Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Unlike Deputy Connolly, I have no respect for The Irish Timesbut the person whose article brought this information into the public domain is one of its better writers. It is the case that survivors of the mother and baby homes, not to mind politicians, should not be getting their information from The Irish Timesor any other media outlet.

This is an incredibly important issue. There is a certain irony in the fact that we are celebrating 100 years of this Parliament and of the Irish State and yet one of our biggest, dirtiest secrets has not been properly examined. It is part of what we are, the way in which women and their children were treated in this State and, as Deputy Joan Collins noted, working-class and poor women in particular. They were hidden behind walls, their babies in many instances were taken from them and they and their children have lived with that trauma to this day. We cannot develop as a State unless we fully acknowledge that and utilise the information available to the State to learn, apologise and give redress. Redress is not a question of money. In many instances it is an acknowledgment of the wrong. When we have raised these issues, the Taoiseach has got up and said sorry but that is not the same thing. It is not a full acknowledgment that we as a society have to take responsibility for this.

It is in that context that we have to examine the fourth interim report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation. In some ways it strikes me as incredibly similar to the children's hospital because the argument is the same. It is an acknowledgement that something has ended up different from the way in which it started out and that while it is not the way it was planned, it has now gone so far down the road that it would be an awful waste to pull back from that. It is a case of being kind of stuck with it, so the only thing that can be done is to go with the flow because it would be madness to waste all the work that is being done.

That is the same argument that was put forward last year. Deputies across this House accepted the bona fides of that argument in good faith, although they did not like it. The survivors certainly did not like it. They were seriously traumatised by that situation, but they accepted it because it was a rational argument to make that we have gone a long way and that the work is complicated. We cannot do that this time around. There is a difference a year on because we have had that conversation. Our job is now to ask whether it is really good enough to say that the commission has got this far and that we should let it finish off the work. We now have to ask why it did not complete the work in the time allotted. Was it that we got it wrong in laying down the terms of reference, because something is wrong? This commission was set up with a budget of €21 million and has run over time by two years. It has therefore rented nice offices on Baggot Street and employed people for two years longer than it was supposed to, yet the budget is unchanged. How could that be? The sums do not add up. Did we get the budget wrong or is something wrong now? I do not have an answer to that. We do not know how it has got this far. One can only draw two conclusions; either this is being done in a monumentally disastrous and ham-fisted way or something more cynical is afoot. They are the only two possible conclusions. This process has been handled so badly. Other Deputies have also made points about its handling.

Let us look at where we are. This interim report said that the commission needs more time. It said that 26 people remain to be interviewed and that these interviews would be done by January. As other Deputies have already asked, have those 26 people been interviewed? The second issue raised in the report is that of a big boat-load of documents which had only recently come into the fray. It said:

The Commission does not yet know the extent of the material in these files but it is likely to run to many thousands of pages. The Commission expects to receive these in December 2018.

Did the commission receive these files in December 2018 as indicated in the interim report? Did the material run to thousands of pages? Based on that information, what is the commission now saying about its likely conclusion date? If one reads the different interim reports one will see that the language in parts of earlier reports is absolutely identical to the language in this one. We cannot have that. The report talks about its considerable workload in cross-referencing documents and about delays in obtaining the evidence from the authorities which ran the institutions which could not be examined until the commission had finished the examination of the documents. These are word-for-word the same in one interim report as in another. What happened in between?

Why is it that a commission set up by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs had to wait until a year after it was supposed to have concluded for that same Department to forward documents? Either we are dealing with the most incompetent shower in the history of the universe or something more sinister is afoot and there are forces obstructing the transfer of this information. I do not have an answer to that. I actually do not know. Nobody has given me a rational explanation, but I have read between the lines where the report talks about the HSE. This is utterly frightening. Again it is an indictment of the very weak media in this State that they fail to scrutinise the real issues relating to what goes on in here and, instead, prefer to chase a cheap headline. They do not actually carry out real scrutiny and did not highlight and examine what is in this report, limited as it is. The commission is shocked that, "the HSE does not have any system, much less a proper system, of storing and archiving material". It finds it, "difficult to understand how relatively recent documentation is not available". What does this public commission mean when it says that? When it says that it is difficult to understand it is really saying that it does not believe it, it cannot understand it, and there is no logical explanation as to why that would be. Why is that the case? I have not heard anything in that regard. These are incredibly serious issues.

The Minister has talked a lot about Tuam and the graves, but that is a separate issue from that of the mother and baby homes commission of investigation. It is tied in, but it is not necessarily what we are talking about here. I strongly support the point made by Deputies who asked for the issues of apology and redress to be taken out of this process. It is scandalous that we have not had an answer on the issue of the Bethany Home. Perhaps I will hear something now, but I have not seen a single word as to why the Bethany Home redress issue cannot be addressed now. This commission, which we set up, has said that the people affected should never have been excluded in the first place. They comprise an ageing cohort of people and yet we are to wait another year before we even look at the issue. That cannot be. The fund is still there and its parameters are still in place. The existing basis of the scheme can be utilised creatively to allow those individuals to get redress. Everybody agrees that they should. What is the point of us all agreeing if these people are dying off in the meantime and our agreement does not lead to legal effects? We have to do something. I really would like the Minister to answer on that because it has not been answered on anywhere. The people affected by the Bethany Home can be dealt with now. There is a mechanism to do so. In an earlier report the commission recommended it be done. What are we waiting for?

That brings me to the other groups and the issue of the apology. We really need to give this far more careful attention. The problem I have with it is that too often in here we set up commissions, send them off to do their work, and then use them as a great excuse to forget about the issues. I have made that point here before. It has not just happened in respect of this commission. The Grace case was the hottest news in town. It was on "Prime Time" and everyone wanted to know about poor Grace. A commission was set up but it has gone on well past its deadline. Who in here even cares to ask about it? Who in the media is keeping an eye on it?Who is keeping an eye on all of the other commissions we have set up at monstrous cost? They never do what they are supposed to do.

I know that people will say that I am one of the people in here who argues hardest for commissions, but they are the only vehicle available. Perhaps the Oireachtas needs to say that they are not really working, not doing their jobs, and not doing what it says on the tin. We bought all of the excuses the Minister has given on the commission's behalf last year. They are not good enough this year. It needs to explain why it said last year that it would deliver in a year. Why should we now believe that it will deliver next year? If we do not ask these questions we are selling everybody short, particularly the survivors.

See this speech in context