Dr. Niamh McCullagh:

I am happy to talk about the individualisation. As I mentioned, the specific difficulty in dealing with infant remains in a commingled scenario is the sheer number of very small individual bones. As I said, a newborn baby has 300 bones in its body and 34 are in the skull. In Tuam, decomposition led to the separation of those bones in some instances. It is something about which we have to be realistic.

Ideally, one would attempt individualisation, essentially bringing back all of these skeletal elements to form one individual, where possible, and then moving on to the DNA process. The best possible chance of creating a situation where skeletal elements can be individualised is in the forensic recovery process. In a practical sense, referring to a forensic recovery within the legislation will allow those standards to be put in place so that individualisation is given the best chance prior to DNA analysis.