Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Fáiltím roimh an deis páirt a ghlacadh sa díospóireacht seo. Tá mé 100% taobh thiar den Bhille agus tugaim mo thacaíocht dó. Gabhaim comhghairdeas leis an Rialtas as ucht teacht os comhair na Dála chun an mhír seo a bhaint amach. I welcome the opportunity to take part in this debate. I am fully supportive of this Bill and congratulate the Government on bringing it forward.

It is just over a year since we had a referendum on this subject on 26 October 2018. It should have been held back in 2009, and as the previous speakers said, the Government at the time failed to grasp the nettle on this issue. Why did it fail to do so? I pay tribute to the Oireachtas Library and Research Service for putting together a Bills Digest on this legislation. It shows that from 1991 onwards, the Law Reform Commission recommended that the reference to blasphemy should be deleted and further advised that religious adherents could be protected by the incitement to hatred legislation instead. It is extremely important that they be protected. That was recommended by the Law Reform Commission back in 1991. In 1995, the Constitutional Review Group recommended something similar and in 2006, the report of the special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief stated the same thing, though I will not go into it. In 2007 a report was published by the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Constitution.

That was two years before the then Minister, Dermot Ahern, felt there was a lacuna. In 2007 the committee endorsed the view of the Constitution review group which recommended that Article 40.6.1o be deleted. The legislation was introduced in 2009, a point to which I will return.

Subsequent to 2009, we received reports from the Venice commission, the UN Human Rights Committee and the Convention on the Constitution. There was also a paper by Mr. Justice Peter Charleton, whom we have revered in this Chamber, rightly so, for the Charleton report. In 2017 he concluded that, from a constitutional perspective, laws on blasphemy were not a necessity, despite it being mentioned specifically in the Constitution. He compared it to the references to felony crimes which, although mentioned in the Constitution, no longer existed in Ireland. There was a long lead-in period to 2009 when, as a country, we decided that we were not mature enough to take it out of the Constitution.

I thought about that and asked what had happened in 2009 and 1999 when the case which set this process in train, namely, the Independent Newspapers case, came before the Supreme Court. It stated there was no definition of blasphemy and that it could not deal with the matter. It took a further ten years for the Government to look at the issue and when it did, it failed to act and instead introduced legislation which was never going to work.

In 1999 the then Taoiseach apologised for abuse. In 2009, when the Dáil was concerned with introducing legislation in order that we would not insult the Christian God, the Ryan report which made specific conclusions and recommendations came out. I cannot read all of them, but it is important to say there were 21 recommendations and 43 conclusions made, all of which stand out. The report found that sexual abuse was endemic in boys' institutions. The recidivist nature of the abusers was known to the religious authorities, but they did not do anything about it. In a surprising sentence the Ryan report stated it was startled by the level of emotional and physical abuse and so on. The report refers to the lessons that should be learned from the past. It stated the congregations needed to examine how their ideals had become debased by systemic abuse. It went on to state they must ask themselves how they had become to tolerate breaches of their own rules and, when sexual and physical abuse was discovered, how they had responded to it and those who had perpetrated it. It also stated they must examine their attitude to neglect and emotional abuse and, more generally, how the interests of the institutions and congregations came to be placed ahead of those children who were in their care. The report further stated that acceptance and understanding by the State and the congregations represented an acknowledgement of the fact that the system had failed children, not just that children had been abused because occasional individual lapses had occurred.

Deputies may ask me what this has to do with the debate on blasphemy. I ask them to reflect on with what Governments were caught up when the report was released and the apology given. In 1999 the then Taoiseach's apology was in parallel to the Supreme Court case on blasphemy. In 2009 we introduced legislation which would not work at the same time as the Ryan report told us about abuse.

The Comptroller and Auditor General has outlined the costs, which are startling. The estimated cost of the redress scheme was €250 million, but the actual cost is €1.25 billion and rising. The child abuse inquiry and the redress scheme cost a total of €1.4 billion in 2015. The reason for the underestimation was, of course, the negotiation and consultation with the religious orders in which the nature and extent of the abuse were clearly underestimated, something the Government was happy to accept. I wish to outline the extent of the abuse. Offers from the redress board which dealt with 139 scheduled institutions were accepted by 15,562 people. Almost half of those cases involved ten institutions. It makes for difficult reading, but it is important to highlight it because in 2009 the debate was limited to whether we would insult God - a particular God - and ignore all of what was done in God's name. It is time to reflect on whether we have moved on. We have not moved very much if we look at the experience in Caranua. It was a misnamed organisation. The name means "new friend", but it was anything but.

I happily support the Bill. I wish we did not have to support it, that legislation had not been introduced in 2009 and that we, as a country, had had the courage to hold the referendum then. We finally found the courage to hold it last year, but it happened on the back of a tremendous amount of suffering. Just last week I attended the showing of "Land Without God", Mannix Flynn's film. I ask all Deputies to see it. His opening sentence is, "I was the child in the children's court found guilty and condemned at six years and taken away in handcuffs." It is a film which took over ten years to make. More significantly, it has taken a lifetime for his extended family to begin to speak about their experience in institutions. I pay tribute to Mannix Flynn, Maedhbh McMahon and Lotta Petronella for the film. I might not agree with all four of the words used by Fintan O'Toole to describe it, but I certainly agree that it is haunting and devastating. He also described it as poetic and moving. It was the first time some members of the family were ready to speak, yet this country was caught up with defamation and taking God's name in vain, as opposed to looking at what was being done in the name of God.

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