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

This question is a difficult one. It depends. The key objective and reason we included section 50 was to recognise that evidence could come forth concerning an institution. We know a great deal about the operations of the mother and baby homes and the county home institutions because of the commission's report. There are other institutions that we may not know so much about. We spent a great deal of time in the context of the Birth Information and Tracing Act 2022 discussing the protection of records.

As the Senator will be aware, the Government is working on the creation of a new national records and memorial centre. This will be a physical location but work will also be done on a legal infrastructure to better protect records across a range of institutions beyond mother and baby homes and county home institutions. In the context then, hopefully, of finding more records and providing more legal protection for such records, it may very well emerge there were other institutions we were unaware of that were involved in the provision of maternity and infant care services. In that context then, we have the opportunity to include them in a scheme of this nature. The work we are doing in this legislation is not stand-alone. It is part of this wider Government response in legislation, in services such as the national counselling services and in physical infrastructure such as the records and memorials centre. Academic researchers will have the ability to explore and perhaps identify other institutions that were doing something similar in this regard. I know this is a somewhat vague answer but it is the best I can do now. It is important to state, however, that the provision is there and is available for use.

Regarding the points the Senator made about the confidential committee and the treatment of its report, and I think reference was made to it being discounted, the Government has certainly not discounted it. She will also recall that in terms of the suggestions the commission put forward and the outline of what a redress-type scheme would be, where the Government went was far greater and broader. This was influenced by the report of the confidential committee and, indeed, by all our engagement with survivors and hearing their stories. The Senator spoke about the lack of pain relief that mothers experienced. This is why the Government went broader, and not just broader in the context of what the commission suggested but broader even than the interdepartmental group in recognising the experience of mothers.

Fundamentally, however, this comes back to the individualised approach versus the approach adopted here. We do not believe that undertaking an individualised examination of anyone's circumstances is the best way forward. We believe in the broader approach adopted in this legislation because of the difficulties inherent in the individualised approach. Additionally, in many areas in this regard, particularly in the area of racism, to create an individualised approach would create a legitimate expectation. It would be extremely difficult to secure the evidence necessary in this regard because if we were to have a broad and an individualised approach as well, there would be some greater evidential threshold. This would particularly be the case in the experience of racism by a child in one of these institutions. From a practical perspective, I am not sure how someone would be able to prove that. Creating a system where we would have to say we were providing an approach for people that it would be virtually impossible for them to access because a degree of proof that simply does not exist at this stage would be required is something we must also bear in mind and this is one of the reasons mitigating against an individualised tier.