Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

As I was coming up the steps earlier, it struck me that I was going into the place that most people probably consider to be the most powerful place in the country to talk about the most powerless people who have been in Ireland for a long time. I was thinking of the documentary that was done many years ago about Christine Buckley and what happened at the orphanage in Goldenbridge. I was reminded of her sense of powerlessness as a child and that of the others around her at that time.

During the 2016 election campaign, I was canvassing in a housing estate, as most of us do, when I was told that a woman in a house wanted to meet me. I went in for about 20 minutes, and after the election I went back and spoke to the lady at length. She told me that her earliest memories are of crying with hunger as a child in the orphanage in Tuam, with all of the other small children crying around her. There was a green scum growing on the walls, probably from dampness and mildew, and the children used to scrape it off with their fingernails and eat it. She grew up with little children around her who were her friends and later on she would remember them and wonder where they went. They went missing and others would say they were sick. There was nothing more about them. She told me that as she got older - when she was eight, nine or ten - she watched some of the smaller children being beaten, abused and treated horribly by the staff there, some of whom were members of religious orders who betrayed what they had set out to do from the religious life side of things by doing the direct opposite.

In the conversations I had with this lady, she spoke about the children she missed. She grew up with them, but now they are gone and no one knows where they went. She told me about the children she knew of, many of whom ended up in mental institutions and had the most terrible and awful lives. She said she had engaged with every one of the tribunals and inquiries, and everything that had happened since all of this process started around the time of the revelations of what was going on at the Goldenbridge orphanage, and all of the various revelations since. She engaged and told all of her stories. She said she was not telling them for herself but for all the others she grew up with. She knew they could not talk or tell their stories because they are dead or do not have the capacity to speak out because of the terrible lives they have lived. Most of us are very fortunate to have options in life. Those people did not have options. The Ireland they grew up in was a cold, dark, horrible place and we have to do right by them. That brings me to the legislation that is being considered here and the sense of hiding it all away.

She talked about the way it was all hidden away and said that people knew but they hid it even in their own minds. They did not talk about it. It was to be pushed away.

I have heard other contributors say that they trust what the Minister is trying to do and that there is no intention to do the wrong thing here, but if the possibility of hiding it away is even thought about, the Minister is doing the wrong thing. These people need us, as legislators in this House, to do the right thing by them now. The Minister has a choice that these women never had to do something right. I believe the right thing for him to do is listen to all the Members of this House. Even Members on the Government benches have expressed an agonising sentiment of unsureness about where all this is heading. The Minister needs to listen to all of that, pull back this legislation and do the right thing for everyone. He needs to provide a bit of space to get it right, because if he does not get it right, it might not matter to us here but it will matter to the woman I met and the children she grew up with. The Minister has to do the right thing for them and by them.

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