Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

In recent days many people have been talking about nothing else other than the details of Tuam but we also all have a collective memory of having grown up and attended Catholic schools and lived in a Catholic-ridden State. I was talking to a friend who recalled how the nuns in her school used regularly to beat everybody but especially the Traveller girls, who were pulled down corridors by the hair. She never forgot the face on those Traveller girls as they were beaten and dragged through the school. The woman who recalled those incidents is younger than me and she has a vivid memory of what happened. If we search our memories we will all find evidence of the same kind of incidents.

Without being too dramatic I wish to refer to one extract from a journalist called Donal O’Keeffe. It is really incredible. It says everything about the church and in particular the Bon Secours order. He related that a healthy little boy called John Desmond Dolan was born in 1946 in the Tuam home. He died on Wednesday, 11 June 1947, when he was a year and three months old. He was described on his death certificate in the cruel language of the day as "a congenital idiot". In an inspection in April 1947 it was reported that he was "a miserable, emaciated child with voracious appetite and no control over bodily functions, probably mentally defective". That says it all about what we are dealing with here, namely, the legacy of the church and its handling of what at the time were described as unmarried mothers but what we consider a family today. A mother and her children, without a partner, are considered a family. That said, we do not treat them as equals because the statistics are startling and show that lone parents are more likely to live in poverty and suffer from homelessness than families with both a mother and father. There is a legacy still to be dealt with in terms of how we view women who try to rear their children on their own.

No matter how much we recoil over the historical facts, we must remind ourselves that we will be judged not by what we say but what we do.

11 o’clock

I nearly fell out of my chair yesterday morning when I heard Deputy Micheál Martin calling for two hospitals, the Mater and St. Vincent's, to be taken back into the control of the State because he has had a Damascene conversion and now believes church and State should be separated. I want to remind the world that it was Archbishop John Charles McQuaid and Eamon de Valera who established the Constitution that gave the Catholic Church the right to do what it did. It also gave the moral authority to everybody to see only the married family as central and sacrosanct and enshrined it in our Constitution.

We have to start making a change. That is why I will repeat my call that the Bon Secours order should disband and reconsider its position, just like Fianna Fáil should reconsider its position. There are historical legacies dealt with here. Until the church and the political parties complicit in all of this put their hands up and say it was their fault, they played a huge role in it and begin to take measures to deal with that, then we are only codding ourselves. I am not here to talk the talk, I want to walk the walk. I am calling on people to walk with me tomorrow and then stand outside the Bon Secours hospitals, silent and dignified, remembering these mothers and children. The demand will be that it should reconsider its position in this country and disband its organisation.

Interestingly, in the same interview yesterday, Deputy Micheál Martin did not mention the Bon Secours order because private enterprise makes lots of money and the latter is the biggest private medical care provider in this country. The god is profit, money and private enterprise. Accordingly, one does not criticises them, talk about them or challenge them. I want to challenge them, as do thousands of people in this country who are sickened by this memory and the fact that today we are not dealing with that legacy, either politically or morally.

When we look at our history and talk about change, yesterday, the streets were full of tens of thousands of young women and young men. They are demanding a different kind of Ireland. If we do not listen to them, we will be brushed aside by history itself and by the next generation. Thanks be to God for those young people because their determination is to utterly change this society. The next generation is demanding that the church get out of our schools, as Deputy Barry said, out of our hospitals, out of our beds and out of our lives. We are elected and we should begin that process to work with the young people to change the world.

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