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

I am delighted to be able to speak on this issue. I thought long and hard about whether to actually put my name forward to speak because, like other people, it is very difficult for me to be unemotional, rational, logical and have an intellectual discussion about this. Others have spoken about their backgrounds and in the discussions we have had with different people, it is very hard to separate the emotion from what happened.

We are talking about a regime, a system that was established by someone. It was established by the State and the religious orders. Someone came up with these ideas. I heard someone talking last night about the burials of the children. These children were not buried. They were dumped in sewers. That shocks me most of all. If one looks at any tribe in the world, even cannibals, would they do that to their children? I do not think so.

Who came up with this idea? Did they think what they were doing was right? Right for who? For what? We clearly dehumanised these people - they were treated like sub-humans. People can say that this happened in the past and that it did not happen on our watch. They can say we did not know about it and so on. We can come up with all sorts of excuses. However, many of these mother and baby homes were still in existence right up to the 1990s. It is not 100 years ago; it happened in the recent past.

What do we need to do? First of all, we need to stop excluding different groups and individuals from these investigations. That is the worst thing we have done in this whole process. In the 2000s, when different investigations were being talked about, we kept excluding people. I remember talking to one of the people who works in the Oireachtas and he asked me if they were going to mention Artane because he had been there. This man bawled in front of me and he told me about his experiences in Artane. While out socially, I have met other people in the same boat. They have come up to me and started telling the story of what they went through - the starvation, abuse, malnutrition and the fact their spirit was broken. That is what we did. We stripped people and took their clothes away. We took their identity, beat them and starved them. This was all done for what was supposed to be the greater good of some individuals or idea.

What can we do now? The most important thing is that we can listen. It is all very well talking about transparency but if we do not allow people access to their own files, how can we have transparency in these matters? We need to have a system where people can give evidence and get a sense that someone is listening to them. When one talks to survivors, people who have came out of this awful situation, nine times out of ten they are even more hurt now than they were at the start of this process. We are doing something wrong.

In regard to Tuam, the gardaí and the coroner should seal off the site. The big question is, will that happen? What are we going to do about the other sites that have been identified? These are simple things we can do as legislators if we are really genuine about trying to do something.

Our party put forward the idea of the truth commission. People can tear it apart if they wish. It is an idea to complement the investigation that is going on, which people are saying is not working for them. If we are to have transparency and openness, the interim report should be released.

Those jumbled thoughts are some of the things I want to say. As I said at the start, I did not really want to talk on this issue. However, it is important that everyone raises his or her voice for those people who will probably never have the opportunity to be in here or be listened to. It is for those people that I am standing here today and saying to the Minister that we need to do things differently. It is about transparency and transformative measures that will make sure this never happens again. If we act collectively, we can come up with a better model than the one which we have been reproducing time after time.

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