Ms Sandra Peake:

I am happy to respond to Deputy Costello, but I would like first to return to Dr. Farry's point. For the British Government the commission demonstrates the challenges of believing you will get information. It is almost 22 years since the legislation went through and Columba McVeigh and Joe Lynskey still have not been recovered. It has taken 22 years to get the bodies returned. The committee is not asking Dr. Farry the big questions for the families such as, "When did they die?", "What happened?" and "For how long were they held?". Mr. McConville referred to the questions; I am just conscious of raising those. If it was any of our relatives, we would have questions to which we would want answers. The families cannot get answers to those questions. They can get answers to questions such as, "Where did you walk them?" and "How far down did you put them?", which is what the commission wants to know. We have struggled to get that information.

If the British Government wants to say that this type of models works, well then, you get partial information. You get information you can interrogate and it shows that, for whatever reasons, people or organisations do not want to go back to that in which they were involved in an earlier life. It highlights that. Information needs to be interrogated. When the committee visited, Mr. McBride made the point very eloquently that had the information with regard to the Ballymurphy case not been interrogated, we would still have Ballymurphy relatives labelled today as being relatives of gunmen and gunwomen. As mentioned by Mr. McConville, the sad reality for the disappeared is that they are still labelled. That has never been lifted. Often when you read an article it goes on to say that they were allegedly involved in X, Y and Z. The reality is some of these people were very young, only 16, a number of them were young men who had learning difficulties and one of them was a mother of ten. As raised by Mr. McConville, what could his mother have done? She was rearing ten children. She was widowed in January and abducted the following December and those children were left.

We have to bear in mind the reality of what is out there. Senator Currie asked about questions. What we understand from the commission is that a whole team can be involved in a disappearance, from the scouters to the drivers to the people who dug the graves.

We need to go back to the start and look at each case from the start. Something has gone wrong from the start when we have not recovered those disappeared. We need to go back and that is really important because it is not just one or two people.

Mr. Geoff Knupfer appeared before this committee previously. He does not often share the magnitude of the work he has been involved in but he did talk about his work on the moors murders investigation. He spoke about the importance of the time of day in terms of where the sun was positioned, the landscape at the time and various other issues like how far up or across the site the investigators went and all of the things that made the difference to locating those children on the moors. He applied the lessons from the moors to the cases here. That very forensic approach has worked well. It has also worked well because people have engaged and given information, which has been so important. At all of the funerals of the disappeared, the families have acknowledged those people because had they not spoken, they would not have got the information needed to enable them to bury their loved ones.

This leads on to the question as to what this committee can do. We need an Ireland-wide publicity campaign. We need people to know that the disappeared are out there. We do not need it to be known today, only for it to go again in January and for us to come back before the committee in May or have to raise it with Senators Currie and Blaney or Deputy Costello or whoever. We need an Ireland-wide publicity campaign. We need to keep this issue in the public domain and we need to re-humanise Columba McVeigh, Joe Lynskey and Robert Nairac. To have a British soldier in Irish soil in 2021 is unacceptable. If we are truly concerned about reconciliation, he should be returned to be buried in his family grave in England. His sisters should be allowed to lay him to rest; that is the right thing to do. In Ireland we know the significance of burial and the last rites and that is what we need to give people.

On the injury pension, we need parity. We cannot have a situation where people who were injured by loyalist bombs in Dublin are not eligible for a scheme. If it is not the scheme in the North, it should be a scheme that is similar that will give them dignity by providing yearly sums to enable them to live their lives as fully as possible while dealing with severe injury. I urge the Government to do something about that. It is so important and it must happen.

We really need this committee's help. We need to ensure that the disappeared are not forgotten. We need to keep applying pressure and letting people know that nothing will happen if they give information to the commission. I must stress, and I am sure the families will agree, that the commission holds that confidentiality extremely tight. It does not tell the families what it is involved in but it does tell them when it has an indication of where it going to go to search. That is really key. I do not know whether the families want to say something about confidentiality. The commission, from what I have seen of its work, holds it very tight. That needs to be said in order to reassure people. This is a process that delivers but we need people to speak.