Ms Susan Lohan:

In response to Senator Fitzpatrick, it will be an incredibly long process if we are to examine every single death. However, I agree it is the price of having dispensed with the State's obligations towards all its citizens. In other jurisdictions, the state has paid that price.

I would argue for speeding up the process for certain families. There are family members today who want to know where their loved ones are buried and how they died. Those cases could be prioritised and the children for whom nobody so far has come forward could be, unfortunately, left to the back of the list. However, we should deal with those families who are suffering today.

I totally concur with Ms Corless on the need to hold the various religious orders to account. Ms Corless rightly calls these organisations businesses. We have the perverse situation in Ireland that we, as taxpayers, are actually helping to fund those organisations because we continue to outsource vital social services to them. In some of the campuses where these atrocities occurred, the same religious orders are still in situproviding services to, for example, intellectually disabled individuals. The State needs to get its house in order and decide if we are going to subsidise the organisations that carried out the atrocities or if we are going to absolutely cull them from the list of organisations that we might engage in the provision of social services. That needs to be dealt with.