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

A game of divide and conquer is being played here and I believe it is entirely deliberate. There are 58,000 survivors of mother and baby homes in this State. The redress scheme will provide financial compensation for 34,000 of them. Thousands will receive no compensation whatsoever. These include the children who were boarded out and all those who left the homes before attaining the age of six months. Divide and conquer is being played out here. The survivors to whom I have spoken believe so and I have spoken to many of them.

More than 30 experts in childhood trauma wrote to the Minister saying these provisions ignore best practice guidelines in neuroscience, childhood trauma and attachment. They make the following telling point: "The earlier the impact of trauma the more long lasting the effects". That rather spectacularly undermines the Minister's crude six-month cut-off rule. Rosie Rodgers, a survivor of Castlepollard, put it very well and pointed to the divisiveness of the Minister's policy when she said:

Anything after six months and you are acknowledged. Anything less and your pain doesn’t count. Everybody who spent a day in those institutions, it has left its mark. There is no inclusiveness in this redress.

Nor is the compensation adequate for the 34,000 survivors. Furthermore, forcing people to wait until 2023 to receive payment is unfair. Many of the survivors are, of course, elderly. Interim payments are being made in Northern Ireland. Why is that not happening here?

I will say a few brief words about the role of the Minister and the Green Party in all of this. Many people voted for the Green Party in general election 2020 and, in doing so, they voted for change in many cases. They wanted something different and bought the idea that the greens were radical. However, what they see here is the old politics, including an attempt to divide and conquer with people who are victims of oppression. Those people cannot see any difference between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and they have a strong point. I will leave it at that.

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