Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

On 7 March 2017, I was very proud of our former Taoiseach and my fellow countyman, Enda Kenny, when he gave a very emotional speech in the Dáil.

He stated:

We gave them up because of our perverse, in fact, morbid relationship with what is called respectability. Indeed, for a while it seemed as if in Ireland our women had the amazing capacity to self-impregnate. For their trouble, we took their babies and gifted them, sold them, trafficked them, starved them, neglected them or denied them to the point of their disappearance from our hearts, our sight, our country and, in the case of Tuam and possibly other places, from life itself.

Those words have to mean something. They have to mean something to the women and families who are telling us this is so wrong. I appreciate the difficult job that the Minister is trying to do but this was State-sponsored cruelty, the full breadth and depth of which we do not yet know. Let this, here and now, not be another episode of State-sponsored cruelty.

The commission's remit also covers the investigation into the records of the practices at an additional 13 mother and baby homes and, as a number of my colleagues have pointed out, they mask the same horror. To put it more accurately, the homes were cruel detention centres that held women and children.

The Minister has said the commission's report will give voice to the victims. The victims have their own voices and they have used them to give testimony. They have used their voices to oppose the Government's plans to seal their testimonies. Survivors of the institutions have struggled to get information for decades. As one of the testimonies to the Clann Project described in heartbreaking fashion:

When the social workers finally took me to my birth mother's ward, I walked into the room and kissed her on the forehead. I told her who I was and she replied by saying "I knew you would find me someday" ... My mother passed away less than a month later.

The testimony of survivors is paramount. We have a chance here to do the right thing. We cannot tell all these women and families that they are wrong. We just cannot do it. I realise the Minister is trying to fix something here but I beg him not to go ahead with this legislation. He should please listen to the women now. They were not listened to before. If we do not listen to them, we are telling them they are wrong and that the Government is right. We need to tell them that they are right. We need to tell them that we believe them and we need to tell them they count. I plead with the Minister and all his Government colleagues to listen to our former Taoiseach and the voices of these women.

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