Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I thank my colleague Deputy Cairns for tabling this motion. I will take up the point that Deputy Whitmore made. It is profoundly worrying and disturbing that the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth and the Minister do not seem to understand the importance of the early stages of childhood development up to five or six months. One would have thought that, of all the Departments, such an understanding would be ingrained in the thinking of the Minister's Department. When we meet children of homeless families who are in emergency accommodation, we see what a profound impact a number of months can have on them in their early development. It can cause childhood trauma and have an impact throughout their lives. For that not to be fully acknowledged and understood by the Department and the Minister is disturbing and worrying. In the Minister's comments today, he spoke about how children who were resident in mother and baby homes for more than six months would be included. He said that children who spent very short periods in an institution would be excluded. To dismiss four, five or six months as a very short period in infancy is wrong. It is a long time in a child's development, not a short time. That is something fundamental, which we all need to understand and recognise.

This was an opportunity to do the right thing and to cast away the shameful practices of the past, when the voices of survivors of mother and baby homes were not fully listened to. It was an opportunity to break with the power structures that treated people as if they were invisible, to end the grave injustice that was done to thousands of survivors, and to end the practice of othering, shaming and excluding people. It was an opportunity to treat people with the dignity and respect that they deserve, as equal citizens of this Republic, and to respect their human rights and fundamental dignity. It is disappointing that the opportunity to do that has not been taken. This excludes people from a redress scheme when mother and baby homes were all about exclusion, segregating people from Irish society, making them invisible and putting them in a place where they would not be seen in the hope that they would be out of sight and out of mind for mainstream society.

The redress scheme is trying to tackle some of the harmful effects of that societal exclusion and segregation. To exclude people is fundamentally wrong. I do not know how the Government can stand over that exclusion, especially when this redress scheme should be seeking to address, to some degree, some of the harmful effects of people being excluded and segregated. The thinking where people are excluded, put out of sight and out of mind, is continued in the thought process of the redress scheme. People were exploited by the fact that they were segregated from society. They were exploited through forced family separation, kidnappings, forced medical trials and forced vaccination trials without consent. Assault is another abuse that happened. The segregation and exclusion were exploited and to carry on with them is shameful.

We did not hear from the Minister about why the June 2021 commitment to appoint an international human rights expert to re-examine the testimony given to the mother and baby homes inquiry was dropped. We and every survivor deserve to hear a full explanation of why that was dropped. The commitment that was given needs to be reinstated and acted on by the Minister.

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