Eileen Flynn (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 1:

In page 10, line 37, to delete “and” and substitute “or”.

I thank the Minister for being in the House today. We are sorry about the little hiccup. Amendment No. 1 amends the meaning of “principal burial land” in section 2 of the Bill. As drafted, there are two criteria. A person must have died while a resident and must have been buried in a "manifestly inappropriate" manner before the State may intervene. The requirement to meet both criteria is a barrier and this amendment changes the wording of this provision.

Amendment No. 3 seeks to expand the meaning of “principal burial land” for the purposes of this Bill to ensure that it includes burials where there is concern that death occurred in a violent, unnatural, sudden or unknown way.

Amendment No. 4 has the same aim as amendment No. 3 but goes about it in a slightly different way. The amendment seeks to revise the scope of the Bill to fit with international definitions of mass grave sites such as the definition used by the Office of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Amendment No. 7 seeks to amend a provision of the Bill limiting interventions to situations where a person died while ordinarily resident in an institution and where that person was buried in a "manifestly inappropriate" manner.

Amendment No. 8 arises from the Joint Committee on Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth's pre-legislative scrutiny report and, more specifically, from recommendation 6 of that report.Amendments Nos. 4 and 9, which are linked, seek to revise the scope of the Bill to meet international best-practice definitions of mass grave sites and to expand the circumstances that might warrant an investigation.

I will not go into amendments Nos. 30 or 40 but we would appreciate if the Minister could accept them.