SURVIVORS of institutional abuse "need a date" for a public apology, a Stormont committee has heard.
Fiona Ryan, Commissioner for Survivors of Institutional Abuse, pointed out that in January it will be nine years since the landmark Historical Institutional Abuse (HIA) inquiry began and five years since the HIA's report was published.
The inquiry made a series of recommendations, including a public apology to victims and a memorial.
Ms Ryan said survivors she had spoken to, including those now in their eighties, had carried a "lifetime burden of abuse".
She gave evidence to the Executive Office committee again yesterday after Wednesday's meeting had to be halted because several MLAs left.
The committee is responsible for overseeing the recommendations of the HIA inquiry which exposed serious sexual, physical and emotional abuse over decades at children's homes run by religious orders, charities and the state.
So far the redress board set up to compensate survivors has received around 2,199 applications, 1,663 of which had been decided upon.
Ms Ryan said yesterday a publicity campaign needed to be launched to let survivors know about redress and other services available to them.
She said any such campaign should include Britain, given that one in eight applications for redress and one in six applications for support from the Victims and Survivors Service are from survivors in Britain.
It was announced on Wednesday that a review of the redress scheme is being carried out after many survivors said the application process has retraumatised them.
Survivors said they had been "let down again" after Wednesday's committee meeting had to be stopped.
SDLP committee chair Sinéad McLaughlin again apologised to Ms Ryan and victims yesterday saying the committee was "sorry for the hurt that we have caused you".
She said it would be a "failure" if the executive did not offer an apology and complete a review of the redress process by the end of the current assembly mandate in mid-March.
Ms Ryan welcomed the apology but said survivors had experienced "a lifetime of their experiences being denied or minimised, their reality being rejected and a lifetime of carrying a burden which was never theirs to take on".
"What happened on Wednesday... brought up those feelings again," she said.
Ulster Unionist John Stewart said an apology to victims should be made on January 20 - the fifth anniversary of the publication of the HIA report.
Ms Ryan said "the important thing for all of us is that we need a date" for an apology.
However, she acknowledged that some victims felt any apology would be too little, too late, at this stage.
She said the process to set up a memorial had started but it "just stopped again in 2017".
She said she had spoken to the Arts Council about how a memorial can be taken forward.
"The first thing we need to do is engage with survivors to see what they want," she said.
