Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

The publication of the Ryan report three weeks ago will, I hope, prove to be a watershed in Irish society. The five volumes of the report contain the personal testimonies of the shocking experiences of 1,090 men and women who were subjected to physical, sexual and emotional abuse, neglect and wanton cruelty in 216 schools and institutions.

We had all been made aware, through the vivid accounts of individual victims, that serious abuses had taken place but the full extent of that abuse was revealed for the first time in the Ryan report. It is fair to say that the sordid saga of the systematic abuse and neglect of children who were handed over by the State into the custody of religious institutions shocked Irish society to its very core.

This is not something we can dismiss as simply an unfortunate relic of earlier decades. Anyone who has met any of the individuals who suffered in these institutions, the survivor groups or who stood, as I did, and listened to speeches and watched the reaction of those in the crowd in Molesworth Street yesterday, will understand that the abuses carried out in these institutions have left a terrible legacy of pain and suffering. Our society at all levels, but primarily the Government and the Dáil, must look at the way in which the damage, the pain, the injustice inflicted on our children can be fully addressed.

The Labour Party considers this motion to be the first in a series of steps that must be taken. We accept that a collective expression of regret and apology for the failures of the State is an appropriate first step. We have, therefore, approached the motion before us in a non-partisan way and accepted a rather minimalist approach in order to secure all-party agreement. There is, however, much more than could be included and the Labour Party hopes to deal with some of these issues by way of motions or a Private Members' Bill in the near future.

One of the founding principles of the Irish Republic was to cherish the children of the nation equally. The report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse is damning evidence of the terrible consequences that flow from a failure to adhere to that principle. The systemic abuse, neglect and cruelty perpetrated against generations of children in church-run State institutions is a stain on the conscience of our nation. The sexual, physical and emotional abuse of children was not, as some have tried, and continue to try, to explain away as the isolated actions of some abusive individuals. As the Ryan report so clearly demonstrates, abuse was the culture of these institutions, not the exception.

Some people argue that we should not judge an earlier generation by the standards of the present day. It is said that those were harsher, poorer times and what is unacceptable now was commonplace then. I reject the urge to explain away the crimes committed against children in our country as if they were in some way normal and unexceptionable. The State could at every stage have done better and should have done better. At a time when the League of Nations was declaring that men and women of all nations "recognise that mankind owes to the child the best that it has to give", the new Irish State looked the other way.

Using an already outdated Act inherited from the British, the State kept in place the simplest and cheapest arrangements for dealing with children in poverty or distress. They were kept in place for the simplest and cheapest arguments, namely, that what is out of sight is out of mind; that what cannot be cured must be endured because, it was claimed, we could afford nothing better. We institutionalised, through court orders, a huge cohort of young children. Their future care was placed in the hands of men and women, many of whom were wholly incompetent to the task and some of whom were entirely unsuited.

It is easy, at this remove, to revise our history and to reattribute blame. It would be extremely easy to seek out a small number of vindictive, abusive paedophiles and to put the blame for all the damage that was done at their doors but we know this is not true. Yes, the religious congregations must bear a significant burden of responsibility. They were in charge of these institutions and the welfare of their inmates. They handed on a culture of severe corporal punishment from generation to generation of nuns and brothers who worked there. Senior members oversaw the movement of known, predatory paedophiles from one institution to another, protection which allowed them to sexually abuse children for years and even decades.

We know also that these children were sent to institutions by the courts of law. We know that injured children, with unexplained injuries, were sent from institutions to be treated in our hospitals and returned to the very same institutions. We know that our Government and its Ministers presided over a completely inadequate system of inspection for these institutions, institutions that were paid for and maintained by the State on behalf of everyone in this country. A blind eye was turned by all institutions of authority and by society at large. Again and again, the needs of the religious congregations which ran these institutions were put before the needs of the vulnerable children in their care, and not just by the congregations themselves.

That deference to authority and the silence it engendered cost tens of thousands of children their childhoods and, for many, their chance to live a full and healthy life as adults. Mr. Justice Ryan spelled this out in his report when he described how what he called the "deferential and submissive attitude" of the Department of Education towards the religious congregations "compromised its ability to carry out its statutory duty of inspection and monitoring of the schools."

The court of history will judge Ireland for abandoning its most vulnerable citizens and failing to question the authority of those who failed in their duty of care. However, while the majority may in the past have been able to hide behind the defence that the extent of the suffering behind the walls of industrial schools, orphanages and laundries was not known, we have no such defence today. The full horror – the systematic terror and abuse – that characterised the regimes in these religious-run, State institutions, is now there for all to see. We have a duty to make amends to their survivors. We can start by implementing, in full, the recommendations of the Ryan report but there are other outstanding issues of concern to the victims that must be addressed.

The Minister for Education and Science must amend the Redress Act to allow for late applications to the redress board. Many victims of institutional abuse are living abroad, in particular in Britain, and were not aware of the existence of the board or their eligibility to apply to it. They must not be failed a second time. We must look again at some of institutions that were excluded from the remit of the redress board, including the Magdalene Laundries and other smaller institutions. The victims' concerns that incarceration in these institutions could be regarded as leaving them with some sort of criminal records must be addressed. Those who were committed to these institutions were entirely innocent children and that must be publicly and unequivocally acknowledged by the State. Provision in law should be made for the erasure of such committals from the records of affected individuals, similar to the proposed erasure of spent convictions.

We must look again at the confidentiality obligation imposed on those who appeared before the redress board, which prevents them from repeating in public anything of the evidence they gave to the board.

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