Gerry Adams (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I have two questions, one about Bethany Home and the other about charities linked to the churches. I am sure the Taoiseach knows and appreciates very much that charities are in the front line in helping families and citizens who are badly affected by the Government's austerity policies. These charities are now facing very great pressures on their resources. The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul has revealed that calls for assistance have more than doubled since 2009 and that it is struggling to meet the €40 million cost of providing help for needy families.

We are in a new era where it is not just those on social welfare who suffer from poverty or from disadvantage because many people in low paid employment, the self-employed and some people who are in good employment are facing debts they cannot handle because of the impact of the economic crisis brought to us courtesy of Fianna Fáil and its cronies and, subsequently, by the Taoiseach's Government's policies. We are told by the Central Statistics Office that almost 750,000 people in the State are living in poverty. As I said earlier, the controversy, and the Taoiseach reflected this in some of his remarks, surrounding top-up payments from charities to their executives has a disproportionate and unfair impact upon all those very good people trying to raise funds for good causes. Will the Taoiseach join me in commending the good work of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and all those other charities that work so hard to help people, particularly as we face into Christmas?

Has the Taoiseach had an opportunity to raise the issue of Bethany Home with the church leaders? As the Dáil rose for the summer recess this year the Government announced it did not intend to offer an apology or redress to the small number of men and women who survived their time in Bethany Home. That was announced outside the Dáil. I have not got my head around the reason the Taoiseach will not extend an apology or bring forward a redress scheme and why he ignored the Dáil when this statement was made outside of these precincts.

Bethany Home in Rathgar was not simply a mother and baby home, and any attempt by the Government to present it as such is deeply misleading. It was a Protestant maternity home, a children's home and a place of detention for women on remand or convicted of crimes referred to the home by the courts. It was excluded from the residential institutions redress scheme on the basis that Bethany was a private home for which the State did not have responsibility. As a consequence, the survivors have also been excluded from the statutory trust fund that is the redress mechanism to replace the Residential Institutions Redress Board. That is very unfair. A very small number of people are involved. The State had responsibility for Bethany Home as it was subject to State inspections under the Registration of Maternity Homes Act 1934. The State also made a financial contribution to the cost of the nursing of children in some cases.

There is a wealth of information in the public domain detailing the barbaric neglect experienced by children in the home and in the homes to which they were temporarily fostered, including Department of Local Government and public health inspector reports, and media reports of the time. There are no great secrets around much of this issue. Such was the neglect that between 1922 and 1949, 219 Bethany Home children died, and they lie in unmarked graves in Mount Jerome cemetery in the city of Dublin.

The residents of Bethany Home were treated appallingly while they were there, and that is being compounded by not embracing them and by the refusal to treat them fairly and include them in a redress scheme. Will the Taoiseach take the opportunity to do the right thing - I stress that there are only a handful of survivors - and commit to a proper redress scheme for these citizens and an acknowledgement that what was done to them was wrong?

See this speech in context