News & Events Dr Maeve O'Rourke Influences New Legislation

On Monday 28 October 2024, the President of Ireland signed into law groundbreaking records preservation legislation. The Maternity Protection, Employment Equality and Preservation of Certain Records Act 2024 makes it a criminal offence to destroy, fail to preserve, remove from the jurisdiction, or fail to give the Director of the National Archives of Ireland an account of, privately held records relating to Ireland’s institutional and family separation system and the religious and other bodies that operated it. 

Dr Maeve O’Rourke advocated for and influenced the content of this legislation, which was introduced by the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Roderic O’Gorman TD. Dr O’Rourke worked together with Dr Mark Coen, Dr Claire McGettrick and Professor Katherine O’Donnell of University College Dublin and Professor James M Smith of Boston College. 

Following the recommendations of the Northern Ireland independent Truth Recovery Design Panel, of which Dr O’Rourke was a member, legislation requiring the preservation of historical institutional records was passed in Northern Ireland in 2022. Dr O’Rourke’s jointly authored report, which drew on the views of more than 100 victim-survivors, emphasised the importance of records preservation as a first step to information access regarding the abuses perpetrated in Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby institutions, Workhouses, and the related family separation system. 

Further impetus for similar legislation in the Republic of Ireland arose with the publication of A Dublin Magdalene Laundry: Donnybrook and Church-State Power in Ireland (Bloomsbury 2023), which Dr O’Rourke co-edited with Dr Mark Coen and Prof Katherine O’Donnell. In particular, Mark Coen’s discovery in 2018 of several decades’ worth of financial records and correspondence on the site of the former Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry—records which the McAleese Committee to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalen Laundries asserted ‘did not survive’—demonstrated the precarious state of these records and archives, which are essential to truth-telling and other pillars of transitional justice in Ireland today. 

Dr O’Rourke’s previous work includes extensive academic research and human rights-focused advocacy contributing to the Birth Information and Tracing Act 2022 and to the Irish Government’s commitment to a future National Centre for Research and Remembrance at the site of the former Magdalene Laundry at Sean McDermott Street in Dublin 1 (discussed in Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A Campaign for Justice (IB Tauris/Bloomsbury 2021). Dr O’Rourke has further worked with LLM students in the Human Rights Law Clinic at the Irish Centre for Human Rights to educate the public about, and to assist affected people to access archives held by those involved in, the institutional and family separation system. 

See further: 

• LLM Students Create Website to Help Industrial and Reformatory School Survivors Access their Personal Records
• LLM students create public education resources concerning Dublin’s Sean McDermott Street Magdalene Laundry site
• LLM students publish secondary school teaching materials on Ireland’s institutional abuses