Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

The mother and baby homes report has not only failed to address the concerns of survivors, in many respects it has made the situation worse. If it was not for the outpouring of anger from survivors, the Government would have gone along with the plans to destroy their testimonies. I welcome the U-turn on the part of the Government and its promise not to destroy those recordings. The survivors need more than that, however. When the mother and baby homes commission put out the appeal, 549 brave witnesses came forward to share their stories about these detention centres. Three hundred and four were mothers who were sent to them and 228 were people who were born in them. They shared their stories hoping to shine a light on the brutality and exploitation in those centres but then the report came out which ignored and undermined much of their testimony, stating that it was not evidence and whitewashing issues like the forced adoptions which took place. This entire report is yet another failure of those survivors.

The mother and baby homes survivors deserve the truth but, moreover, they deserve justice and redress. Those who bear particular responsibility for those centres, particularly the religious orders who ran them, should be made to pay for what they did. The Bon Secours Sisters ran the Tuam home. That order is now the second largest provider of private healthcare in the State, with revenue in 2019 of €314 million, including €5 million in public funding. In 2019, the HSE gave out more than €1.3 billion in funding to services owned by five religious orders. In 2021, well over 90% of primary schools and a large majority of secondary schools remain under the control of the Catholic Church. Rather than giving them a slap on the wrist and a packet of public money, we should be seizing the assets of those religious orders to fund proper redress for their victims and fully separating church and State once and for all.

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