As I said in my opening contribution, 20 years ago the then Taoiseach made a State apology. I want to point out a few more things that are of concern to me. Almost no prosecutions appear to have arisen from the investigations of the Ryan commission to inquire into child abuse. The ongoing mother and baby homes commission of investigation is refusing to provide survivors or family members of the deceased with any of the personal information that it holds concerning them. Meanwhile, as reported by Conall Ó Fátharta of the Irish Examinerrecently, the commission is refusing to inform families of the whereabouts of their relatives’ graves because underpinning legislation makes it an offence for anyone, including a member of the commission, to disclose or publish any evidence. Regarding the Magdalen laundries, the Department of the Taoiseach has repeatedly refused to release any of the contents of the McAleese committee archive, claiming that it is holding the archive for safe keeping and not for the purposes of freedom of information. Another concern in respect of the survivors or victims is that there is no statutory right for adopted people, whether lawfully or unlawfully separated from their family, or people who were placed in informal or illegal care arrangements as children, to access their early life files. This means some of these people cannot even get a passport. The suffering is ongoing. I want a commitment that they will never shut these secrets away. We need to set up a national repository and people should be entitled to access their own information from it.

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