Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I wish to share time with Deputies Daly and Coppinger.

I welcome the Government's decision to establish a statutory commission of investigation into mother and baby homes. Such an inquiry is long overdue. That hundreds of children are buried in unmarked graves is not news. The fact of how mothers and babies were treated is not new. I wonder how the public who have known about it for so long feel about the politicians' wringing of hands now.

The Taoiseach told us that this was Ireland of the 1920s and 1960s, but I have a story from the 1980s, when the Taoiseach was already a Member of the Dáil. When my sister Mary was 19 she got pregnant. She went to a social worker here in Dublin and told her she was considering adoption as she was struggling with the idea of raising the child. She was put in contact by the social worker with CURA, a Catholic agency. After seven months, she decided she did not want to part with the child and would keep it. She returned to the social worker and told her. The social worker told her she was mad, ignorant and was putting the baby at risk. She was made cry before she left the room. She had her baby in Holles Street and five hours later there was a nun at the bedside with a form and a pen, pressuring her into signing. My sister did not give in. If she had, she might never have seen her daughter again. That was not the 1960s, it was the 1980s.

How do we treat our most vulnerable today?

Are we proud of how we treat the 4,000 people in direct provision? Are we proud of how we export 4,000 young women each year to terminate pregnancies abroad? Are we proud of how we treated single mothers, those who find the strength to raise their children alone? In April 2012, the Minister for Social Protection announced that she would not proceed with changes to the one-parent family payment unless a credible and bankable commitment to a Scandinavian-style child care system had been put in place. There was no new child care system but the reforms went ahead. Are we proud of how we treat our Traveller children? Some of them are now on the PULSE system while still infants. Have we treated them any better than the Aborigines were treated in Australia? Have we treated them any better than the American Indian was treated in North America?

Last week, the Minister for Health was quoted as saying: "This is a nation that stands on its own two feet and we will protect our children". The new Minister for Children and Youth Affairs feigned shock at the Tuam story, telling the media that it happened at a time when our children were not cherished as they should have been. This is not news. We have known about this. We play games and perform for the public. They are shocked because some of them have never heard it before, so we are shocked, but we are not shocked really because we knew about it. How much has changed? To what extent do we treat our children differently today compared with then?

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