It will be a criminal offence to destroy or allow harm come to the records of up to 250,000 survivors of historical institutional abuse under legislation being fast-tracked this week by Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman.
The legislation, which will be brought forward as amendments to the Maternity Protection Bill currently in its final stages in the Oireachtas, was “urgent” said the Minister, adding he hoped it would be signed into law by “early next month”.
It will oblige any private organisation or individual holding “relevant records” to preserve and maintain them while criminalising the destruction, mutilation, falsification, alteration or export of such records. It will apply not only to individual survivors’ records but also those relating to how institutions like Magdalene laundries, mother and baby homes, county homes, industrial schools and orphanages, operated.
In addition, organisations will be obliged to comply with requests from the National Archives for inventories of their records.
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It will not compel organisations to hand over records but was nonetheless welcomed on Tuesday as a “very significant first step” in ensuring survivors’ access to records. A senior official at the Department of Children said on Tuesday access required “preservation as a first step”.
Dr Mark Coen, lecturer in law at University College Dublin, said the legislation represented a “significant change in attitude to these records ... The State is signalling these are not private records. [These] records would have been in the past regarded as totally private.”
He was speaking “as someone [who] found significant financial records on the Donnybrook laundry on the Donnybrook laundry site in 2018 in a building prone to vandalism and full of pigeons. We are aware of other examples where on an ongoing basis people are finding records.”
The rush to complete passage of the legislation was nothing to do with an impending general election, said the Minister, but due to reports of records being found stored “rotting and moulding” in derelict buildings, on display as curiosities in pubs and in other cases “wilfully destroyed”.
“I know how absolutely vital information is to people who may not have had a full picture of their past or their own identity and that for far too long that information was kept hidden,” he said. “The story of Ireland’s dark past must not be forgotten and it’s incumbent on all of us to ensure future generations can understand the horror of Ireland’s history of institutional abuse.”
Representative groups for survivors urged “all politicians” to support the “long overdue” records preservation legislation.
The special advocate for survivors, Patricia Carey, said since she took up her position six months ago, access to records was the second most frequently raised issue by survivors. “I think [the legislation] is overdue. It’s a first step but it’s very, very positive.
“I would highlight records are not only held by religious but also those held by private [offices including solicitors and GPs]. It will open a vast array of private, personal histories and the history of the State ... will give a vehicle for institutions to once and for all to hand over records [to the National Archives],” she said.
The legislation would mirror similar legislation passed in Northern Ireland in 2022 ensuring “consistency” for survivors of institutional abuse on both sides of the Border, said Dr Maeve O’Rourke, lecturer in human rights at the Irish Centre for Human Rights and the School of Law in the University of Galway.
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