Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I certainly agree that the commission of investigation format is not working. The delays and

costs involved are inordinate and often by the end of the process, a lot of people are left wondering what it was all about in the first place. There is an air of Dickens's Jarndyce and Jarndyce about a lot of these commissions.

I refer to the report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes as another example of where we have got it very badly wrong. I know we will be discussing this in greater depth later this evening but a number of the survivors who were outside Leinster House today are absolutely furious at the proposed redress scheme. They are angry at arbitrary time periods and thresholds for those who were in mother and baby homes being used as some sort of meaningful guide for redress. This is just typical of the way the State gets it so badly wrong. People must have spent six months in an institution to be eligible for redress, as if the human story, tragedy, hardship and trauma can somehow be equated to a particular time period or amount of money. This is an example of how the State really get things wrong. We will debate it further this evening but I would simply say that the key in such sensitive investigations and in the production of reports is to listen to the survivors and those with first-hand experience. The establishment of schemes and the production of reports must be done in step with survivors. The failure to do so has landed this Government in a mess. The Taoiseach and the Government must consider that.

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