Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to make a contribution to this, although sometimes I tire listening to my own voice. I am not here for myself but for those who feel exasperation on the ground. I admit from the outset that I have a particular personal interest besides a professional interest in the past.

I welcome that there will be a report in March and that the Minister has opted for a full forensic examination of the Tuam site. However, I do not welcome the way this has been handled, with details of an extension being sought published by Mr. Patsy McGarry in The Irish Timeson 9 January. I do not know who is responsible for that but I am afraid the Minister must carry the can. It is not the way it should have been done. I do not know how that got out and the independent commission clearly could not have done it. It would be serious if it was responsible so I will presume it was not, but who did this and how did the details emerge in that manner? Have we learned nothing?

It is important to consider the timeline. I was about to say the remains of "approximately 800" children were found but I thought how wrong of me it would be to do something like that. There were remains from 796 children discovered in 2014 arising from the extremely important work of Catherine Corless. That work was not easy. I will not go back into it but it was the beginning of the process. We are uncovering the layers of secrecy in Irish society, along with the layers of shame heaped upon women. I often wonder how we, as women, emerged sane from this or how we can have any sanity after the way we were treated. I certainly came up towards the tail end of such a background. With the brave work of Catherine Corless, we finally had some action from the Government on 4 June 2014, when it announced it was to bring together representatives from various organisations and that an inquiry would take place. On 16 July 2014, which is more than four years ago, the Government announced that Judge Yvonne Murphy would chair a commission. I will not get into the details, which we know.

My difficulty is that deadlines were given from day one but they were never met. There was foolishness with the confidential committee report, a social history report and a substantial report, as all the deadlines were missed. One can imagine that with something as important as this, trust should be of utmost priority. There was no trust. People could not even trust birth or death certs. We could trust nothing and the people for whom I stand here had no trust in anything. A commission was set up but there is no trust either in the process of reporting on that commission, with deadline after deadline missed. There is a final request to extend it another year to 2020.

The first interim report concerned the revision of the timeframe for the reports. There was no change to the statement on costs or anything like that and that was agreed to. The second interim report is a little more important. It made a recommendation to the Government, which it duly ignored. Trust once again went out the window. It was given to the Minister in September 2016 and was published in April 2017. There is no explanation for that delay and no understanding of what that did to people’s confidence. The report clearly stated that those babies and children who were unaccompanied should not be distinguished from those who had received redress from the Residential Institutions Redress Board, those who had spent time in institutions. It is a distinction I do not agree with but I can see where it is coming from. If the Government wanted to show good faith and restore confidence it could deal with the implications of that, rather than make a glib response that the time for the redress board had closed. That was a golden opportunity that did not happen.

The third interim report was submitted in September 2017 and published in December 2017, another inexplicable delay. That was to request an extension of a year. We agreed and the Government gave it that in our name. How could all of these extensions of time go ahead? I accept the work is complex and there is a pile of documentation but there has been no request for an increase in resources, staff or money. How could that happen? It was set up for a specific period and has gone far over that time yet there is no request for any increase in funding. That is very strange.

The fourth report stated that it was expected that all the meetings with individuals would be completed by January 2019. This is February. Has that happened? The revelation in the report that extensive material provided by the Departments of Health and of Children and Youth Affairs had only recently been provided to the commission was alarming. More of the blame, if that is the appropriate word, fell on the Health Service Executive, HSE. What are the reasons for this? The commission has been going on for four years and it is not clear why there was a delay in giving it the documentation and whether all documentation has been given.

The terms of reference go way back, yet the first tranche of discovery documentation was delivered in March 2017. This consisted of over 12,000 pages. The second tranche was delivered in March 2018 and consisted of over 54,000 pages. The fourth interim report stated:

it is difficult to understand how relatively recent documentation is not available. For example, the North Western Health Board, and subsequently the HSE, was intensively involved in the running of one of the institutions under investigation.

It mentions the institution and continues. Does the Minister have an answer for that in respect of specific documentation?

I have repeatedly highlighted a file note and confidential briefing documents in this Chamber. Every Government for the past few years has been utterly aware that something was seriously wrong in respect of mother and baby homes throughout the country. Much of that documentation and knowledge came from the McAleese inquiry into the Magdalen laundries. While it was not his brief to look into that, all of the information came to the surface, which may be a bad choice of words. I note the principal social worker for adoption in the west has been working on her own time. This is all outlined in this material, to which the Minister, the Government and the previous Governments were privy. It is a record of what they knew at the time. She is working on her own time and on her own dollar, an interesting choice of word bearing in mind where our children went, to try to piece together a bundle of information. She already has a database of up to 1,000 names but it is not clear yet whether they all relate to the ongoing examination of the Magdalen laundries or to the adoption of children by parents, possibly in the USA. It continues, for the information of the person in charge, "This may be a scandal that dwarfs other, more recent issues with the Church and State". There are serious questions about interference with death and birth certificates. We have a commission of investigation but there are unacceptable delays. We get a lot of padding from the Minister about collaborative justice. As someone who has been affected by this, but not as much as those who have closer relatives involved, I do not want filling on collaborative justice. The people on the ground who have spoken to me do not want it. They want knowledge and information at regular intervals to empower them. They were disempowered and this system continues to disempower them and to patronise them.

I do not think the Minister should stand over that. I do not think she is the type of person who will do so but unfortunately, that is what has happened. Patronising disempowerment continues by the very mechanisms that have been set up to undo what happened in the past. If we learn anything, the Minister should publish the report as quickly as possible when it becomes available in March. There should be an interim report on the substantive nature of what has been discovered by the commission. I see no reason why a substantive interim report cannot be published. There should be no more communication through The Irish Times, notwithstanding my respect for that newspaper. Communication should be directly with the people on the ground. Any report that comes into the Minister's hands should come into the Dáil within hours or days, depending on the schedule of the Dáil. There should be no more three and six-month delays. That is how the Minister will restore confidence in the system and empower the people on the ground.

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