Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I would like to know where is the Minister, Deputy Alan Shatter or indeed, his sidekick, the Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch who had so much to say last evening. I do not level that as a personal insult to the Minister of State, Deputy Perry, but it is quite clear he is not the member of the Government who should be seated, on his own, on the Government benches to take this debate.

We can draw conclusions from the absence of the Minister, Deputy Shatter and the Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch. Either they do not care about this issue or they are at some human level deeply aware and deeply ashamed of the action their Government is taking. I cannot be absolutely sure which motivates their absence from the Chamber but I hope that it is the second. I hope that when the lights are out and the microphones are off and both of those individuals, indeed every individual member of the Cabinet, along with those on the backbenches reflect for themselves, they will realise the injustice that is being done. This injustice is not in the past, not by those who ran a home, but in the here and now by the democratically elected Government of this State.

When it is boiled down, the Government's rationale for rejecting our motion is that Ireland was poor and things were tough. The Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, had a lot to say about that yesterday. This sentiment has been echoed from the Government benches.

In this impoverished Ireland, those who ran the Bethany Home were moved by what the Minister describes as charitable motives. The amendment the Government has brought before the House amounts to an apologiafor those who ran the Bethany Home, citing their charitable motivation and the poverty of Ireland in general at that time. There is no other possible interpretation of that amendment, and there is no other possible understanding of the contribution of the Minister, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, last night, re-affirmed in part by the Minister of State, Deputy Perry, this evening.

In the Bethany Home institution, children and babies, for the short time they were there, suffered. That is what happened. In that institution children and babies died at enormously high rates. My colleagues and others have referred to the remains of 219 small souls in Mount Jerome cemetery still in unmarked graves. Far from affirming, recognising or sympathising with the experiences of those children the Minister and this Government have belittled their experiences and set them aside because they are inconvenient for them. They seek to deny their experiences despite testimony from the small number of courageous survivors who have come forward, many of them, as the Minister of State will have heard in their own testimony, damaged and traumatised in their childhood and further dismayed and traumatised in adulthood by the failure of this Government to look their experiences in the eye and account and apologise for them.

Last night, the Minister, Deputy Lynch, accused the Sinn Féin Members of having our facts wrong. It is a measure of how pathetic and perverse her position on this matter is that she sought to zone in on the fact that we identified Bethany Home as being located in Rathgar and omitted to make reference to the fact, of which we are aware, that the home started its life in Blackhall Place, where it was located for 12 years. It moved to Rathgar in 1934. Incidentally, 1934 is also the year in which the registration of maternity homes legislation comes onto the Statute Book. The Minister, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, had the gall to stand in this Chamber and engage in that level of petty political point-scoring when we were seeking to discuss a matter of grave importance. Her position was pathetic and perverse.

I respectfully suggest to the Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, to the Minister, Deputy Alan Shatter, to the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste and all involved in this Government that they check their facts, and the facts are that Bethany Home was inspected by the State. The facts are that records held by the then Department of Local Government and public health inspectors' reports registered the level of neglect of children in the home, and subsequently in foster homes, when they were sent to what were called nurse mothers. The fact is that the State paid a subvention in many cases in respect of these nursing out foster care situations. Those are the facts, and the Ministers, Deputy Kathleen Lynch and Deputy Alan Shatter, up on their high horses, should dust down those facts and not pretend for another second that the State's fingerprints were not all over Bethany Home because the facts are that they were.

It is a fact also, and this is keenly felt by the survivors, that perhaps the sole action by this State to intervene in the Bethany Home was to ensure that Roman Catholic children were not admitted to it for fear that they might be transformed into Protestant children. That was the State's action in the face of sky high infant mortality rates and general child mortality rates. In the face of known and reported abuse and neglect the State sought to intervene to stop what it viewed as proselytizing activities, namely, turning Catholic children into Protestant children.

It is entirely wrong for anybody to argue that this motion is simply concerned with the past. As my colleague, Deputy Ó Snodaigh, said, wrongs done in the past cannot be undone, and therein lies the greatest tragedy. This is about now. This is about a very small group of survivors who experienced what can only be properly described as horrific trauma in childhood in institutions and subsequently in foster care arrangements inspected, overseen and known by the State. That is what happened. Even at this stage and at this remove from their trauma these people deserve the dignity of acknowledgement and the dignity of us, as elected legislators, saying "We have heard your story. We believe you. We acknowledge your hurt and as a State and a people, we apologise for that." That is what needs to happen.

Despite its posturing, this Government strenuously resisted affording that same dignity to the Magdalen women and but for the intervention of the United Nations Committee Against Torture, I dare say we might be standing in the Chamber this evening discussing the trauma of those women and girls.

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