Johnny Guirke (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I tried over the last few days to think of new words somehow to crack through the State's deep-seated denial and awful treatment of the mother and baby homes survivors – women, girls and children who suffered horrific abuse and human rights violations in these religious prisons, one in my own constituency of Meath West, Castlepollard mother and baby home. I do not have words strong enough to split the State’s cruel and coercive attitude of disrespect towards survivors. It is an attitude beyond any language I know. It stands in stark contrast to the human dignity of the survivors and their families. These women have been to hell and back. If it was not for their courage and bravery, the shameful legacy of the mother and baby homes would have remained shrouded in secrecy, swept under the carpet. There would have been no commission of investigation, no State apology, no redress scheme. The survivors had to push the State every inch of this tortuous journey. They had to chip away at a wall of silence.

The redress scheme published last week is an insult to the survivors. It is an extension of the flood of disrespect that these women and their families have waded through for decades. It is shameful that the Government has brought forward a scheme that creates a hierarchy of victims by taking the view that some mothers and their children suffered less than others. It is cruel to deny compensation and medical supports to some survivors simply because they were taken from their mothers or left the institution before six months. Not only is it callous, it flies in the face of modern clinical evidence regarding the traumatic impact of forced separation on babies of that age. The idea that it did not affect them because they were under six months is not only morally repugnant, but it is also nonsense in a scientific sense. It is wrong that the Minister would seek to justify this botched scheme in this way. This needs to be rectified. No matter how long people spent in these places, no matter what age they were when they left, they suffered greatly and they carry the trauma and the pain with them to this day.

Religious institutions are responsible for that pain and trauma too and they must contribute to the scheme. The State cannot allow them to wipe their hands.

The timing of the scheme is also disrespectful. The Minister announced the scheme in the full knowledge that, in the very same week, survivors were in the High Court challenging the report of the commission, the report on whose recommendations the scheme is based, recommendations which survivors described as whitewashing of their abuse, especially the contention that no forced separation took place. This scheme continues the disrespect demonstrated in attempts to seal survivors’ records, in the leaking of the commission's report to the media before survivors had a chance to see it and in the destroying of survivors’ evidence given to the commission. What is so fundamentally wrong with the State in 2021 that it would seek to prolong rather than help to ease the trauma of these women? This exposes again the deep and dark psyche of the State that puts its claustrophobic interest above those citizens brutalised in its name – women, girls and children who cry out for justice, for dignity and for basic humanity, while the State pushes back against those cries at each and every turn.

Survivors do not want this botched report. They want an equal scheme in which everyone’s hurt and trauma is recognised. They are not willing to leave behind anyone who spent a single breathing moment incarcerated in those wretched places. That is an integrity, a strength and a compassion to which we should all aspire and Ireland would be a better place if we did. I ask the Minister finally to listen to the survivors and to deliver a scheme that matches the gravity of their experiences, a scheme that is fair, just and equal for all.

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