Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I am very conscious of how we give other people's histories back to them. With that in mind, I want to acknowledge that there are people listening to this debate who will be impacted by many of the stories and discussions we are having. I want to acknowledge them and try to do justice to the testimony that we will bring forth today.

I want to begin by commenting on one aspect of the Minister's speech. He talked about the Ireland of today being very different to the Ireland of 1920. That is a gross misunderstanding of how pervasive the legacy of institutional abuse and incarceration has been in this country. I promise the Minister that the Ireland of 1920 continued until 1996 when the last Magdalen laundry on Sean MacDermott Street closed. There are people today, young and old, who are still being impacted by discussions we have. The Ireland of 1920 continued long after.

I am always conscious of a human rights lawyer in the United States, Bryan Stevenson, when I think about restorative justice and how we own our own memory. I will paraphrase him badly. He said when one becomes conscious of the injustices contained within one's own nation's past, one starts to see them replicated elsewhere. Bryan Stevenson was talking about the legacy of slavery and how it continued with the incarceration of African-American men in the United States. However, we can apply that concept to the injustices of our nation's past and how we can see them replicated throughout our history should we choose to open our eyes and look.

The injustices of the Irish nation are ones we often ascribed to our struggle against the British empire and our fight for freedom. Far more injustices occurred within these islands long after that freedom was delivered. We never really discussed what that independence meant for the average person on the street who lived in Ireland throughout that period and what became of him or her. The injustices that were inflicted upon our own population are something we have never really opened our eyes to.

The Bill we are discussing deals with 4,000 pages that give life to many of those injustices. It is lamentable in the extreme that the Minister – I do not want to personalise this – is going to wilfully seal those documents from public perusal, discussion and understanding. Contained within them would be a fundamental understanding of who we are as a people and what we have inflicted upon ourselves throughout the course of the State's short history. That is really important and I want to acknowledge that.

Contained in the 4,000 documents we are discussing and struggling over access to is a social, ecclesiastical and feminist history of this country. If we are to have a strong, thorough and real interpretation of who we are as a people, those documents will be essential to that understanding.

There was a contradiction in the Minister's statement, in the sense that he said he is not sealing the records and people will have access to them, but in fact they will be sealed from any sort of discourse and discussion and will not be available for people to explore their full detail. That is really important.

The Minister said he did not know what was in the documents. Is there information on, for example, forced adoptions, the physical abuse perpetrated in these institutions and the medical experimentation that was discovered? This is all absolutely essential information and it will be locked away. We will not have access to it. Is there information on the collusion of the State with church organisations in continuing this practice over decades of our history? That knowledge is what we will lose when the documents are sealed.

The opportunity to understand ourselves will be lost if the Bill passes. Of equal importance is what those 4,000 documents would say about who we are today as a people. Does the Minister not feel that if we are fully aware of the injustices of the past, we would be more conscious of the manner in which we replicate them today? Some of the practices, which I know the Minister would stand against, would be deemed unconscionable.

Does the Minister not see that there is a continuum in terms of the mother and baby homes, Magdalen laundries, asylums and industrial schools that leads right up to direct provision centres? There is a continuum that leads up to the fact that the most vulnerable group in our society, even today, are lone parents who are statistically at risk of poverty and the structural violence that goes with that.

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If we fully appreciate the horrors of our institutional past, measures such as family hubs where women and children are incarcerated to the profit of other companies would be unconscionable. If we fully understand that past, which is what we are fighting over here, these practices would become grotesque in our mind and unconscionable and perhaps we would not continue them. That is what we are struggling for.

I lament the manner in which the Bill has been dragged to this House at this point. It has been very unfortunate. We received more than 4,000 emails from citizens all over this country which crashed the servers of the Oireachtas last week. I tried my best to get through as many as I could but it was simply impossible. The ones I did get through talked about their personal stories and about how they, their mothers and family members were impacted. Under the cover of a pandemic we are not allowed the opportunity for civil discourse and discussion. I imagine that if we were not in the midst of a pandemic, many of those voices and faces would be outside Leinster House and we would have to look them in the eye and the passing of this Bill would become a lot harder. Rather, it was rammed through the Seanad and we had no opportunity for pre-legislative discussion, it will face a guillotine tonight and under the cloak of a pandemic, it will pass. This is really unfortunate.

I expected to find this Minister a reforming one but the sheer absence of engagement with civic society on this Bill suggests that this may not be the case. There was no substantial engagement with survivors. Human rights lawyers and civic society representatives were offering to meet the Minister and to discuss their genuine concerns about this Bill. These are people who do not come from the oppositional politics sphere, which exists across this Chamber. They have dedicated their lives to standing up for the truth and revealing a broader understanding of who we are and the injustices that were inflicted on people in our country. These people have not been dealt with.

The data protection expert, Simon McGarr, produced a very interesting piece of information in that he felt that this legislation would not be permissible in accordance with EU law and that the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and GDPR practices would supersede the 2004 Act, which we seem to be clinging to in this Chamber, and that we will end up in the courts next year. An administrative error and a moral wrong would be upheld in the European court. There was no engagement there.

Who was the Minister talking to? Is it just the same officials who were just telling him what to do? I expected better than that.

The Minister asked for trust in bringing forward new legislation. Speaking to him as a representative of the State, the State has no legitimacy to ask the survivor community for trust. We have failed them at every turn. He should not ask this community to trust us now. We have no grounds for that.

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