Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

With respect to amendments Nos. 13, 18 and 22, I suspect the Senators who the Minister of State discussed these matters with will probably be less than satisfied with his propositions, but given that they have to go back to the Seanad I will let the Minister of State fight that out with them at a later Stage. I am keen to hear, very briefly, the Minister of State's response to my amendment No. 15. It is a very technical amendment but I would like to hear the Minister of State's thoughts on it, nonetheless.

Amendment No. 191 seeks to delete "ground" and substitute it with "ground, or...any other burial ground that is discovered;". From discussing this with my colleague, Deputy Ó Snodaigh, his logic for tabling this amendment is to expand the chapter on burial grounds to cover discovered burial grounds that were never vested either in the guardians of the Poor Law Union, the burial board of a sanitary district or indeed by the Commission of Church Temporalities in Ireland report. I refer, for example, to burials that have been discovered in relation to mother and baby homes in Tuam. That is just one possibility. In our view, graves from the period of An Górta Mór could and should be treated with the same degree of protection and care, under the legislation, as official burial grounds.

With respect to amendment No. 229, it seeks to delete the phrase "destroying the object" from the definition of "dispose" on page 103 of the Bill. The idea of the amendment is that there should not be any provision for destroying objects. Obviously, there needs to be provision for disposing of objects but it would seem that the choice of words in the text in the Bill would permit, even tacitly, the destruction of objects, rather than their appropriate removal and disposal. That is why we want to remove those three offending words.