Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The long-awaited report of the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes is, unfortunately, not what many expected. Survivors have waited for five years for this report and so many are disappointed that, after all that time, they just feel let down.

One survivor contacted me on Monday to thank my party for all the work that it has done to support survivors. She told me that it took her almost a week to contact me as the publication of the report meant she relived the horrors of everything that had been done to her. Without realising it, she had personally buried it in the recesses of her mind, but it all came back to her this past week as if it was yesterday. She told me that she was one of the lucky ones because her daughter found her after years of looking.

Not everyone has been so lucky. One man told me that he was denied access to his personal information and lied to by social workers. When he finally, after years, managed to trace his birth mother, it was too late because she had passed away. He felt cheated of an opportunity to get to know his birth mother. This cannot be allowed to continue to happen. Access to information is a must. I commend my party colleague, Deputy Funchion, on introducing the Civil Registration (Right of Adoptees to Information) (Amendment) Bill 2021 which will guarantee the right to people to their own birth certificate and personal information. I am urging all Deputies in this Chamber to support that legislation.

One would imagine when thinking of the church, nuns in particular, that love, dignity and respect would be high on its agenda and that the church’s preaching that we should treat others as we would like them to treat us should be its mantra. For the women who spent many months in these institutions, punishment, abuse, shame and trauma were visited on them regularly. Women, many of them children themselves, were forced to go through giving birth to a baby without any sort of pain relief or support. In fact, many were verbally abused while they endured the pain of childbirth. Nowhere in the equation were men made to take any responsibility.

I have no doubt that the State is the one to blame here. The State allowed itself to have its policy dictated by the church and then left it to the religious organisations to cater for what it saw as Ireland’s dirty little secret. Shame on the State for treating its citizens and allowing them to be mistreated in this way. Do not tell me that those in power did not know what was happening.

To blame society is totally unfair. Many people throughout the decades of this new State were just trying to make ends meet and were not aware of what was happening in these institutions. Women who endured this mistreatment did not talk about it.

What is needed now is inclusive, constructive and collaborative engagement with stakeholders. Survivors of these institutions need to be kept informed of what is happening in respect of this report. They need access to information and have a right to their birth certificate, and they must have the correct information about their own care. Support for survivors, such as counselling services, access to housing, therapies and a medical card, and a redress scheme which does not differentiate between the women need to be put in place.

All the little children who lost their lives in these institutions and were coldly buried in unmarked graves need to be properly reunited with their families, if at all possible, and given a proper Christian burial. It is time for the full truth to be known and for whatever supports that are needed to be given to the survivors of these institutions.

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