Michael Moynihan (Cork North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We are debating a report about an intolerant Ireland and a very dark period in our past. I have not read a whole lot of the report, but from what I have read of it, it smacks of the intolerance of society. We can blame many factors in society for that, but that is what comes through. When I am looking at reports of this nature, I am taken back to July 1989, when I was working on my uncle's farm with John Joe Bradley. He left school at 13 years of age and worked on farms all over the place. He talked to me about his own life and the challenges facing his own family. He also talked about people and the way they were treated. He outlined to me the stories of three women within the community, and what had happened to them. I remember quite distinctly when he looked at me and said: "Michael, can I put it very clearly to you. When we were at our most Catholic, we were at our least Christian."

I have heard many fine speakers, in the 30 years since that conversation, talk about the scandals that have been thrown up in Irish society, but nobody has put it as clearly as John Joe Bradley did. We lacked Christianity within our society. We lacked a basic common decency towards our fellow human beings. We believed, or our society believed, that some human beings were lesser than others. We delivered an intolerant society that was based on where people fell in a pecking order.

It is important that we debate this report and that we find redress for those who suffered. Church, State and all of us must look within our hearts. I challenge us all today to look around at our society in 2021, 100 years on from the founding of our State, and to seek to weed out intolerance. We have to look at where intolerance is causing huge pressures for people today. When we look at what is happening on social media and various platforms, and the polarisation that is there, we see that the middle is afraid to speak out because of the powerful voices of intolerance on either side. Our legacy as Members of this Dáil must be to ensure that, in 50, 60 or 70 years' time, nobody will say we turned a blind eye to the intolerance that is within our society today. That is our challenge and it should be our response to the horrific suffering of women in the intolerant society of the past. We must make sure our less well-off and marginalised people do not continue to be less well-off and marginalised. We must ensure their suffering does not have to be revisited in a different chapter 50 or 60 years from now.

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