Abstract
Ireland’s new government is now considering a bill that would delete the records of institutional abuse survivors for at least 75 years.
“We’re all born with inalienable human rights, but ours were taken away and they haven’t been restored,” she said.
Ireland’s new government must now decide whether to proceed with the controversial Retention of Records Bill or to scrap it, as Harney and many other survivors would have them do. The bill proposes to “seal” all survivor testimony which was submitted in the 2000s to state investigations into abuse in residential institutions, all administrative records, and evidence relating to all operations in general – for at least 75 years.
“Why Ireland is insisting on this craziness… I mean it’s secrecy to the nth degree,” said Harney.
The bill does not provide for survivors to be given a copy of their own testimonies or asked whether they wish their testimonies to form part of the national historical record during their lifetimes.
Harney was one of four survivors who spoke to a joint parliamentary committee about the bill last November.
Consideration of the bill was deferred, and Fiona O’Loughlin, who was chair of the committee at the time, told Index: “I was moved to tears by the testimonies of the survivors.
“All we could do was defer it. We didn’t have the right to say ‘This can’t happen’.”
She said that Joe McHugh, then the education minister, and his department put “a lot of pressure” on the committee to try to convince them not to meet the survivors at the pre-legislative stage.
“But it was something that, as chair of the committee, I insisted on,” she said. “I think it was hugely, hugely important and it would have been completely wrong to go ahead and make a decision without having their input.”
The bill lapsed with the dissolution of parliament in January, prior to elections in February.
The decision about whether to continue with the bill now lies in the hands of the new minister for education, Norma Foley, who was appointed in June 2020. “I have no doubt that this proposed bill should not go ahead,” O’Loughlin told Foley in parliament on 28 July. But, as yet, Foley has given no indication of her intentions.
“What has the government got to hide?” Harney asked when she spoke to Index. “What is it? We don’t know. We don’t know why they’re doing this.”
Questions have been raised – not only by survivors but by academics, lawyers and archivists – about why the Irish government is seeking to adopt such draconian legislation. When introducing the bill in April 2019, McHugh claimed that it was needed in order to overturn current legislation which would see the destruction of the records.
But multiple legal experts contest this.
“The constitutional right to a ‘good name’ of those who might be seen as wrongdoers if records are released seems to be one rationale for the secrecy,” said Maeve O’Rourke, a lecturer at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, who has been working with and on behalf of survivors since 2009. “However, survivors’ legal rights to their own data, and to speak freely and participate in truthtelling, are not being given adequate, or any, effect.”
Harney, who is 71, and has been campaigning for the rights of survivors for more than 50 years, said: “I hate the word ‘victim’ or ‘survivor’, but that’s what they are – that’s what we are.”
She says that being allowed to access her records would “go a long, long way” towards healing the trauma she suffers every day.
But what she fears most about the enactment of the bill is that she and other survivors will die without seeing their documents.
“Even if they extend it for 10 years, for some of us that’ll be too late,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s the intention, but it sure feels like it for us.”
Harney, who has just finished writing her Master of Laws thesis, Denied Until They Die, is also concerned that the records will be with-held from academics and researchers.
“We are denying further generations the knowledge of what happened in their own country,” she said.
O’Rourke shares this concern. “Denying survivors the opportunity to place their testimonies – if they wish, voluntarily – in a national archive creates a risk that future generations will not learn of this history,” she said.
And Harney added: “The preponderance of protection is always on the side of the official entities of Ireland, the official bodies – the official and religious bodies. It has never been with the victims of abuse.”
CREDIT: Gillian Blease/Ikon
She is also concerned about the safekeeping of the records while they are in the hands of the state. In the late 1980s and 1990s she was told that many records, including some of her own, had been destroyed in a fire.
“I tell you what, we’re very lucky Ireland’s still standing, because the amount of fires that Ireland seems to have had when people are inquiring for their identities… The whole of Ireland should have been wiped out.”
When asked whether she believed her testimony to the parliamentary committee would make a difference, she said: “We know they heard us with respect, we know their intentions may be honourable – but intentions are not enough. We need action.
“All of them have stood up there and said ‘This is all wrong, we have to put this right’, and yet the one thing we want, the one thing that’s ours by right, is our access to identity,” she said, referring to the country’s political leaders.
“It’s as if we are being treated exactly the same as we were in the institutions: don’t speak, listen, and do what you’re told. We’re in charge and we’re going to give you this, and that’s it.”