Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Minister for Children and Youth Affairs will take note of all the comments and suggestions coming to him, including from the Deputy in respect of counselling services and a confidential telephone line. Obviously, the terms of reference for the investigation will need to be considered very carefully. I understand most of the information is available, but it needs to be collated and gone through. I honestly believe this is a much broader question about the kind of society in which our people lived from the foundation of the State until the early 1960s. I know from the part of the country I come from that there are implications in terms of what happened to children who were fostered, the vaccination issue, those who were forcibly signed into mental institutions by families, the banishing of young women from various locations around the country to have their babies in Liverpool or wherever else, if not in mother and baby homes, the mortality rates which were so high and the old buildings, the walls of which were infested with TB and whatever else. These are all issues that need to be considered in the context of the kind of society we had at the time. Essentially, this is about the kind of country Ireland was in which women, in particular, were the focus of shame and suppression. I think today of the late Nuala Fennell who served in this House and was the principal driver of the banishment of illegitimacy when babies born out of wedlock were deemed to be an inferior sub-species. That is one of the issues that will be dealt with. In so far as the Government and the House are concerned, this is about the country and its people. It is not about apportioning blame at any one location.

We can apologise to everybody, but where does it end? This was Ireland of the 1920s to the 1960s, an Ireland that might have been portrayed as having a glorious and brilliant past but which within its shadows contained all of these cases, and in which people felt ashamed and different and were suppressed and dominated. Obviously, the question of their treatment in the mother and baby homes is a central part of that, as were the issues identified in the Ryan report with regard to mother and baby homes, the fostering out of babies by institutions, and so on. It is another issue that we must deal with in 2014 to the best of our ability. In an attempt to get this as right as possible we will, through the programme being put together by the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, meet with everybody, including the historians and groups mentioned by Deputy Martin.

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