Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for many of the clarifications around that. Amendment No. 24 refers to "records of any vaccine trials in which the relevant person was a research subject". Senator Seery Kearney touched on it as well. I was not necessarily touching on medical vaccines or ones given by consent. I am talking about research, as does that amendment. The House should remember we now know children in State care aged up to seven years were being involved in research and we know something of the adverse reactions some of them had. That was a point I wanted to make.

I also inform the House the BBC has commissioned a documentary and I have been part of it. Indeed, it came to this House some weeks back. The documentary was to go out in June but will now go out in July. The BBC is covering this very extensively and quite a number of people are being interviewed for it and teed up for this. This is a programme that has been in the making for 12 months. It is important we are clear. I am not taking away from what the Minister has said but we cannot emphasise enough the difference between medically approved vaccines, and adverse reactions to those are a different issue, and the fact these were children in care or in institutions, with State involvement or not, who were gathered up and used for vaccine trials. We know this happened and it is factual. I think the Minister has made that clear. That is the reason I wanted to talk specifically on that, just so we were clear. It would be a pity if we do not really get that message out. Nobody but nobody is going to block their access to that information. There are other strands of investigation and court proceedings going on as we speak. We know there is a very substantial amount of information but we know also there is a very substantial amount of this information in the hands of institutions that are still operating, albeit historically a long time, are in receipt of State funds and are still very much part of the care system and the health system.

I thank the Minister for clarifying that. He might just reiterate that point. It is about communication. We have to get the message out that there is no hiding place for anyone who was involved and took advantage of children, with the support of some people who ran these organisations, because the medical crowd did not break the doors down. They were facilitated, they were invited in and in many cases they were paid. That is an important message to get out there.