Ivana Bacik (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. I also welcome this debate and the publication last week of the report into mother and baby homes. Its publication and the subsequent apology by the Taoiseach have marked a painful but cathartic week for the survivors of the homes, their families and, indeed, all of us. It has exposed again the dark history of confinement and incarceration of women and children that has been such a feature of Irish society for so long.

All of us will reflect on the many reports we have seen over the years and on the extent of abuses of human rights of women and children they have exposed. There have been reports into abuse in industrial schools and Magdalen laundries. In the report under discussion, there are references to country homes as well as mother and baby homes. We are aware of psychiatric institution confinement. We know that for many decades of the 20th century, Ireland had the highest rate of confinement of citizens in the world. The majority of citizens in many of the institutions were women and children. We are aware of the shameful history of the collusion of church and State in judging and condemning women and girls who became pregnant outside marriage. All of us are mindful of the silence so eloquently described by Senator Seery Kearney.There was the silence related to the sexual abuse of children, the extent of rape documented in the confidential committee findings of this report and the absolute silence, despite the clear culpability of so many men, and then the cover-up and silence from church and State institutions. All of us are mindful of that. This report has really brought that out for all of us.

It brought back to me a personal memory from 1989 when I was aged 21 in Trinity students' union. The Minister will know the building in Trinity. As president of the students' union I received phone calls every day from young women and older women who were desperate because they were pregnant and felt they could not continue with the pregnancy in the culture that prevailed. This was in 1989, not the dim and distant 1950s. Those women were seeking information on abortion, information that was then denied to them by the Irish State and it was information on something that was condemned by the church. It is only in 2018, as we all know, that we finally moved to change the law on abortion. That to me was an experience that was deeply painful and that exposed the callous disregard for women and children from State and church authorities. We, as students, were denounced by priests from the pulpit at the time, including a priest who Senator Seery Kearney reminded me was later exposed for his own behaviour.

This report is cathartic. Clearly, however, there are flaws within it. The Minister spoke of the broken trust between the State and survivors. That trust was broken by the experience many survivors had in the homes. I pay tribute on behalf of the Labour Party and colleagues to the courage and tenacity of the many survivors who engaged with the report, came forward and spoke to the commission, and who have spoken in recent days about their experiences and given us much more of an insight into those experiences. Clearly, trust was broken as a result of their experiences but it was broken more recently by the leaking of the document about which others have spoken, which was appalling. It has been broken by the continued failure by the State to give survivors access to such basic information as their birth certificates. We need to move on that. It has also been broken, however, by the dismissive and often callous language used in the executive summary of the report. Senator Doherty and others called for a review of that language, which would be appropriate. It is unfortunate the executive summary does not do justice to the real wealth of detail and the true depth of experience of survivors disclosed in the substantive chapters of the report, which the Minister has acknowledged. If one reads the report, one finds it directly contradicts some of the rather dismissive findings in the executive summary. That is very problematic.

We owe a debt to the commission members undoubtedly, in particular, for the information and experiences disclosed through the confidential committee report and through the other substantive chapters of this 3,000-page report. We know from the report that a total of 56,000 women and 57,000 children passed through the institutions in the decades examined. We know, as Senator Boyhan has so eloquently described, that thousands more were resident or incarcerated in other institutions that were not subject to investigation by the commission. However, even within the commission sample we know that 9,000 babies died - a shocking figure - before their first birthday. That is an infant mortality rate of 15% or one in seven, an extraordinarily high death rate, reflecting the contempt with which mainstream Irish society appears to have held the women and children who were confined in the homes.

Others have spoken of the report's failure to clearly define the responsibility of State and church. I agree that saying the responsibility rests mainly with fathers and families neglects the power relations that the State and church had. It neglects the key point that it was the church and the State which shaped the culture of misogyny, the culture in which shame and secrecy attached to the women and children confined in the homes but a culture in which men escaped censure or sanction. The church and the Catholic Church in particular, although other churches are also implicated in the report as Senator Boyhan has said, was directly responsible for generating the moral context within which shame and secrecy prevailed. The State was directly responsible for failing to provide any support to women rejected by their families who were following church doctrine. It was not until Labour's Frank Cluskey introduced unmarried mothers' allowance in 1973 that the State formally acknowledged responsibility for the women so shamefully neglected for so many decades. I wish to return to the language used in the executive summary and to look, in particular, at three ways in which it fails to reflect the findings in the report, findings about which survivors have spoken so eloquently and powerfully, namely, those relating to physical abuse, forced labour and forced adoption. When one reads the findings, the confidential committee report and other chapters, the extent to which these practices were taking place in the institutions becomes clear. We learn within the report of the confidential committee in particular of the extent of physical, verbal and psychological abuse suffered by survivors, the widespread practices of forced labour or slavery to which they were subjected and the extent of the practice of coerced or forced adoption.

In the context of physical abuse, dismissive language is used in paragraphs 15 and 16 of the executive summary, which states: "there is no evidence of the sort of gross abuse that occurred in industrial schools. There are a small number of complaints of physical abuse." That is directly contradicted in the report of the confidential committee. On page 42 of the report we are told: "the abuse described was not just verbal; some witnesses told of being slapped, beaten and punched, with nuns shouting at them that this was their penance for sinful behaviour." Throughout the report, numerous further instances are given with regard to conditions in the homes. Children born in the homes also describe their experiences. The report relates the harrowing story of a child who lived in a home until the age of six. He was locked in a room and suffered lasting damage to his ears as a result of being boxed around the ears by a nun.

A later section on the birth experience contains particularly traumatic findings. Women recalled being verbally insulted, degraded and slapped during the process of giving birth. Pain relief was routinely withheld because birth pain was seen as retribution for becoming pregnant. Some women suffered long-lasting gynaecological conditions as a result of the abuses suffered during the giving of birth. How could one say there was no physical abuse?

On forced labour, the findings are again stark. Paragraph 15 of the executive summary states bluntly, "The women worked but they were generally doing the sort of work that they would have done at home". How callous is that? However, on page 41 of the report of the confidential committee it is stated, "mothers reported having to do physically exhausting work up to the verge of giving birth, or very soon ... immediately afterwards". The level of sadistic behaviour by the nuns in forcing the women to work is also widely reported to the confidential committee, with one survivor relating how she, "had just finished mopping a long corridor when the nun upended her bucket of dirty water and ordered: 'now clean it again!'" How can one say forced labour was not extensively practised in the institutions?

The phrase "forced adoption" has been somewhat controversial and, indeed, it is not used in the report. The commission states in the executive summary that some mothers signed forms consenting to adoption because they had no alternative, but it then states that there is no evidence that the consent was not full, free and informed. However, when one looks at the report of the confidential committee and at chapter 32, which provides a really comprehensive overview of adoption practices and law, one sees clear evidence in that regard. It is stated on page 88 of the report of the confidential committee that, "Some women reported a baby being 'snatched' from their arms before final adoption papers were completed", while other women describe having been effectively deceived into giving consent and signing papers while not knowing what they were signing. An extensive paragraph in chapter 32 describes the giving of consent by mothers who were themselves children. These women were minors under the age of 21, which was, of course, the age of majority until the 1980s, or mothers who were under the age of 18, yet their consent was treated as valid legal consent. Indeed, one survivor who came to me was one of those minors who allegedly gave consent.

I echo the call of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties for a broader investigation of the entire system of adoption. I accept that such an investigation was not within the remit of the commission, but it has done us a great service in outlining so clearly in the report of the confidential committee and in chapter 32 just how extensively women were coerced into giving babies up for adoption. It is unfortunate that fact is not reflected in the executive summary.

There are many other issues raised in the report, such as those relating to vaccine trials or contradictions with regard to discrimination against children of mixed race, that is, with a father of different ethnicity. There is no reference to the education of girls. Many of the women in the homes were schoolgirls.

I wish to put those remarks on the record. I very much welcome the action plan of the Government and I think the recommendations of the report are clear, albeit somewhat limited to information and redress. Earlier today, we in the Labour Party published a Bill on information and tracing which seeks to give adoptees the right to access their birth certificates. I will be sending a copy of the Bill to the Minister. It is a straightforward measure designed to amend the Adoption Act.

On redress, I ask the Minister to ensure that the church institutions pay up and that we do not have a repeat of what happened with the redress board established under the 2002 legislation. I thank the Minister for his attention and I apologise for going over time.