Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

All of these amendments concern giving GSOC officers the same power as gardaí when they are acting as coroner's officers. As the Minister has explained, the amendments are for circumstances where it is more appropriate for a GSOC officer to act as an aid to a coroner, for example, where gardaí might be suspected of involvement in a death. I am happy to support all of the amendments and they seem fairly straightforward but I want to make some general points about the Bill, how we got here and how long it has taken us to get here because there are important lessons to be learned from this.

My involvement in the issue of maternal deaths began eight years ago, which is as long as the length of time I have been here. In May 2011, the Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services, AIMS, Ireland contacted me to ask for help in raising parliamentary questions about why there had not been a full inquiry into the tragic death of Bimbo Onanuga in the Rotunda Hospital in March 2010. From those first parliamentary questions I stayed in touch with AIMS Ireland and with a dedicated group of activists on this issue, most notably Jo Murphy-Lawless, and I did what I could to support it in the fight to gain an inquest. It took nearly eight months to get that. It took a further eight months for the case to be heard over four devastating days of evidence which were heartbreaking and shocking but even more shocking was the fact that before Bimbo's inquest took place in autumn 2012, six other women lost their lives in our maternity services and inquests were held for only two of them.

In autumn 2014, there were three further inquests, all of whose verdicts were of medical misadventure. It was clear the issue had to be stepped up and that we had to do everything to prevent such tragedies from happening again. In July 2012, I introduced a Bill to provide for mandatory inquests into cases of maternal deaths, which the Government did not oppose. It was debated in the House but the small matter of a general election was in the way. We got it out of the way and one of the first tasks of the new Joint Committee on Justice and Equality was to draft the Bill. I salute the efforts of my colleagues on the justice committee, of all parties and none, who, together with me, the Ceann Comhairle and the Business Committee, have moved might and main to keep the issue on the Government's list of priorities.

In November 2016, officials from the Department of Justice and Equality appeared before the justice committee and agreed with us that reform of the coroner service was needed. The committee gave them six months - a long time - to revert with amendments to my Bill that they considered necessary to get the job done. The committee pressed the officials and told them that was as long as they would have. The committee meeting was scheduled for 9 a.m. on 10 May 2017 but at 5.30 p.m. on 9 May, the last minute before we were to go home, the then Minister, Deputy Fitzgerald, contacted the justice committee secretariat to say the Government would not give the Bill a money message. Sean Rowlette and other partners of deceased women who had made arrangements to attend the committee meeting the following morning were devastated that at the 11th hour, the Department had spiked the Bill. Everyone was devastated. I met the then Minister the next day, almost exactly two years ago, and was told the Government would bring forward its own Bill. In fairness to the then Minister, she agreed how important the issue was and indicated that it would be rushed through. We spent the next couple of months liaising with the Department to get the Bill passed by summer 2017. Given that the then Minister and the current Minister, Deputy Flanagan, had this as a priority, which I believe it was for them, and given that the justice committee, the Ceann Comhairle and the Business Committee, and county councils throughout the country are pushing it, we must ask ourselves how in God's name a 28-page Bill would take that level of effort to get this far.

We must learn lessons from that situation. It suggests that the State's apparatus contains many rusty cogs, some of which turn very slowly. It is a source of great regret to me that even after what I have outlined, we are not fully there yet. A number of the amendments the Minister flagged on Committee Stage for Report Stage are not yet ready but we have been told we will have to wait for them to be tabled in the Seanad. On behalf of all Deputies and some of the dedicated staff who have worked on the Bill, I suggest that the drafting delays in the Bill have been the source of the most unspeakable frustration for the House. I emphasise to the Minister that we cannot let the summer recess arrive without the Bill being enacted. It will not be tolerated. Since Committee Stage, another woman, sadly, has died in our maternity services, although there may have been more. It is devastating. We cannot afford to have any more delays.

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