Ms Anna Corrigan:

Memorialisation is not on our radar. It is at the very end of a process that we have not even begun. We are still at a loss as to why the site was partially excavated and exhumed body parts taken out for carbon dating and the possibility of extracting DNA. We do not know where those body parts lie. We were left with that and the site was handed back to Galway County Council, backfilled and reseeded. That is where it left us in 2017. Here we are in March 2021 looking for a law to open up this site again. Memorialisation is nowhere in our vision. We are looking for our human rights, which were never afforded to our families, which we are being deprived of and to which we have entitlement under the laws of this land and under the European Court of Human Rights.

Both my brothers have been the subject of two open Garda inquiries since 2013 and 2014. These have not been acted on. I have never interacted with the commission and I am being deprived of my right to justice as a citizen of this State. I act as the PR for the Tuam Babies Family Group and we also represent survivors. A combined total of 11 of our family members are in Tuam. We have been denied justice. From the start of this process, we have never been directly communicated with. We have elicited a lot of our information from social media. We saw a digger on the site and somebody got up on the wall and took a photograph. We had no direct feedback. We got a press release in tandem with the press. When the human remains were found we were notified at the same time as the press. We were not brought in in advance to be told body parts had been found. We are in an Alice in Wonderland situation and the further one goes, the more it is like going down the rabbit hole. Things get curiouser and curiouser. A lot has happened around this that has not come out in national media. We have been gaslit quite a bit, despite the fact that we have 11 stated members of our family in that pit. Everybody chooses to be a voice for us but we have our own voice.

Memorialisation is a long way down the road - when the bodies have been identified using SNP, as Dr. Donoghue said. I got information under a freedom of information request and I cannot understand why SNP is not being used. It was stated that Tuam was unprecedented. If it is unprecedented, there is no need to go down the road of STR, which ties in with the criminal and Garda side.

There has never been any indication that the Garda would get involved here because it has been denied that it is a criminal site. It has been taken that there is no evidence of criminality here even though the coroner took jurisdiction of Tuam in July 2017 but failed to act. I was listening to the discussions this morning about the involvement of the coroner. It was stated on the FOI documents I received that the coroner had taken jurisdiction. He is obligated to act under the Coroners Act. None of the children in that grave had medical certification of death. Under section 18 of the Coroners Act, when a death is reported to the police, a superintendent or higher must go to the coroner and inform the coroner that the body lies in his jurisdiction because it does not have medical certification of death. This was raised this morning. I notified An Garda Síochána in September 2016 that this was the case in Tuam but this was not acted on. The coroner took jurisdiction in Tuam in 2017 and we have had a partial excavation-----