Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 18 November 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement

Engagement with the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains

Photo of Jennifer Carroll MacNeillJennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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I appreciate the constraints with which the commission operates. I am trying to ask questions within that, as our guests will understand. Last week, we had the opportunity to meet Mr. Oliver McVeigh, as the Chairman mentioned. He was clear about how desperately he and his family want to find his brother, a subject of significant work on the commission's part. He urged us, as public representatives and Members of the Oireachtas, to remind everybody to do everything they could to be of assistance with that. He asked us to call on everybody, including all the political parties, to be clear that information, if it exists, should be provided to the commission directly and without delay to enable the search to continue. Having met Mr. McVeigh and having had the opportunity to listen to him and the pain he, his mother and his family experienced and that he continues to experience in the absence of his brother, without the opportunity to give him a Christian burial or to begin to mourn the stages of death in the way a person might having gone through a burial, members of the committee want to take that opportunity. It is our good fortune our guests happen to be appearing before the committee this week, given we met Mr. McVeigh last week. It is important for me to take the opportunity to highlight that.

In light of Mr. Dalton's experience in the Department of Justice and his work throughout the period leading up to the Good Friday Agreement period, he has been engaged in reconciliation efforts for many years. Will he speak to how important the resolution and recovery of bodies is towards the overall reconciliation effort, having regard, perhaps, to the many families he will have met during his work in its various guises?