Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The State's response to the suffering of its citizens in these institutions is best described as too little and too late. We were far too late in stopping these practices in these mother and baby homes and we were far too late in setting up the commission of investigation, the final report of which was best described by my party colleague as a miscarriage of truth. It has been too little in terms of the amount of redress and the number of people it is proposed to include in the scheme. This Government has failed at every turn when it comes to the survivors of these penal-like institutions and now they will be failed again.

Why must it always be like this? I will make reference to a different case involving sexual abuse in day schools. I explained to various Ministers for Education and for Education and Skills over the years the case of sexual abuse in Creagh Lane school in Limerick. At the time, those Ministers seemed upset and promised to act. Their failure to act leads me to believe that any fair solutions they had were torpedoed by officials in their Department. I ask the Minister if the same thing happened to him. When Louise O'Keeffe won her case in Europe, it took years for the survivors to be included in redress. The brave men in Creagh Lane school had to protest in Brussels and at the gates of the Dáil to achieve fairness. Will the survivors of the mother and baby homes need to do the same? I hope to God they will not.

At every point in the mother and baby homes process, the Government has placed obstacles before survivors. The final report underplayed the actions of those institutions. The stark reality of what happened is that these women were interned and their children were kidnapped and now we are expected to accept there will be a hierarchy of survivors. We are expected to accept that those boarded-out children are to be excluded and to accept a redress scheme that is based on a commission report that is itself extremely flawed. It cannot be accepted and will not be accepted by the survivors I have spoken to. What can be accepted is a commitment to remove the time-based redress criteria and a commitment that those who were boarded out will be included in the scheme. What can be accepted is fairness for all the survivors. The responsibility and shame is with the organisations that ran those homes of hardship.

Deputies from all parties read the accounts of the survivors last year. Many of us were emotional when we spoke about the horrendous wrongs that were done to the women and children of those homes. I appeal to those on the Government benches to be sympathetic to the needs of all the survivors. I ask them to support this motion and together we can, at the very least, ease some of their pain in this regard.

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