Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome that the legislation is to be published and will appear before the Dáil. I welcome the change to the bands as well as the changes regarding the absences. However, the Minister is persisting with a scheme that maintains the imbalance of power and the division and is coldly and calculatedly directed at reducing costs. The Minister is excluding the babies who were resident for less than six months, which is at odds with the committee's report and what was recommended by the experts - 34 clinicians who work in the area of childhood trauma - who contacted him. Childhood trauma, which includes separation from primary caregivers and being exported to multiple caregivers in an institutional setting, has the greatest impact early in childhood. Thus, to state that young children who might have been in mother and baby homes for a period of two to three months early in life are less impacted by those who spent longer there is not scientifically correct. Indeed, the opposite is true.

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