Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I, personally, along with everyone in this House who has the benefit of living in a more enlightened time than that of our grandparents, automatically and instinctively empathise and sympathise with the people who had the experience of being abandoned, for whatever reason, and placed into child care homes, which were cold places for any child who could have expected to be brought up in a loving environment. The State looked back on the record of our predecessors, our forebears in this Chamber and those responsible for placing, with the authority of the State, people into institutions which subsequently turned out to be places of extraordinarily abuse. We are all familiar with that. I have had some experience in this regard and I have to say that the Government has not been satisfied that in the case of the people who were placed in the Bethany Home and who had a very difficult and harsh experience, which no one can excuse, agents of the State were responsible for placing those people into those homes.

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