Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. This is the first time I have seen him in this House and I wish him well in his post. I look forward to engaging with him on this and other issues.

I do not like the way things continue with regard to procedure in this House with the rushing together of Stages of legislation. It seems to me that a necessary delay of a few weeks would allow us to tease out the difficulties and problematic aspects of this legislation. I would say the same about Second Stage. If more people want to speak for longer, we should have the flexibility to do our work properly.

I dislike the sudden, ill-advised tacking on of extraneous issues to legislation. It reminds me of the pork barrel politics in America where Bills about one thing involve shunting money off to a particular region, or whatever, on something completely unrelated. We need to get away from that.

To come to the substance of today's legislation, I feel that where promises have been given to people, for example to women at the time they put their children up for adoption or people who gave information relying on complete confidence, we must be at pains to ensure those promises are kept. I do not think that is the voice of male privilege speaking. It is being honourable and respectful.

Nobody supports the right of people to know their identity more than I do. It often surprises me that some of the people who push surrogacy, for example, seem to care little about whether a child can know who his or her father and mother is, or whether they have the right to the society of their father and mother or birth mother. There are amazing hypocrisies and inconsistencies around some of these issues in our society.

I start from the perspective of supporting a child's right to know who he or she is and genetic identity is particularly important. However, I believe that one cannot ignore the context of the past and where people were given promises, they should be kept. Senator McDowell's amendments are sensible. This commission only deals with a certain number of institutions. In a case where somebody tells his or her story and it might be the only time the person intends to do that, I would not like that information to be lost in case it could be used for tracing in the future. That can only happen if specific permission is sought from the person involved that his or her name not be redacted. Nothing else shows respect for people, having regard to the promises that they were given.

I would like to say a little about how we talk about the past. There was harshness in our past but when we think about the decade of commemorations that we are going through, we see how dangerous it is to get into the business of assigning blame. Senator Dolan referred to the Catholic Church and people talk about the dark periods in Irish history. Are people open to recognising that even though there was harshness, there were people who had positive experiences of how they were treated? Are people open to considering that some who worked in these institutions had the best of intentions? Do people think that things were significantly better in other countries? Do they think that the church institutions involved were only doing it for money or the sexual control of people's lives? Is it not the case that, in the context of a poor and difficult society, some, many or most of those people were trying to be a part of a caring agenda? Are people interested in that kind of nuance or do we all want to be running with the pack in condemning the past? It is easy to condemn the past because the people who were involved are either dead or weak and voiceless now.