Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank Senator Boyhan for his comments. I, too, welcome this opportunity, which is longer perhaps in this House than the Committee Stage was in the other House. It is useful to tease through the issues.

Specifically on Senator Higgins's point on using the word "or", I confirm that I specifically raised the issue of looking at "or" rather than having a pure substitution. Again, having engaged with the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, it has not been possible to achieve what the Senator spoke about, that is, using the words "incorrect or illegal", in a way that is legally sound and that would not require the State to set the standard of illegality and burden of proof, even were we to use the phrase "incorrect or illegal". Since we were not able to find a way to do that, I looked for other mechanisms and that is the reason the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel came back with the insertion of the term "false or misleading". As I said, that term recognises the falsehood but in a way that does not risk excluding people from being able to use the provisions of this legislation. I believe it recognises that point. It keeps the definition of who can use these legislative provisions broad, which is the key point on which we are all in agreement.

None of that takes away from the very clear acknowledgment made in the apology, in the discussions on this Bill and in other debates related to legacy in both Houses, in the wider Government response to Professor O'Mahony's report and in the very real actions we are taking both in setting up a specialist tracing service in Tusla and making changes in this legislation that provide a much better legal basis for tracing where there is a suspected legal birth registration. I believe all those actions demonstrate the very real recognition by the State of the illegality of what happened. It is not only recognition, but also concrete and real efforts to address that to the extent to which we can address historical practices like this.