A report on burial practices at Ireland’s main mother and baby homes has been described as “substantial” and will be published once survivors groups have been briefed.

The Government is looking at methods of justice used in post-apartheid South Africa and after Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile to address the mother and baby home scandal here.

Concern has been expressed that any evidence given to the Mother and Baby Homes Commission is not admissible in any future criminal proceedings.

Tens of thousands of people affected by the mother and baby homes scandal risk being excluded from a State investigation into the decades-long hidden crisis.

The Government’s high-profile investigation into the mother-and-baby homes scandal will have an “extremely broad scope” and may involve “interim reports during its lifetime”.

As a State, we are either unwilling or unable to face up to our past, and our shameful treatment of women, writes ConallÓ Fátharta

Detailed 80-year-old legislation gave Government a clear right to all records on child deaths and adoptions in mother-and-baby homes as they happened — but allowed "charities" to exempt themselves from the oversight.

The past spoke loudly this week reminding us all that we are no more than a culmination of circumstances, some noble others less so, some fortuitous others contrived.

As the Church plans to discuss erecting a memorial to the 800 babies and children in a mass burial site in Co Galway, the Adoption Rights Alliance has called for a public inquiry into all deaths of babies, children, and mothers at mother-and- baby homes around the country.