Ms Maree Ryan-O'Brien:

I will go back to Senator Seery Kearney's point on the legislation. One point I will make is that we have been let down by successive Governments for a long time, be it either on information and tracing or on the proposed legislation to deal with Tuam. If, therefore, we are asking for prescribed text within legislation, it is usually to ensure there will not be any grey areas and that promises will be acted on. It is fair to say that we are sceptical about the Government's intent. I do not doubt the Senator's intent or that of her colleagues in this regard but we have had very disheartening experiences over quite a long period.

To touch on Tuam, the legislation underestimates the amount of work that needs to be done. Clear provision needs to be made for the storage of data. It is quite foreseeable that when every body is eventually exhumed, we will not have the technology to identify one of them, be it either through DNA or other means.

A more suitable model for the retrieval and storage of DNA and remains would be something similar to the World Trade Center, where undertakings were essentially given that every victim would be identified following the crash. The approach they took was to decide, in instances where the remains could not be identified, that time and science eventually would catch up and they would be able to identify them. If we take a similar approach to that as regards a repository, hopefully, time and science will eventually enable us to identify who these children were and who their families were.

As well as that, I believe it is quite probable that adoptees had extended family in these homes.

We need to be aware of that when we are casting the net on the DNA encatchment to ensure we bring as many people in as possible. We can only do that through education and through explaining the context of this as a wider societal situation as opposed to the piecemeal basis we have with institutions.

I want to touch on both of the questions that have been brought up on the legislation and moving forward. There is a clear stratification with this issue. We have people who were part of the remit for the commission of inquiry and investigation, we have people who were outside the remit of the inquiry and investigation, and we have people who were illegally adopted. Moving forward, we need to have something that addresses all of those issues.

We are probably touching on something to do with information and tracing. As regards information officers, however, I would struggle to see how we could provide people with information that essentially is not there. That is the main issue we have. We do not have an appreciation of how vast this is and how many people it encompasses. Ms Coughlan touched on this as well and I would completely share her view that there are birth mothers who have still to come forward and state that they have children who were interred, who died or who they suspected died. How do we go about building trust with women? How do we reach out and support them? That is something we need to encompass in any legislation or programme moving forward, be it a restorative transition programme or whatever way we choose to describe it. It needs to take as many people on board as possible and support them in a way they have not been supported so far. We need to see that support both in legislation and in practice. We need to see that in society and in the education on this issue. The way the issue has been approached means we are only ever looking at it as one issue, be it institutional burials or mother and baby homes. Even the term mother and baby homes is exclusionary as it excludes people who did not go through that or who were adopted. There is a disconnect because the survivors think this does not involve or affect them when in practice it could. We need to look at all of this as a holistic issue, rather than just as one specific issue.