Kathleen Lynch (Cork North Central, Labour)

I wish to share time with Deputy Rabbitte.

Following on from the previous speaker, one positive action the Pope could take would be to instruct his flock that complaints of sexual abuse be automatically referred to the Garda or the relevant police authority. That is something that could be done immediately.

It struck me that the people who have been to the forefront of bringing this horror to our attention call this the Irish holocaust. I sat and thought about that for a while. Just after the Second World War a study was done in Germany on how people could allow such awful things to happen to their neighbours - the people they worked with, the people they went to school with, the people they met every day, in some cases, the people they were married to, and those their children played with.

The study concluded that it is quite easy to do this if people are dehumanised. First, one takes away a person's first name so that one addresses him or her with his or her formal second name and then one groups people as if the group has no personality, as, for instance, in the case of the Jews, but in this case the Irish poor. Once you start talking about people in those terms it is quite easy to do anything to them. They are less than human and, therefore, it is okay. Like the mangy dog, once one dehumanises someone one can simply do what one likes to him or her and it does not impinge on one's consciousness, and that is what happened here.

I listened to every speaker here today. They keep speaking about this awful thing that happened to all our children. It did not happen to all our children. It did not happen to the children of the middle classes. It did not happen to the children of the educated classes. It happened to the children of the poor.

On asking why did someone did not shout "Stop", who was there to shout "Stop"? I can still remember my mother telling me about the terror there was when the cruelty man came to the street. There was terror because this man had the power to take people's children. Despite the fact that one was poor and one's children may not have been dressed to perfection, they were very much loved, and we forget that sometimes. These children were taken from women who never got over it.

For a number of years, although not recently, I went on a Saturday morning, usually once a month, to the Daisy Café in Notting Hill in London to an afternoon meeting of people who had escaped from Ireland having been in institutions. How they escaped, and how they got through that hell of the boat and the train and did not get picked up by further perverts, and perhaps people who wanted to put them into prostitution and all sorts of things, always amazed me because they did not have an education, confidence or the wherewithal to protect themselves. What they had was the survival instinct because that is what they are - survivors.

All those people wanted to do was talk. One woman told me does not know when her birthday is. Imagine not knowing that. All I ever do when I think about these matters is close my eyes and imagine it happening to one of my children or grandchildren. That is all one has to do to know what it must have felt like. Those groups supported one another, and they did survive. Maybe they did not have the lives they could have had but they survived; they survived because they had one another and they clung together.

The niece of one of those involved in that group wrote to me. As I do not want to identify him, I will leave gaps. She wrote:

I am writing with regard to my nephew, ..., to briefly recount my memories of the short time that he spent in the family household ...

[His] mother ... is only 11 months younger than myself. We were very close to one another, so I was terribly shocked, as were all the family, when she became pregnant at ... [a very young] age. I never knew what had happened to her, or who the father of the child was. I just remember missing her during the two years that she went away ... to have her baby.

Approximately two years later the girl returned with this woman's nephew and came to live in their house. The letter continues:

He was a lovely child and I was very relieved to see my sister. We loved her child, as I did all of my other siblings. I helped [her] to care for him. We were:a large family, but no child in our home was ever cold, hungry or unloved.

Although I do not know why it came about, I was actually at home the day that the police sergeant, accompanied by another official unknown to me, came in from [the town] to take [him] away from the family home. It was a heartbreaking moment, but in those days it was very hard to speak out against any authority. I felt desperate at what had happened, that he was taken away from all of us, while [his mother] was out of the house working. It just seemed that we had to accept the situation and get on with our lives.

Over the years I often wondered what had happened to [him], but as it was such a traumatic experience for [his mother], it was never discussed openly. Yet I often wished that I had tried to trace him while I was young.

Just before Christmas in 2005 I had the opportunity to meet [him] again, after more than half a century had gone by. To meet such a kind and gentle person was a true pleasure, yet I felt so sad and angry when I discovered the life that he had lived as a child growing up in the orphanages in Kilkenny and Cork. Also, to read certain comments recorded on documentation from those times, that the reason [he] was removed was because he was found wandering and destitute is particularly outrageous to me.

This story has been repeated time and time again. Were I to tell the Minister of State, Deputy Curran, the young girl's age when she had her baby, he and I would know that she is still alive. Certain people should be included in the redress scheme, namely, the women in the Magdalen laundries. Women still live in the one in Cork because they are so institutionalised that they cannot live independently.

Mothers and fathers, including those who are still alive, were deprived of their children. What we did was outrageous, but not all of us did it. Those parents had no part in institutionalising their children, nor did the poor, but people outside the religious orders played a definite part, namely, the local sergeant, the community nurse, the local magistrate of district justice, the local busy body-----

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