Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am here instead of Deputy Phelan. I wish to raise a couple of matters. First, in January every year there is a release of documentation from the National Archives. That occurs across many governments and is not unique to Ireland. As regards the idea of it being a surprise or unique to this situation, I am a little disappointed to see that lack of context given the fact that it is normal governmental practice in the UK, Ireland and in many other countries. Although the period of time is proposed to be reduced from 30 to 20 years, and there are discussions about that, there is a practice of doing this. At the same time, we have the GDPR, which has superseded any instrument or practice like that in that it entitles one to information. There is also a commitment to proposed legislation, which is coming through shortly, that deals with information and tracing. That must be acknowledged and borne in mind in this context. In fairness to the Minister, not to acknowledge it is being disingenuous on the part of parties on the committee or otherwise. We need to park that.

I am interested in developing and exploring the Stasi model and how that might be employed in looking at resolving the conflict. In the next session there will be two submissions from two parties. Both are from Cork and both are affected by Bessborough. One wants exhumations and the other does not. We have very tangible and obvious opposites. We cannot deal with one site and address those individually. That leaves us with the real problem of not being able to resolve those two. Under the Stasi model, is there some way of allowing truth and memorialisation and also addressing individual needs or not? How would that be deployed? Behind all of this there is also the spectre of tribunals and the fact that in the pursuit of truth, that gets overshadowed by the cost of legal teams, so we lose sight of what we were originally setting out to do. Perhaps Ms Ansbro will elaborate on how that Stasi model would be available to us and could perhaps be of use in resolving a conflict on how this should be dealt with.