Ms Laura McGarrigle:

I apologise if my earlier answer was not clear. When I referenced national and international evidence earlier, it was not with respect to an individual psychiatrist or psychologist coming in and speaking to us. I was referring to evidence we gained from taking learnings from other schemes within this jurisdiction and in other jurisdictions. One example the IDG would have thought interesting in terms of learning, which is referenced in its published report, was the Australian stolen generation scheme. We would have examined it with respect to learnings from the perspective of the best way to construct a scheme that would deliver for survivors in a way that would not retraumatise and that would do no harm. The principle of "do no harm" was a key point put to us by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, IHREC.

The stolen generation scheme would have started out with individualised payments that might have been set based on trauma and abuse. The individual assessor reported to the Australian Government and recommended moving away from that model to a common experience payment for a couple of reasons. First, he felt that he was being asked to make individualised judgments that were subjective in nature. He thought this could lead to unfair judgments as he was trying to gauge one person’s level of suffering and trauma vis-à-visanother in making these individualised assessments. He was also worried that it was deeply retraumatising for the individuals affected and it was causing them to feel let down by the process and feel retraumatised. There was a concern among advocates in Australia that it was also proving to be a more divisive approach. For that reason, the scheme in Australia moved to a common experience model instead.

When I referred to the evidence, it was evidence of that level that was informing the IDG when it recommended that in putting parameters around the scheme, the general approach of the scheme would be one that would be non-adversarial and grounded in a common experience payment based on residency. Within that, there is a length of residency scale. The rationale for that, which the IDG put forward, was that the longer the length of stay, the longer one endured the harsh conditions, particularly noting the harshest conditions were associated with longer lengths of stay in earlier decades of the State when conditions, particularly in county homes or in Tuam, were really appalling. It recognised that this is a scheme on an unprecedented scale that takes account of survivors coming from many different institutions over a span of many decades. If we look at the commission, we see that this was across eight decades. The age range of survivors spans quite a number of decades. It is quite a broad demographic as well. I hope that helps to answer the Senator's question and I apologise if my previous answer was not clear.