Réada Cronin (Kildare North, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

In Irish, a kite is called a préachán ceirteach. With the GDPR and the commission, the State has taken murders of paper crows and flown them sky high. The recordings, once lost, have been found. That is just amazing because the Government is still blind to how it must be accountable to survivors, the Dáil, the people, humanity and decency and what it means to have survived mother and baby homes. With its kite-flying in respect of the recordings and miracle finds, the only thing that separates the Government of the mother and baby homes era and the current Government is the passage of time. There has been no change. Today, the face of the State is as brazen, cynical and pitiless as ever. We have had enough of the patriarchy, the old and the new, and its willing defenders of the status quo. The survivors must have access to the recordings and be able to check them against the commission's findings.

I commend Deputy Whitmore on bring forward the motion.

The State respects the survivors in words only. Nobody in the commission sent them a copy of this unwieldy report. They were told to get it online, while their suffering was reduced to the usable content of a video at publication. It really was disgusting.

Elements in the Green Party learn quickly that it is all about the optics all the time, but the Minister still has a chance to give the survivors accountability. If he does not extend the term of commission and if we do not write the mother and baby homes into our history books, where they can be studied and contained, we will pay the price. As a State, we all live the trauma in every family and generation, with the pain, dysfunction, the named and the unnamed filling the spaces left in our families and society. The Minister simply must extend the term of the commission. For the first time in history, let this State explore what accountability looks like. Take down the kites and the paper crows and give the survivors what they need.

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