Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Yes. I will be sharing time with Deputy Seamus Healy and members of the Social Democrats, should they arrive.

When we look back to the foundation of our State and the way we treated our most vulnerable people, it was the academics Eoin O'Sullivan and Ian O'Donnell who described it as the "casual disregard [we had] for the quality of life of vulnerable citizens [which] characterised the formative decades of [our] State". Its history is well recorded. Between 1926 and 1951, 1% of our population, or 31,000 people, were held in a variety of different institutions. They were, in effect, incarcerated in industrial schools, mental hospitals and Magdalen laundries. Rather than creating the Gaelic Eden de Valera described of comely maidens at the firesides and athletic youths dancing at the crossroads, we had, in truth, created what Sean Ó Faoláin described as a dreary Eden. It is welcome that we moved on from that. True to the kind of progressive policy of creating a social welfare Keynesian state of other countries, we escaped from that narrow and repressive sense of how we look after our most vulnerable people to a better, more inclusive and caring way.

I want to pick out some examples of where I think we need to go further. I am very glad that the Minister of State, Deputy Finian McGrath, is in the Minister's chair.

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