Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I, too, thank the Minister for the considerable amount of engagement he has had with Members regarding this Bill on this difficult subject matter. I refer, particularly, to the briefing yesterday which clearly outlined the intention behind this Bill we are discussing today and the difficulties with the existing commission legislation.

The legislation being considered today has an objective and that is absolutely not to seal away information. It is, in fact, to stop information from being put beyond reach. This information concerns those who were treated so poorly in our recent past, namely, the mothers who were deprived and denied a normal life and whose futures were denied by being placed and imprisoned and trapped in mother and baby homes. Their stories are horrific. We have heard some of those stories tonight. I have been contacted by those people and had their stories relayed to me. For any parent, mother or child or anybody with any ounce of compassion, what happened to those banished to those homes is painful to listen to and is a most shameful period in our history.

I, too, have received thousands of emails on this matter. There is no other issue in respect of which I have received more emails. I fully understand the concerns expressed by all those who contacted me. I understood them and I understand the fear that this Bill will seek to bury the secrets of the past. That is not the intention behind the Bill. This Bill will not seal those important records or hide the information or put invaluable information beyond reach. From my understanding, what we are trying to do tonight is the very opposite. We are here to protect this record. We need to give back a voice to those who were subjected to the horrors of the mother and baby homes, the lives that were destroyed and the lives of the survivors who were so badly damaged in so many ways that many of us will never be able to understand.

I understand that the commission report is a comprehensive document and comprises the survivors' personal stories which will be accessible to each person who told their story. It will inform us all on how society and religious institutions in the past acted to banish and destroy mothers and their children and how this despicable part of our history ever happened. I understand that many of the records of the commission are, in fact, copies of documents held by other agencies, such as the Department of Health, and that those originals are accessible and available through certain processes.

From my understanding tonight, the Minister has confirmed that he will ask the Oireachtas Committee on Children, Disability, Equality and Integration to lead a re-examination of the access to this personal data in a way that will enable survivors and their representatives and legal experts and academics to thoroughly explore the issues surrounding this debate on access to personal information in the commission's archive, and to issue recommendations which can resolve the real difficulties the passage of this legislation has highlighted. I trust that the Minister is acting sincerely and in the best way possible to protect this data and this Bill will safeguard the database created by Tusla in respect of this matter.

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