Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

The mother and baby homes commission was ostensibly established to seek out truths and it should have been a help to survivors. To be clear, if the Government shoots down this motion and if it closes down the commission in four days' time, it will be doing it in the teeth of opposition from the very survivors the commission was meant to be helping. Sitting around the Cabinet table today discussing plans to defeat this motion and to finish the work of the commission in four days' time are Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Ministers but also Green Party Ministers. Are the Green Party Ministers going to betray survivors on this issue?

Survivors have been treated horribly by the church over decades. They have been treated horribly over decades by the State. To close the commission in these circumstances in four days' time would be to add insult to injury. The term of the commission must be extended. The questions that have been asked must be answered. That includes a new question, namely, how did these files come to be disposed of in the way they were? When, hopefully, the commission is extended survivors must be brought into the heart of the decision making processes around all of these issues.

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