Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I want to come back to the point Senator Seery Kearney made. I agree with her and she has articulated her point well. I was just touching on some examples but I agree with her that it is about managing that expectation and being responsible. In time, when this process starts to unravel, we will eventually know the institutions that kept forensic records. I could tell the Senator 20 of them off the top of my head that could tell you they bought a raincoat for a child in 1956. Some of them kept amazing records and they nearly made it a business. They had a lot of people in vocations who did not have a lot to do and they kept impeccable ledgers. In time, when we unravel institutions and look at many of their archives we will be fascinated when we start to list and set out all of this rich archive. It is a rich archive because it tells a story with many aspects.

I was able to go to the Department of Education some years ago and source roll books from the Church of Ireland Representative Church Body Library and they were able to dovetail. In those records they had an X where they identified the children from the local institution, so with a little bit of thinking, there is a lot of information out there. We were able to cross-reference those roll books with other records when we went to some other churches. There were some notorious churches in Dublin that en blocchristened a lot of these children and gave them different names or changed their names. Again you will see particular priests and clergy who did this and the same person appeared as the godmother of all of these children. There are common threads and when they are all pulled together, layers of information can be built.

I agree with Senator Seery Kearney because of my experience and I know and keep in contact with many people who grew up in institutions and who grew up with me. These people have been brought in and handed a little file with three bits of paper on their vaccines and they ask where the other records are only to be told there are none. We should be honest that many people arrived at the institutions, left a child outside the door, pressed the bell and ran away. That is a fact whether we like it or not and there is no information to be found in those cases. There is a process but in time we will see that particular institutions did or did not keep records. We cannot analyse or say for sure what the motives for that were. We can suggest or speculate but if the records are not there, they simply are not there. I agree we have to be careful in how we handle that and in how we manage that expectation.