Anne Ferris (Wicklow, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Two weeks ago, I met my younger sister for tea across the road in the Merrion Hotel. It was an unusual day, but not because neither of us had taken the time to have tea in the very posh Merrion Hotel. It was unusual because it was the first time we had ever shared a pot of tea. Before that day two weeks ago, I had never laid eyes on my sister. Each of us was adopted from a different mother and baby home into different families and eventually, we ended up living in different countries. Sitting together, we looked like sisters but we did not talk like sisters. Where other sisters in our age group have shared experiences and a shared family history, we just have had a long gap in our lives. I never played childhood games with this sister. I never fought with her over toys. We never skipped together or climbed trees. She was not handed down my old clothes. We did not go to school together or to discos and nor did we fight over boys. She does not know my children and I have never met hers. We look very alike but thus far, that is the only aspect of our lives that we share.

What of our shared mother? I know, from the documented experiences of many women of her era, that women who bore more than one baby in a mother and baby home frequently were obliged to serve time in a Magdalen laundry. Perhaps our mother managed to avoid such a sentence by not choosing the same home twice for her confinement. The evidence, however, is that most women in her circumstances would have been made to pay their penance by toiling for years in one of Ireland's notorious laundries. Research carried out by the Magdalene Name Project and published just last week shows that in the year I was born, more than 60% of the Magdalen women, that is, six women in ten, whose names were recorded as inmates in two Dublin laundries subsequently also were recorded on headstones in Magdalen grave plots. These women did not leave the laundries alive.

My sister and I feel lucky. We were both adopted as babies into loving families but not everyone born in a mother and baby home was so lucky. The morning after I met my younger sister for the first time, I had the pleasure of meeting three beautiful intelligent women who had spent their entire childhood and teenage years to adulthood in religious-run institutions. They were born in the 1960s. Their fathers were doctors and black while their mothers were Irish and white. These mixed-race Irish children were not considered by the church or the State to be appropriate candidates for adoption. Their stories of racial discrimination, physical abuse and mental abuse are truly shocking. Having heard their stories and other stories from survivors and victims of abuse in Catholic institutions and Protestant-run institutions such as the Westbank Children's Home in Greystones in my constituency of Wicklow, I know I have been lucky.

I also am lucky in another important sense. As a Member of this House, I have the freedom within this debate to add my story to the public record. Many other people with similar backgrounds to mine had intended to come into the House at 4 p.m. for this debate and would have been barricaded behind the glass partition of the Visitors Gallery. They have not yet been offered the opportunity to have their voices and stories heard. Their stories, and what the future Ireland can learn from them, are the reason this commission of investigation is so important. Their stories, like my story and that of my sister, demonstrate why this must be a broad and all-embracing inquiry. The mother and baby homes, the adoption processes, the Magdalen laundries, the private nursing homes, the county homes, the church hierarchies, the religious organisations and the State all are part of a very large jigsaw puzzle that must be considered in its entirety. Until this is done openly, honestly and comprehensively, the gaps in the lives of families all over the country cannot begin to be filled.

I made a submission on the mother and baby commission to the Minister's predecessor, Deputy Charles Flanagan. He had professed a genuine interest in the subject and gave me certain commitments about his prioritisation of much-needed adoption legislation concerning both historic and modern day adoptions. One such commitment was to hold committee hearings into both closed and open adoption practices as part of the process. He told me that I would be invited to these hearings because as the Minister probably is aware, I recently introduced into the House my own Bill on open adoption, which has not yet been debated. There is a legitimate public concern about the recent turnover of Ministers in the Department of Children and Youth Affairs and in that context, I would welcome a commitment from the Minister to give the issues discussed here today his top priority. I acknowledge he has done that. This is one of the last items on the agenda before the House enters its summer recess and I hope it is one of the first items to which Members will return. Moreover, if the Minister needs any help over the summer months - I was delighted to hear he will be working over the summer to make sure he returns in September with the terms of inquiry - I will be available all summer to give him any assistance I can.

See this speech in context