Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Well done, Minister. This is great legislation and I thank the Minister for his thorough engagement with us. It was a meaningful conversation about what this system would look like. One of the points I took away from our engagement was that the onus to preserve to a standard that would be required in an archive may mean that organisations and institutions will hand over the information they have because they will not be able to keep it to such a standard. The information will be accessible and properly preserved. I came away from our engagement reassured. I had wondered whether the information would be destroyed or moved to another country, as has happened previously. We now have a means of stopping that from happening.

This information is not personal data. Given the narrative the Minister has given us, it tells us about the organisations and the experience of living there without it being any one individual’s experience. That in itself will be meaningful.

I acknowledge that people have received information from the database on birth information and tracing and under the redress scheme. I have assisted a significant number of women through that process. I remember standing in the Chamber cautioning that there may not be the information people believed was there for them, but I have actually experienced quite the opposite. People have got extraordinary information about a level of care experienced of which they have no memory. I saw letters from the then local authorities that were cold and transactional, but I have now been privy to the letters of parents who had children boarded out with them. Some of those letters showed a level of care, concern and heart. I have had the honour of being part of that process in people’s lives and seeing how healing and restorative it has been. I did not anticipate that. I anticipated that people knowing about themselves would be good, but not that extra piece. I remember speaking about how there may have been teddy bears, letters and so on. There actually were, much to my surprise.

I congratulate the Minister. It was a difficult process for all of us. There is a residual issue affecting people who were in an institution for less than six months, so if we can review that in future, I hope we will. A review is built into the legislation. The Minister guided and led this process at a time of great political turmoil, so I congratulate him on that. To his parents, I say, “Well done, you did a good job.”