Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Donegal North East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Whenever we start to digest the full horror of all the stories that have emerged not recently but for several years we must go back to its roots. Where did it all go wrong? What was at the root of it? Let us consider this building, in particular. We are surrounded by the leaders of the 1916 Rising and icons of our struggle for independence. They helped to formulate the Proclamation, the vision for the people, that is to be found in the main foyer and which represents the hopes and ambitions they had for the people. Their thoughts would have been framed by the Dublin of 1913, as reported on during the Lock-out, when the conditions of poverty were even worse than on the streets of Calcutta. The city had some of the most appalling examples of poverty in the world and that was the challenge that faced the new State. We thought we had had a revolution. We thought we would develop a state of which we could be proud and that would address this poverty with real gusto. What we got was a counter-revolution. What we got was people who were mean and cruel in their conservatism, who wanted to control the lives of others. They turned the colonial institutions that had been so hated by the people into even worse manifestations of what they had been previously.

The people who ran these institutions professed to be Christian. I am a Christian and have faith in Christ. When I think of Christ, I think of love, empathy, compassion and everything that could be beautiful and challenging about this life. I do not think of malice or cruelty. I do not think of a desire to isolate and punish vulnerable women, push them away, take their children from them or have them adopted, vaccinated or let them die from malnutrition. All of this was for some ideology or to adhere to the teachings of Christ and this is what was done in our name. We are all part of it because we knew it was happening in our communities. We knew about the young women who had been banished to these institutions. We knew about the children who had escaped and had subsequently been sent back to these institutions. There had to have been reports in newspapers.

Where were the coroners? Were there coroners' reports into these deaths and were they published in local newspapers?

This is the great shame of our people. It is based on a deeply conservative, malicious and cruel interpretation of faith, one that seeks to imprison people rather than liberate them, one that seeks to be cruel to them rather than give them the love, empathy and compassion they deserve.

Government after Government protest when they must deal with issues like this. We will have another commission and more findings, speeches and apologies from the Taoiseach in the Dáil. However, the response in the case of Bethany Home is, given the overwhelming evidence, a denial of what happened in the name of the State and a failure to vindicate that handful of people who need to be told they were right. We on this side of the House know they are right. Will this issue be addressed? Will the Government's actions match the noble words often voiced by the Taoiseach? This is the challenge. Will the Magdalen women get their full recompense speedily? Will we acknowledge that there was a conservative counter-revolution that hijacked the promise from ordinary, working class people? It was hijacked by a mean, cruel and conservative political establishment. Will it be acknowledged that all of this was part of a collective abuse of the people and their hopes and ambitions? I recall Professor Diarmaid Ferriter's series, which documented in the most brilliant and obvious fashion the counter-revolution that took place in this State. It was that environment of meanness, cruelty and narrow-mindedness that failed our people. Only when we own up to it can we set free ourselves, those women and those souls.

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