Tom Clonan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I hope we can come back to the issues raised by Deputy Cairns because they fit with my own experience of recording the testimonies of women who were targeted in our Defence Forces for bullying, harassment, sexual assault and rape. In the process that flowed from my PhD, the subsequent Government inquiry, led by Dr. Eileen Doyle, and the revelations of September 2021 from "Women of Honour", it seems to be a recurring pattern that the concerns of those who are targeted by others, or who find themselves in a vulnerable position in institutions such as our Defence Forces or in mother and baby homes, seem to be subordinated to either the moral and legal concerns of adversarial approaches, or other procedural or administrative purposes.

We have to remember that people who make these disclosures relive the experiences. They are retraumatised. It is extremely important that their very powerful and compelling testimony can been seen explicitly to facilitate acknowledgement and healing, as opposed to further traumatising and adding further injury.

I am coming late to this issue, given the circumstances of my arrival in the Seanad but it occurs to me that we already have very powerful instruments and methods for getting to the heart of these very sensitive issues. We have experts of international renown in all of our universities. We have some amazing women and some men who are very well placed to carry out incisive and qualitative phenomenological research into the testimonies and experiences of these survivors. A huge body of international literature already exists on how best to go about doing this. The Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, knows this from our shared background as academics. I am always really puzzled as to why such inquiries are led by senior council or judges when we have an embarrassment of riches in the country. We can put together these very compelling disclosures from survivors, weave them through with all of the secondary sources available to, and with the resources of, the State, to arrive at extremely compelling findings that can contribute significantly to knowledge and assist us to move forward. When findings are constrained and confined within this quasi-legal frame, it really limits through very positivistic and deterministic thought processes. It narrows and undermines. I hope that the survivors' personal accounts housed in the national centre for research and remembrance would be amenable to this type of research. I agree with everything said by Deputy Cairns and it chimes with my own experience in this regard. We find, 20 years after the original research, that women in our armed forces are still targeted in this way. There is a judge-led inquiry under way at the moment to investigate that. Can we not learn from this? I ask the Minister whether it is possible for him to suggest to Cabinet that in the future, rather than appointing senior counsel, judges and so on, we look at the resources we already actually have to assist in truth and reconciliation. There is a lot more to follow. There are other areas of Irish life that require this type of inquiry.