Ms Susan Lohan:

I thank the committee for inviting us here today to respond to the proposed burials Bill. I am the co-founder of Adoption Rights Alliance. I am joined by my fellow advocate and survivor, Ms Mary Harney. We are pleased to be here today. I am an adopted person, separated from my mother immediately after birth. Ms Harney was born in the Bessborough mother and baby home in County Cork. She spent two and a half years in that institution and was illegally fostered from there. At the age of five, due to neglect on the part of the foster people, she was taken to court by the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, ISPCC, and was subsequently incarcerated until the age of 16 and a half in the Good Shepherd industrial school, Sunday’s Well, Cork.

We are here today in a private capacity but we are also both members of the collaborative forum of mother and baby, county and Bethany institution survivors and have been since 2018. As survivors, we endeavour to describe the treatment of all victims of Ireland’s forced adoption and enforced family separation systems in human rights terms, irrespective of when and where the abuse occurred. We have embraced the international human rights models of transitional justice in describing the actual abuses and in recommending potential remedies around the four pillars of truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of non-repetition. Sadly, we find that the proposed burials Bill is not in keeping with these central tenets of transitional justice and we will address our concerns under a number of headings. We are not legal experts. We are volunteer advocates for our fellow survivors and the voiceless 9,000-plus deceased children identified by the commission of investigation. The committee will undoubtedly hear more professional and more detailed submissions over the course of its pre-legislative scrutiny. We make our recommendations from the heads and hearts of those so willfully discarded and othered by the State, its agents and various churches.

It is evident from the outset and from reading the purpose of the Bill that there are huge problems. The Bill allows for the powers of the coroner under the Coroners Act to be disapplied during the existence or establishment of an agency that will be set up to investigate the existence of inappropriate burials. I have a small table that highlights some of the issues that we would like the committee to highlight. It seems from the Bill that intervention will be based on the existence of inappropriate burials rather than suspicious or unlawful deaths. The Government has given itself considerable powers not to proceed with intervention at various sites. It has a five-criteria test for whether an intervention should proceed. We are concerned that the Government can unilaterally decide to memorialise a particular site, rather than to intervene and investigate any remains.

We feel that the wishes of family members and survivors for truth and justice should be central in the burials Bill. An alternative could be to amend the Coroners Act, rather than proceeding with this Bill. We feel that it is imperative that we get to the absolute truth of all of these deaths and burials. As we saw from the final report of the commission of investigation, several survivors were disbelieved by the commission. There were references to contamination of evidence and I think the Irish public needs to realise the extent of the horrors that existed and happened in these various institutions. The lack of involvement of local coroners and the entire coroner system is a misstep within this Bill. We propose that either the coroner system is interwoven into this Bill or that the Coroners Acts would be amended to give them the powers which are now being earmarked for this agency.

The suggested provisions on sealing data that emerges from the investigations into these burials is anathema to us.

As we saw with the digital archive controversy in late 2020, the Data Protection Commissioner has already ruled that such sealing of records is unlawful so I am somewhat at a loss as to why the same scenario is being suggested for this Bill.

We also want relatives to be kept informed at all points during any investigation. Progress reports should not just be going to the Minister. Some of the timescales are also deeply disturbing for family members of people with children whose remains are interred in these various sites. A timescale of five years has been suggested so that the agency would not have to release a body within that timescale. We very much reject this.

I hope the committee will have an opportunity to listen to the various experts who will present today. From the survivors' perspective, this Bill falls far short of what is not only expected but promised if we look at the Taoiseach's apology. It falls very far short of what would be expected in international best practice when it comes to the treatment of mass graves.