Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I became very aware of the issue of the Tuam mother and baby home during the election campaign this time last year. I was canvassing in an area and was told a woman in a house wanted to see me. I went down to see her and spent half an hour with her. She told me she had been born in Tuam. Her earliest memory of growing up was hunger and how all the other little children that were with her were so hungry that sometimes they used to scrape bits of dirt off the walls and eat them.

It was horrific to sit for 30 minutes and listen to this lady about what her life was like and about her early memories of childhood. In most cases, people’s childhoods are joyous and happy. It is about the people one grows up with in a loving family; feeling cared for, sheltered and looked after. Her childhood was the direct opposite. It was about fear and the very worst horrors one could imagine. She told me how, during the three and half to four years that she was there, she was sent out at one stage to some kind of foster home - she was unsure what it was - where she was kept for a couple of months and then sent back to the home. She then ended up in an orphanage, I believe it was in Galway, where she stayed for many years and where again she felt like a slave. The other children around her all lived in fear of the people who ran the home; the nuns and the staff. The big irony in all of this is that we all know people who are in the religious life, be they nuns or priests, who are very caring, helpful and who have done great things, yet we have this scenario sitting alongside. This woman spoke about how they were always told that they were the product of sin and it was all about sin. It really shocked me that this was being used to abuse children. It was child abuse.

It was not just the religious. The Taoiseach has spoken about how the nuns did not come and drag these children from their homes and that the children were given up. The fact of the matter is that it was an oppressed society. Society and the culture of that time was very much dominated by Catholicism and the Catholic Church which created that oppression. The State worked hand in glove with it to make it happen. We have many thousands of victims of child abuse that was State sponsored and church sponsored. This lady told me how she and another girl escaped from the home in Galway and went to Dublin. They ended up working in a hospital washing dishes for two years before they got away to England. She told me that when they went on the boat to England, they cheered and danced because they were getting away from Ireland. They still lived in fear that they would be brought back to the home. Their stories need to be not just heard, but vindicated. We need a society that rises above all of this and the first step in making that happen is to ensure that whatever inquiries and institutions we set up to look at all of this does not just look back, but also looks forward in order to guarantee that these things can never happen again. When I was growing up I often wondered about Hitler, the Germans and what happened to the Jews and how he was able to do what he did. If one sits and thinks about it for a while, and when one thinks about the kind of Ireland we had, it is very easy to understand how people were able to do these things.

Sinn Féin will table amendments to the proposals and we certainly hope that some truth will come out. It is just so horrific, so terrible and such a shame on Ireland that we worked through all of this and that we were part of it. People say that they did not know about it. The truth is that everybody knew about it but they just did not look because they did not want to know. Some were afraid and some were fearful. At the end of all this, we have to come to a place where we can acknowledge that these are our people, the best of our people, and Ireland let them down. We allowed the church to do all of that. We must create a new society where none of those things can happen. I think of refugees today – I met them in many of the direct provision centres - and their situation is not that much different in 2017. We have a long road to go but let us make the start together. I know the Minister has her heart in this and that she wants to do the right thing. She will have the support of everyone here and in the country to do the right thing, but she should not be held back by some legality that somebody may throw up. This is what they are going to do. They will come up with every excuse as to why we cannot do this, for example, that the State would be exposed to this, that or the other. These women and children were exposed to the greatest horrors known to mankind and we must do the right thing.

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