Decision on infant remains found at Tuam mother and baby home due within weeks
A memo will go to the Government “in the coming weeks” outlining how to deal with the infant remains found at the site of the former mother and baby home in Tuam.
Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone also told the Dáil the final report of the “scoping exercise” investigating the scale of illegal birth registrations has been delayed until the middle of December.
Ms Zappone is waiting on a report from Geoffrey Shannon, the special rapporteur on child protection, on the human rights issues arising from the discovery at Tuam. A decision on what to do with the site after the Cabinet examines this report is due this month.
The scoping exercise was announced by Ms Zappone at the end of May following the discovery by Tusla of 126 cases in which births were illegally registered between 1946 and 1969 in the records of St Patrick’s Guild. The records transferred to the agency in 2016.
It is being led by independent reviewer Marion Reynolds and will involve the Adoption Authority of Ireland (AAI) and Tusla.
It was due to publish its report at the end of October but Ms Zappone said the report would now not be ready until the middle of December. She said the delay was due to a “very complex task and issues have arisen in relation to data protection and GDPR”.
She said: “I want to get to the truth and I believe that further analysis which has commenced, together with the ongoing work of the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes, will be extremely important in helping us to shape the further steps to be taken.
The Department of Children and Youth Affairs has declined to reveal the sample size of the 150,000 records to be examined or the methodology.
The scoping exercise has also been criticised for being focused only on illegal registrations and not all forms of illegal adoption.
Ms Zappone was asked why her department has failed to launch an investigation into illegal adoptions before now and why it has not initiated a full audit of adoption records.
The has revealed issues around illegal adoptions for many years, including the fact that the regulatory body for adoption, the AAI, warned the department about the scale of the problem in 2011, 2013, and in 2015.
In 2015, it sent the department a detailed spreadsheet containing 90 cases that it felt represented illegal registrations. This information was not acted upon at that time.
Ms Zappone defended the actions of her department, stating that the AAI information supplied to it did not contain sufficient evidence to be confirmed as illegal registrations.
As I said on my press statement of May 29, [the AAI] is examining these unconfirmed cases further to see if any further facts can be established but it’s really difficult to prove these cases in the absence of good records,” she said.
“But, if the AAI, following this validation exercise, reaches the high level of certainty that I have spoken of, these cases will be added to the 126 that have already been confirmed and announced by me.”
Ms Zappone also said that she is still awaiting a reply to a letter she gave Pope Francis last month about the need for the Church to “contribute substantially” towards the cost of whatever is done to deal with babies’ remains at Tuam.
