Patricia Stephenson (Social Democrats)

I fully support Senator Ruane's comments, particularly on the use of waivers. Last week, Senator Ruane and Senator Higgins spoke quite clearly when they discussed the human rights aspect of waivers. When we ask people to sign waivers for redress, we are basically saying they have no other recourse for justice within that and that is not the way we should be doing justice in Ireland.

When it comes to amendment No. 8, we spoke a lot last week about lessons, learning lessons and the importance of learning from the past and bringing that forward. That is really what this amendment is about. It looks for a report on the adequacy and consistency of supports provided by the Residential Institutions Statutory Fund Board. This will include applications received and processed and the range and uptake of supports so we can assess the supports that were provided and the frequency of the uptake. This data could disaggregated and we could find it out based on age and where people are from. The summary of appeals or complaints is very important to assess people's experiences within the system. Without the last piece of an evaluation of survivor experiences of the scheme, we are not responding and we will not develop and make sure new schemes take on the critique and criticism of survivors, which is fair criticism, to make sure this onwards scheme is appropriate.

It is really about lessons learned. We should hear about evaluations. This is true for all monitoring and evaluation of any supports provided by the Government or the State. This is particularly pertinent because of the human rights abuses and violations that survivors experienced but it really is best practice for the service users or recipients of any scheme to be consulted on their experiences. This amendment is designed to get a full understanding of those experiences. It is very simple. I hope the Minister will consider adopting it because I do not think it is a controversial one. It is best practice. It would be good faith to take on this amendment, recognising the opinions of survivors and making sure they are acted upon in future schemes.