Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Last night I sat still, writing these words and struggling to decide what to say to describe this report of the women who came before me and the rest of us and of the lives they and their children lived. I fought to find the words until my small son came and kissed me goodnight in his pyjamas. I knew then that the only way to approach this trauma of motherhood was to speak in that way. The only thing to do was to speak to the women who had their babies taken from them and to beg forgiveness; to speak to the women excluded by every element of our society and who were given no protection by the State and to hang my head in shame on behalf of that State; to really think about the many children lost through death, through not knowing where or how they were buried or through being found gone when someone went to the nursery to feed them; and to acknowledge at this remove and in this inadequate way the unbearable and unrelenting trauma of those losses.

Of all included in the report and in the discussions since its publication, one image sticks with me above all others. It is the scream described by Terri Harrison on RTÉ's "Prime Time", the scream when she went back to the nursery to find her five-week-old baby, Niall, gone. She also described the screams of the other girls in the home and how they all knew such a scream meant another baby gone. There are women among us today who know that scream for different reasons. They know the guttural animalistic scream that comes with the loss of a child but many of those who now know that scream also know love and care. They know arms wrapped them to comfort them at their loss, they know the support of their partner or family, and they may know the care of psychologist or counsellor to help them find their first blurry steps through indescribable grief. The women and girls in the mother and baby institutions knew no such kindnesses. They had no support and had nothing to help them. They knew nothing but abuse, exclusion and exile, at best.

We know now, as we knew before, that these women and young girls were condemned. Again this week I have heard them described as second-class citizens but I do not buy that. Married women in Ireland were second-class citizens. Mothers who happened not to be married - and I say this not meaning one iota of disrespect to the survivors but simply to state the situation as it is - were not even second-class citizens. Sometimes stripped of their very names and given house names, they were a caste apart. They were untouchable, even by their own parents. As it says in chapter 12 of the report, "In Ireland it’s a sin you pay for all your life". That was the law of this land, the unwritten rules of the squinting windows and the respectable walk to church of a Sunday. Parents used language to their children such as "If we had heard that you had cancer it would have been easier to accept". These are not the words of anything but exclusion.

Do we really think that these thoughts and ideas were independently formed or that many of these families did not bear their own long scars from the forced exile of their girls? Who told them how to think? There is only one true answer. There were instances of bravery, generosity, kindness and goodness shown within families and to the girls of other families and there were good people everywhere, some of whom bravely spoke up or acted differently, but when the social custom was to step off the street and let the priest pass, when it was considered a mortal sin to step on the grounds of a Protestant church and when the church dictated every moral, thought, action and Cabinet meeting for a substantial period of the history of this State, it is truly hard to entirely blame our grandparents rather than the dogma of the dominant church and the State that should have guarded against it instead of completely facilitating and legitimising it. Neither, however, do I accept that society had no role. People in towns knew these homes existed and ignored it.

Decent Irish people knew these things happened and decided it was acceptable or necessary to ignore it. I accept that a priest-ridden society told them to denounce it, but it was nothing to do with them.

As we look around and wonder how it could have happened, we need to look especially at the State. The very essence of the State, as a constitutional democracy, is to protect the vulnerable individual from the tyranny of the majority. It was a plain fact that religious and social dogma was enabled by many political representatives - though not all - and by the State bodies which knew it was happening and failed to protect the women and girls and their children.

We can respond. The first response is the need for strong legislation on the basic right to information and identity for adoptees. We already recognise the fundamental right to identity in our approach to assisted human reproduction. The constitutional dial has moved before and can move again. We need other responses, as the Minister has said, such as full acknowledgement of the real experiences of survivors, appropriate memorialisation, financial recognition and, crucially, help for many of those with trauma.

Finally, and linked, we need to look today at what we are doing that we know is wrong. We are not immune from our own mass hysteria. It is easy to stand here and pass judgment on the past. We also need to look closely at ourselves. For example, we can work to find meaningful, creative and therapeutic access between children in long-term State care and their parents. We need to acknowledge that our system of direct provision is wrong and that it is contributing to trauma and damaging parent-child relationships, thereby subjecting parents to unwarranted restrictions. I could also mention our ongoing failure to have a national education strategy for Travellers. However, today is not about those things. It is about the people who survived, the mothers and their children. Today is about hearing their scream, acknowledging their hurt and our wrongs, and asking for their forgiveness.

While I was not going to say this today, following the comments of my colleague, Deputy Lahart, about the church, it is important to say that the timidity of the State in the face of the church has ended, but not its interdependence. This week a pregnant lady contacted me to say she was upset about the report and upset that the maternity hospital she attends is still into the sisters who used to run it. It is wrong that a woman sitting vigil beside her child in intensive care is approached by a chaplain and not a counsellor, and that parents today still need to fight for admission for their second child to a local school not with the Department but with the archdiocese. Today we began our proceedings in the Parliament with the words, "Directly we beseech thee, o Lord". I mean no disrespect to anybody of the church or practising in the church, but we need to take a hard look at this interdependence and the delivery of safe services by the church.

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