Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I have to say I find this whole issue extremely distressing, as do huge numbers of people. As Deputy McDonald has already done, I want to pay tribute to those who have campaigned for truth and justice on this issue. I am glad that we are at least close to the moment of vindication for those who suffered and died at the hands of the Bon Secours order in Tuam and the State that colluded with it in its systematic, immoral, inhumane of abuse of women and children over many years. Of course, the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam was part of a wider architecture of oppression, degradation, dehumanisation and, ultimately, murder of women and children. We need, even at this belated hour, justice and truth for the survivors and victims of that terrible regime of oppression, imprisonment, degradation, murder and exploitation - an immoral exploitation involving the sale and commodification of young babies who were sold for headage payments and sent to the United States and elsewhere.

This is particularly poignant for me because I was born in a mother and baby home. I was one of the lucky ones, although that is not something that I realised at the time. I was lucky to be adopted by a loving family, to have a decent upbringing and to finally be reunited with my own birth mother. However, even the latter had to happen against the resistance of the State and the religious orders who tried to prevent that reunification. This issue makes me think about what my fate could have been. It also makes me very conscious of the terrible fate that so many suffered, quite possibly also in the mother and baby home where I was born.

One of the things about which I am very conscious in all this is the issue of class, which has not been talked about enough. It was a brutal oppression of women and children but there was an overwhelming class dimension to it. The mothers who had children outside of marriage who were from poor or working class backgrounds were singled out for the worst treatment, exploitation and degradation. They were literally treated as sub-human. For women from slightly better-off backgrounds, the church still effectively enforced its rules, backed up by the State and forced the separation of mother and child and the adoption of that child but usually the treatment for those women was a bit better. The people who came from poor or working class backgrounds were essentially considered disposable. They were to be exploited and punished. Punishment was a very big part of what went on. There was punishment for sin but the punishment that was meted out to the poor women and children was of a particularly vicious and horrible kind. That is the legacy of this State.

I want to conclude on what we can and should do about this. At a very minimum, the Bon Secours order should be forced to pay for the memorial that has been requested. We need a full audit of everything that happened at Tuam. In particular, we need to know the fate of the more than 2,000 children who were sold or exported to the United States. We need a full uncovering of the truth about the 700 babies who lost their lives. We must do everything possible to uncover the truth but we need to go beyond that. The Bon Secours order needs to reconsider its entire existence. It has profited and continues to profit, to an extortionate level, from the support the State has given it through all this, while doing all this to people. The order continues to enjoy that support, as we saw with the recent visit of the Minister for Finance, Deputy Micheal Noonan, to the Bon Secours facility in Limerick. The congregational indemnity agreement needs to be scrapped and the religious orders must be forced to pay up to compensate the abuse victims.

Finally, I will make a call which I believe Fianna Fáil has echoed. The BonSecours hospitals, St. Vincent's Hospital, the Mater Private Hospital and other private, for-profit health institutions run by religious orders should be taken from them forthwith and brought under public control. That might have the spin-off effect of alleviating some of the pressure in the public health system but, more importantly, it would be just in the context of what they have done, particularly as the State supported them in doing it. We need the separation of church and State, particularly in the area of health care where these religious orders were relied on and were responsible for such horrific abuse, neglect, imprisonment and exploitation of women and children. If we do not do all this then frankly, all the weasel words will mean nothing. We must also stop mistreating children in direct provision and in the emergency homeless services, where this sort of treatment continues to be meted out to single mothers and the children of the poor and the less well off.

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