Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We know what people did. We know that innocent people were murdered and secretly buried in parts of Ireland and then the location of their remains were hidden from the families for decades and that in excess of 40 years later, we are still asking for where the bodies of people on this island are buried in order that we can give some tiny comfort to their siblings before they, too, pass on. We know what people did.

Something that struck me in our trip last week, and some colleagues as well, was we met more groups then. We met Mr. McVeigh. We met Rev. David Clements, whose father, who was in the RUC, was murdered. We met Mr. Alan McBride whose family were murdered in the Shankill bomb attack. We met families of the Ballymurphy massacre who suffered enormous intergenerational trauma and families of the Springhill massacre. All of those people really stuck with me over the weekend, and I am sure with colleagues as well. I was thinking about Ms Irene Connolly and the late Ms Joan Connolly in Ballymurphy over the weekend and, indeed, Ms Jacqueline Butler from Springhill. As we said to them at the time, you remember their faces. You remember what their voices sound like. You remember, when you have that personal connection.

Something that struck me also when we visited the WAVE Trauma Centre - which Mr. Knupfer has reference and which really is excellent, and we must commend Ms Sandra Peake, yet again, on her work - in particular, with Mr. McVeigh, was how alone he was, in comparison, in trying to articulate his voice on behalf of his brother and mother, to try to be heard and how different perhaps that was to some of the other experiences that we had had. Although all of the people who met stuck with me, certainly, over the weekend, that sense of being more alone really stood out. A Dáil motion is an excellent idea to have, yet again, that opportunity, many decades later, to put on the record what we are asking people to do and how we are asking people to contribute information. For the benefit of the record of the Oireachtas, I wanted to mention that. As members of the committee, we had the good fortune, opportunity and privilege to meet people and to listen to them. As we are doing that as public representatives, on behalf of our constituents, the very least that we can do is come back and relay that experience, and what that experience looked like and felt like, back onto the record of the Oireachtas so that people know what it was like. I thought that comparative isolation really stuck to me and I certainly wanted to note it today.