Tom Clonan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Martin and Caroline very much for coming here today. I thank them for sharing their story of their beautiful boy Stephen. I thank Nina for her contribution and a couple of things that were said really struck me.

In the earlier session, I spoke about our loss. We had five children, one of whom had a cord accident at birth and passed away. As I said this morning, she would have been 21 now. The more we talk about this topic, the more it brings me back. My mum passed away on 13 March 2003. She was only 67 and had cancer. We lost our little girl two weeks later. At the same time, we got a diagnosis of a rare neuromuscular disease for her brother Eoghan. He is now 22. He is a wheelchair user and partially sighted. As I said this morning, life does not stop when you have this kind of trauma. Everything else is going on as well and you have to try to cope with it. I would definitely say because of the way trauma expresses itself that you certainly need time. It might, though, not be within the week, the month or even the year of the loss itself. The literature on trauma is so comprehensive and I think it definitely relates to the experiences we have had.

In 1996, when I was a young officer in Lebanon, we had a very violent deployment. The Israelis came in, as they are doing today, and slaughtered the local population. I was in charge of what was called the battalion mobile reserve. We used to go out to provide security in these big armoured personnel carriers in breaks during the shelling. The engineers would come out and we would provide the security. They would have these big diesel generators and they would cut up the houses that had been hit by missiles or helicopter gunships, dig down into the rubble and pull out the bodies of entire families. These would include elderly people, middle-aged people, children and infants and the whole lot.

As young people witnessing that, we did not have time to process it. The support we were offered in the Army at the time was that at a certain point after a couple of weeks of this experience it was suggested that we go down to battalion headquarters. The Army chaplain was there and he said he would go through a decade of the rosary with us. Then you go home. Something Caroline said struck me. We did not come home the same people that we were when we left, although we might not have had as much of an insight as we ought to have had into that aspect. When we then lost our little girl Liadain seven years later, it was like a lightning-rod moment when we were in the Little Angels plot in Glasnevin Cemetery burying her. In a completely unexpected way that reconnected me to the experiences I had had seven years before in the Middle East.

The literature is really clear on this point. Trauma does not always give expression immediately. Often, there is a time delay. What can trigger trauma or a kind of a stress reaction in a person are other life events. In my case, all those years later, I lost my mum and my daughter and my son was diagnosed with a neuromuscular disease and I found myself at a point where I experienced the symptoms of PTSD, without having any insight into what was happening to me and not having the language or the vocabulary to describe it. It impacts people in that they become emotionally closed down and unavailable to their partner and other people. You are not there for your other children, the siblings.

I really think that having a 56-week limit for taking this type of leave is not correct. It should be up to each person who has experienced a loss to decide when and where they take that time, if they can get it. So much of what was said speaks directly to me. I agree with all the suggestions made. It was mentioned that you might notice a scent, see something unexpected in the environment, spot someone on the street, pass by a building, find yourself on a route in the car that you used to take when you were going for check-ups or scans or meet somebody who might have been on the team that dealt with you. You remember all these things. It might even be something in the cinema.

For me, one of the things where a memory jumped out unexpectedly was when I was at a graduation in DIT. I was lecturing there at the time. The president of the college called the graduating class of that year, 2007 or whenever it was, to come up and take their degrees. They were mostly young women. They all stood up. They were all there with their families and their parents and had their make-up on and their graduation gowns. You could actually smell the perfume coming up the aisle. The graduation was in St. Patrick's Cathedral. As they were all coming up the centre of the cathedral, it just hit me that my daughter would never do that and I realised what we had lost. There are these constant reminders, as was said, of birthdays, anniversaries, times of the year and life events and these will always be with us.

Anything we can do in legislation to support each other would be good. This experience impacts so many people. I am sure plenty of our colleagues listening to this debate remotely and so many people in the building have had this experience as well, but they would not have been permitted to take this type of leave. I was again struck by the language used and the reference to "misunderstood and disenfranchised forms of grief". We are not expected to talk about it. We are not given permission to talk about it. There is a kind of a hierarchy of loss around the age of a child in this regard. However, the witnesses and I know how real the loss is.

Féileacáin is doing great work. We had our experience in 2003 and, as I was explaining to the Cathaoirleach during the break, the midwives were brilliant and gave us great support. All the things mentioned about Féileacáin demonstrate that it is a powerful intervention, either before, during or after, for example, if people find out that a baby has died in utero. I commend all the members of Féileacáin and the people who support it on the work that is being done. It is such a powerful intervention at such a moment. I will never forget how the midwives interacted with us at the time of our loss and the little things they did. I am sure the witnesses will have heard about this. They had a little Polaroid camera to take pictures of Liadain, which we would never have thought of. They had a little dress for her as well. Of course, reflecting back on that now, you realise they had all those things because this happens often. This is common, so the more we talk about it, the better it will help people and help them to continue their lives.

I suspect that at some stage we will be reunited. I am not a religious person or anything like that, but I hope we are reunited with Stephen and Liadain. I also hope they are somewhere now having a good laugh at us sitting in here talking about things we do not really understand. I do not really have a question, as such. I just wish to support the amendments suggested. I thank the witnesses for coming here and I express solidarity with them.