Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The horror we have learned about regarding what happened in the mother and baby homes represents another dark chapter in a pretty bleak history in the State's treatment of children and women. It is a history of abuse, mistreatment, discrimination, and needless death and mortality. These are the most serious of failings by the State imaginable. Some of the facts that have been revealed about what happened in Tuam are horrifying, including 796 children dying in these institutions; infant mortality rates multiples of what the normal rates in the rest of society were; 474 children's bodies experimented on; thousands of children put up for adoption illegally; mass graves; and bodies found in septic tanks. It is really extraordinary.

While I welcome the interdepartmental report and the Government's commitment to a statutory commission, we need to remind ourselves that this has only come to light - as was the case with the Magdalen laundries, the industrial schools and Bethany Home, which has now been finally included - because the victims of this abuse from this long and dark period of our history fought for years in order to bring those issues to light. They fought against the resistance, indifference and denial of State and church institutions that did not want to know because they did not want to own up to what had gone on. Those groups and organisations are to be commended on that fight because without that fight this would not be happening.

In defining the terms of reference for the investigation to be set up, the Minister must take the lead from those organisations that represent the victims, the people who have campaigned and brought this to our attention. They feel the scope must be comprehensive and wide enough to include issues such as adoption and access to the identities - the lives, if one likes - that were stolen. It must cover all the institutions where people were imprisoned, locked away, hidden away and brushed under the carpet, and with it their identities, their lives and so on locked away, imprisoned and in many cases extinguished.

Much of the commentary in the report suggests we need to understand the history. While I accept we need to understand the history, let us not use history as an excuse to somehow sanitise what went on because all the way along there were people and political forces involved. While I do not want to politicise it overly, in historicising what happened we must remember there were people back then who were arguing against what was going on and the political establishment vilified those people, denied them and tried to undermine them. Let us think about Noel Browne and how the mother and child scheme was shot down by the political establishment and the church in cahoots with each other. We only got rid of the status of illegitimacy in the 1980s; Russia got rid of the status of illegitimacy in 1917 after a revolution, nearly 100 years before. There were people challenging these things all the way along the line and those people were vilified.

It is not just about the past, but also about the present. The situation in direct provision for children is absolutely shocking and the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs must look into it. The situation for our youth in mental health services at the moment is shocking also. Children who are suicidal are being sent home or put into adult facilities which are completely inappropriate. This is a scandal. It is not possible to find a bed in a mental health facility for a young person that is appropriate at the moment. These are shocking things that are happening right now. Children are still being neglected and abused and the State does not want to know until it is forced to look into it and admit things. Let us have a Government that is proactive in seeking out the truth about our treatment of children both in the past and in the present if we are to ensure these things are never to happen again.

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