statement from Rod
I wanted to contact you this evening to try to respond to genuine questions and concerns which you may have in relation to the passage of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission Records Bill.
I want to categorically reassure you - this legislation is about preserving invaluable information, not putting it beyond reach. It is about protecting a database, and to stop it from being put beyond use forever.
As part of its work, the Commission on Mother and Baby Homes has created a vast database of every person to have passed through the main Mother and Baby Homes. They informed my Department that it was their view that the current law governing personal information required them to redact information in this database once they had concluded their work, rendering it unusable. The database itself provides information on all those who entered a Mother and Baby Home and those who were born there. This would be invaluable information for those survivors and their families who are seeking to know the truth of their trauma and the circumstances of their early years.
This bill aims to protect and preserve the database created by the Commission. It aims to grab a once in a lifetime opportunity to safeguard an invaluable database so that it is not put beyond use, but, rather, can facilitate future information and tracing services.
Given the tight deadline for under which the Commission was due to report at the end of the month, I felt that moving forward with the bill quickly through the houses, though absolutely not what I would wanted to have done in the ordinary course of events, was essential.
I realise however that in so doing, in the context of pre-existing laws that require survivors’ personal information, their own information, to be sealed for 30 years, enormous hurt was caused to survivors and their relatives. My haste in passing this bill to solve a legal problem left no time to do proper consultation with those whom I was aiming to serve.
We should have given this legislation more time for debate and consideration, given the wider issues relating to how we, as a country, respond to those who have been so wronged in our past.
I said earlier this week that our most fundamental duty today is to acknowledge the profound failures and mistreatment of Irish women and their children who were cruelly deprived of choice, deprived of agency and in so many cases coerced into unnecessary institutional settings designed to reinforce, in brutal terms, that their power to exercise a free choice about their own lives would not be tolerated by the society in which they lived.
Although I fundamentally believe that this bill is something that will be of incalculable benefit to survivors, I of course have an obligation to listen. I will be engaging meaningfully with survivor groups as soon as possible, and with expert legal opinion and academics who have done substantial work in this area. I want to do right by survivors.
Having amended the bill already to take account of concerns coming to light in the course of Oireachtas debate, yesterday I also committed to further engaging extensively with the Attorney General on the matter of providing access to personal information within the archive under GDPR, and to requesting the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Children and Equality to conduct a thorough, public re-examination of the ethical and legal issues around personal access, with the participation of survivor groups, academics and legal experts.
