The records from mother and baby homes, where more than 100,000 Irish women and children stayed between 1922 and 1998, are being held in a database which is “not fit for purpose” and which is not designed for the long-term preservation of the important documents.
Tusla has warned the Government that the system holding the records from the religious institutions, where 9,000 children died over 76 years, requires a “significant project to redevelop”.
The State child and family agency argued that it also needs a new archive system to hold adoption records and those related to identifying any remains found at the site of a former residential institution in Tuam, Co Galway.
Mother and baby homes were religious institutions where women who had children outside of marriage were sent by their families, local authorities or the Catholic Church.
RM Block
A six-year commission of investigation set up in 2015 found that 9,000 children had died at the “regimented” institutions, which was about 15 per cent of all the children that had passed through them.
Between the 1920s and 1960s the institutions did not save the lives of “illegitimate” children, and reduced the children’s chances of survival, it found.
The mother and baby home records were originally collected by the commission of investigation into what happened to women and children in mother and baby homes. When the commission finished its work in 2021, Tusla and its parent Government department, the Department of Children, became the custodians of the records.
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The Mother and Baby Institutions Payment Scheme Act 2023 allowed Tusla to use and share the records for the purpose of making payments to survivors of the institutions, and the Institutional Burials Act 2022 allowed it to share records to help identify any remains relating to the former mother and baby home in Tuam.
Kate Duggan, the chief executive of Tusla, wrote to the secretary general at the Department of Children last year to warn that her agency had not been aware of some of its obligations under the new laws.
Ms Duggan told Kevin McCarthy on September 3rd, 2024, that legal changes highlighted the “necessity for an investment in an appropriate digital archive solution”.
The existing archive of records from the homes, which was transferred to Tusla, is based on unsupported legacy software which was used by the commission and requires a “significant project to redevelop”.
“This project is required to ensure the long-term preservation of this data in a secure modern system,” Ms Duggan wrote.
She added that the system holding adoption records, which was set up by the Health Service Executive before 2014, was also in need of review.
Tusla argued that it had not received any additional funding to manage the archive, which it was maintaining using its existing resources.
It said it had a “best-efforts” attempt to share the data, which “is not ideal but is operating adequately”. Tusla asked the Department of Children to support a bid for funding for 2026 for a “a new digital archive system,” that will ensure the mother and baby home and adoption records “are preserved and are available for access as required”.
Tusla told The Irish Times that the replacement of the mother and baby home database “is a long-term phased initiative.” It said its current focus is “digitising and indexing of the State’s historical adoption records,” and it has done so for more than three million records over the last two years. It said that after this project is finished early next year, Tusla will “develop a proposal for a new digital solution to host all digitised archives, this proposal will be part of Tusla’s 2026 estimates submission” to the Department of Children.
In a statement, the Department of Children said “Budget 2026 provides an increase of €165 million, bringing the total budget for Tusla to over €1.3 billion. The department continues to work with Tusla to support the management and preservation of these records.”
