is progressed. Again, when we speak of the tone and language of the report, we wish to create a space where we can reflect, in the words of survivors, what happened to them in arrange of ways and where people can come and deposit the real testimony of what happened to them, be it oral or written. The national records and memorial centre gives us the opportunity to honestly reflect the lived reality of the survivors, women and children, who were in these institutions.