Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

In the Taoiseach's reply to Deputy McDonald, he was keen to grab credit for Fianna Fáil for things it did in the 1930s. I hope he will be as quick today to accept responsibility for what Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the institutions of the church and the State did to tens of thousands of innocent women and children who were imprisoned and who suffered gross abuse. The mother and baby homes report alone documents 9,000 victims, although there are undoubtedly thousands of more infants and women not covered by it, which is an issue in itself, who suffered obscenely.

I have not had a chance to go through the thousands of pages of this report but I have read the significant parts. It is my job to read stuff like this. One can only imagine what many of the survivors must feel like, faced with the whirlwind of commentary on the report. At this point, my feeling is that the report and the official political commentary coming from Government are beginning to look like a sham, an insult and a whitewash of the gross crimes that were committed against thousands of women and infants.

The report and some of the Taoiseach's comments yesterday seem to very consciously seek to diminish the culpability of the institutions of the church and the State and to disperse responsibility for the crimes that were committed onto society as a whole. There should be apologies for that as well immediately. Some of the passages in this report are offensive: in trying to shift the blame away from the institutions of the church and State, in trying to create a hierarchy of the severity of abuse between one institution and another; and in the constant refrain of there being no evidence of abuse. Is 9,000 children dying in proportions way beyond the number of infants who were dying at that time in society as a whole not in itself evidence of abuse? Was it not in fact an imprisonment sentence for every single woman who was forced to go in there? The report says there was no evidence of illegal adoptions when in fact we have evidence. There seems to be a systematic attempt to not treat as evidence the testimonies of the survivors.

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