Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We need to be careful not to suggest that empathy is the preserve of any one individual. The fact is that the Minister stood up and apologised on behalf of the State and while I might have given out to him about bits of that apology, the fact of it should not be lessened. The fact is that he acknowledged the illegality of what happened to individuals and that is now on the record of this House and was widely reported.

I too have spent a lot of time with people who are affected by this Bill in various ways and who desperately need the provisions within it. We do not need to put "illegal" into this Bill in order for there to be a course down which we go because there is already an 1874 statute that does that. It is not that we have to create a criminal offence all of a sudden, to name it and be prescriptive. Indeed, I would be nervous about being overly-prescriptive about it because anything up to 20,000 people may have been affected. If we are very prescriptive now, God knows what we are going to come across. We need to go back to a very simple statute that holds that it was an illegal act to falsely register someone.

The terminology in the Bill as it stands is sufficiently prescriptive to provide a route. It has actions that are practical in the response to people who find themselves in this horrific situation. If we need to step that further and look for a criminal prosecution, that is already on the Statute Book. Even pre-Constitution, it had been on the Statute Book. That vehicle is already there. We do not need to create it. It is not wise to be too prescriptive because while we know a lot, there is still a lot to know. As we get in to the tracing aspect of this and as the provisions of this Bill come to life and into effect, we need to leave it open-ended and the terminology within the Bill already allows for that.