Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

It is just ten years and one week since former Minister for Education, the Minister, Deputy Micheál Martin, announced helpfully that he had appointed a senior archivist to the Department of Education because all the files accompanying the Kennedy report, except the Daingean file, had gone missing. I was spokesperson on education for the Labour Party at the time. The Daingean file was the file that had the details on a youngster that had been stripped naked and punished at midnight. The Daingean institution was visited by a secretary of the Department of Education who said we should all be grateful for the quality of the people running it. In preparing for the debate the Minister undertook to provide a list of the files that had been lost but which might have been recovered and to state whether any files relating to the Kennedy commission's visits to all the institutions would be made available publicly. In facilitating the debate on the Ryan report, does the Government intend to place a list on record of such files as have been recovered and if, as the former Minister for Education indicated, it will make such files as have been recovered available publicly to those of us who are interested?

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