Ms Catriona Crowe:

I was asked about my experience with records of this sort in the NAI and there was reference to the National Archives Act. I will give two examples. One was the adoption files which were discovered in the archives in 1996, about 2,000 of them, which referred to Irish children who had been adopted in the United States between 1948 and 1972, long after the Adoption Act 1952 came into operation. Those files were officially in the custody of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and still are. The Department took back those which had been transferred to the National Archives of Ireland but the proper paperwork, because of the huge deluge of material which came into us in 1990 when the Act came into operation, had not been completed. The individual case files of each child, who had to get a passport in order to travel to America which is why the files existed in the first place, contain a vast amount of information about the prospective adoptive parents and one piece of paper about the birth mother, giving her name, her address, her age and her signature to a declaration that she will never attempt to contact this child again. They are heartbreaking documents with very little information about birth mothers but which are hugely important to those who wish to access them. They should be accessible under freedom of information provisions to anyone who wishes to see them. I am not sure if that is happening or not. We retained the administrative records, about two boxes of papers, that tell of how the scheme operated throughout all of those years. I spent a week going through those files one by one, taking out sheets of paper which had individual names on them, photocopying them and Tippexing out the names, putting the photocopy back in the file and putting the original document back in a separate envelope where they can eventually be reunited with the original files. That meant that three or four people were able to write books immediately about how the system worked. This is why we are making such a fuss about administrative records relating to the industrial schools and the other institutions and why the religious archives are so important. We must be able to know, first as survivors, second as members of the public and third, as historians and academics, how these systems operated in this country over the period they did.

The second example is older. The miliary service pension files, which number approximately 275,000, deal with people applying for pensions for actions taken during the War of Independence and the Civil War. They deal with atrocious actions, including murder and all kinds of stuff. Those records have been open for ten years. When the testimony was being taken from people who were applying for pensions, they were all given copies of their testimony, which allowed some of the material to get into the public domain before the State's own records were released. Again, we have a template which deals with very difficult and sensitive material that followed quite a liberal route in terms of access to those who gave testimony.