Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The story of Tuam's mother and baby home is appalling and horrific and its scale mind-numbing. It is difficult to read and even harder to understand. Can we truly say what happened is surprising? In 2002, when I came into the Dáil, there had been calls to investigate the horrific crimes committed in residential institutions. The focus was narrow. We had a partial apology from the Taoiseach at the time and established the redress board, the structures of which compounded the hurt, according to many of the victims. The State apologised to a certain section, but many groups were left out. From the first investigations and State apologies which cruelly left out the likes of the Magdalen laundries to the imperfect and selective McAleese inquiry which left out the likes of Bethany Home and others, we have seen the State continue to fail the tragic victims and survivors of various institutions. We failed them collectively once by leaving them out and we have continued to fail them to this day by denying them justice.

These appalling events did not happen in the dark distant past. Pregnant women were still being sent to the Magdalen laundries and mother and baby homes right up to the 1980s. Westbank in Greystones only closed in 2002. It is clear that gender, class and power were all at play. If a citizen was female, poor, lacked an education or had the audacity to challenge the religious ethos of the time which dominated the health and education systems, she was isolated and marginalised. Some were locked up, treated and used as prisoners and economic slaves. Women citizens were treated as a subspecies which was impure, tainted and even dangerous. The men who got many of these women pregnant did not lose their positions or standing in Irish society.

Women's children were starved and disease, including TB, was rampant. The child mortality rate was massively higher in these institutions than among the general public and the State allowed this to go on. Many babies born in these institutions were immediately taken from their mothers and put up for forced and illegal adoption as quickly as possible. Many of the survivors do not know what homes they were in. Can we apologise to them, even though they do not know from which institutions they came? Will we look at the possibility of including them? There are people who have a difficulty in obtaining passports and realise they were living under the wrong name through no fault of their own. We heard that children were treated as guinea pigs and used without consent in vaccine trials. Women and their children were ignored, abused and shunned in life and hidden away in death.

We must deal with this dark and difficult issue once and for all. No home or group should be left out of any inquiry and full powers must be provided for investigating authorities to ensure justice is done. We must learn from the past. With all of these inquiries and investigations, can we learn and improve? Can we do things differently? Can we be more inclusive? Will we continue to prolong the hurt experienced by the people concerned? We have a chance to be inclusive or exclusive. We have been exclusive in the past. Surely, it is time to include all homes in this process and that is what I urge the Government to do. The motion suggests the way forward. Surely, we can all work together to make this better. Perhaps, we might try to do things differently in the future. We have certainly done things in the wrong way in the past. There is an opportunity for us to do things differently collectively. I urge the Government to look clearly at what we are suggesting. Those who were hurt are the heroes. No one is here to sensationalise or make insensitive remarks, but it will be insensitive and wrong if we fail to include people who have been hurt.

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