Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I start by saluting the survivors, the women and their families who have put up with years of very deep pain. I also start by echoing the hurt and anger that they feel at this report. No doubt they will also feel some anger and hurt at the apology that they heard here today. I certainly do.

One could say that the report and its contents were to be expected. When the then Minister and current Senator McDowell introduced the original Act to set up commissions, it was very much about being a cheaper, easier, less justiciable version of tribunals and offered a way out of looking at these issues without risking criminal or legal implications. This report, therefore, cannot deliver real answers or address the scale of the crimes or offer any actual solutions. I find the built-in weakness of it shocking. It is shocking not in the facts and the testimonies, many of which were known or people had spoken about, but the constant refrain and single-minded determination to lay the core responsibility, from the State and religious institutions, on to society, fathers, families and on everyone. As Fionn Davenport, himself an adoptee, has said, if one makes everyone responsible then no one is responsible. That is just what the Taoiseach has done here today, as has the Tánaiste. They make us all responsible where, then, nobody is responsible. It is not true to say that we are all responsible and that the chief blame lies with fathers and families.

There was no vote on the attitude that society would have to unmarried mothers or to children born out of wedlock. The ethos and the social mores that the report takes as a natural given, as some sort of fixed entity, was hard worked for, planned and argued for by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and even the Labour Party at times, which were not innocent bystanders but enthusiastic enforcers of these mores. The Catholic and religious institutions fought for the attitudes and vigorously defended the rules and regulations that went with them. The church and State battered, beat and forced those mores on women and society in a deliberate, premeditated and political programme. It was known and was opposed.

The registrar general reported to this House in 1924 that the rate of death among illegitimate children was way higher than that of Northern Ireland, England and Wales. It is also stated in the record of this House in 1936 in a report from the Department of the then Minister for Local Government and Public Health, Seán T. O'Kelly of Fianna Fáil, in response to a similar report that: "Doubtless the great proportion of deaths in these cases is due to congenital debility, congenital malformation and other ante-natal causes traceable to the conditions associated with the unfortunate lot of the unmarried mother." The abuse and high mortality rates among these children was highlighted and opposed in this House. An Independent Deputy, Dr. Robert Rowlette, in response to Deputy Seán T. O'Kelly said: "I do not know of any evidence that will prove that there is greater general congenital debility or malformation in the illegitimate child than in the legitimate child." He went on to say: "It is a disgrace to a civilised country, and to a Christian country like this, that three-and-a-half times more illegitimates are condemned to death in the first year of their existence than legitimate children".

The idea that children had rights was part of a democratic programme articulated in the 1916 Proclamation and adopted by this State when we signed up to the Declaration of the Rights of the Child of the League of Nations in 1924. The problem here was not that society condoned it but that the political class and the church enforced it. That needs to be acknowledged first and foremost.

The most shocking and offensive matter in this report is, however, that there is no evidence of those abuses, of profit-making from adoptions, or of the coercion of women into signing adoption forms, other than the testimony of those women themselves. That is not dealt with as evidence other than the bones of over 9,000 dead babies' bodies.

I will finish by saying that a number of things have to happen. We have to treat immediately those graveyards around those homes as crime scenes. No more developments or alterations should happen to them and they should be blocked off as crime scenes because somewhere in the future we need to get to the bottom of this criminal matter. They are crime scenes and need to be treated as such. The process of redress also needs to start, not by offering these people enhanced medical cards, but by telling these institutions which have built their wealth on the bones of dead babies, that their assets will be effectively frozen unless they agree to deliver a decent redress that is an absolute benefit to both those women and to society in general.

This report is inadequate, should be rejected in its entirety and the apology of the Taoiseach is utterly inadequate.

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