As someone who has worked with oral testimonies - which are often with marginalized groups of people on sensitive subjects - I cannot understand the ethics this commission was working under. There are so many examples of bad practice https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-40217036.html

When you conduct interviews it is best practice to let the person you were recording with see a transcript of the recordings not only to allow for inaccuracies to be resolved but also to allow them to redact anything they aren’t comfortable with. This should have been standard.

Any one working with personal data that could identify the person involved - it does not need to be named but just identifying details - should provide details of how it will be treated. That is, the interviewees should have been told what would happen to the recordings.

The point of GDPR legislation is to allow the person whose data is being held to control what happens to it, so they have the right to be forgotten. This doesn’t mean that you simple discard their data without informing them. Key is their knowledge and consent as to what happens.

Lastly, I know no researcher who would plan to discard their data before the final results are published, especially when paraphrasing and selectively quoting from the words of such a large number of people. The recordings should have been retained for a period after publication.

Also: don’t use legislation as an excuse for bad practice. A lot of us groan about GDPR - it can make the process of working with people more fraught - but essentially it exists to protect everyone and shouldn’t be used as an excuse for prematurely destroying data.