Patrick Costello (Dublin South Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Given the time pressure, I will try to be quick. If a summary is presented without a full recording or transcript, and the recording is destroyed afterwards, that is a huge problem. There are many questions about how close a summary it was. Why was this done? Why was this chosen? There are questions about the informed consent of the participants and so on. We can only get those answers, to echo what everyone says, if the commission was to provide the committee with the details of the methodology, as was requested. The Minister is here answering for somebody else's homework which puts him in a difficult position.

The reality is that there is potential for a large gap between what people said and what goes on the official record. The right to rectification is only a part of that. It is important to understand how that gap happened and to prevent it happening again. A couple of issues arise from that. The reason this has caused so much hurt is that so many things have been hidden in the past. I have concerns that I have addressed to the Minister already. However, many people hope that the institutional burials Bill can be a source of information and can answer questions. We all need to be very careful with that legislation and ensure that it helps survivors and helps answer questions where information is missing.

Are the Attorney General and the DPC likely to report soon? How much investigation will they do into this? There are wider questions to be answered regarding this data and their destruction. There is a large overlap here, hopefully not with the next commission, with other areas where information is recorded and summarised and a recording or field notes might subsequently be deleted or destroyed. That is a huge picture that impacts on so many other areas that we need to get to the bottom of. A lot of unintended consequences from this are coming to light.

I said I would be quick, and I am conscious I am not. An official response or a shadow report, as mentioned by Senator McGreehan, is a positive idea. A shadow report from NGOs is very common at international level. Something like that, perhaps through the collaborative forum, would be worth exploring and the Minister's thoughts on that would be welcome.

I am conscious that he said that his Department is coming up with a way of implementing and monitoring the 22 action points. This committee also has a role in that. I ask him to keep the committee informed as much as possible. We are all in difficult times and no committee can get space to do the work it wants, but quarterly updates from the Department on the progress of a clear timeline that could be picked over in our correspondence would be very useful. It would save the Minister time in coming before the committee as well as keeping it fully informed, given the strains on all committees in getting work done in these difficult times.