Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses. I was listening to them both. It is bureaucracy personified and that is being very polite. I am normally relaxed on the more profane language but this is plain black and white. I see where the frustration is coming from. The excuses are not based on fact. They are based on the assumption that we do not know, maybe there are bodies there or maybe there are not but they are not affording the National Graves Association the opportunity to prove it which must be very frustrating.

I see from the OPW the response that it is going to be a unilaterally big problem. When I was a young fella, going back a good few years now, my first experience of exhuming bodies was with my dad. We took 92 nuns out of a convent in Youghal. We never met with any problems. You applied for each person to be exhumed, you paid the fee which was about £60 at the time, each exhumation was done and what was left of those bodies was transferred into the new cemetery. There seems to be a lot of hiding behind diplomacy here, or whatever word you want to use. Maybe "diplomacy" is the wrong word.