Réada Cronin (Kildare North, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I also thank the Social Democrat for tabling this important motion. However, it has come to the stage where I kind of dread getting up here and talking about mother and baby homes because so many of the people who were excluded from our society back in the dark old days of the State are still being excluded by the Government’s proposals. At the time of their first exclusion, their behaviour was perhaps too high a price for our prim and proper society and our respectability - we had our own morality police stalking the streets - even if that behaviour was sometimes just getting raped. Now they are being excluded again. Their inclusion is too high a price financially for a Government that goes to great lengths to present itself as righting wrongs. In truth, it is underwriting the wrongs done to these women and their children in its bullheadedness in reducing costs and liability for the State.

I told the Minister previously that he drew short straw. He and his party have had to clean up the way successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments put away women and children. Now, when the State has a chance to look after them, the stooges in their Departments are looking at the liability instead. There are billions of euro to splash around in overruns and billions to euro given to the private sector to provide public services, but there is not enough money for the women and children who were abused by the State. This must change immediately.

The exclusion of children in an institution for less than six months is not just neglect; it is vindictive. It is completely lacking the understanding of the early days of a child’s life. The last time I spoke on this I told the Minister about Mary, who spent less than six months in Bessborough. Her mother took her home, but she was called names all through school. She was reminded that her mother had her outside marriage, as if that was something shocking. She left her village and never told a single person about her earlier life. She asked me to ask the Minister a question last time about the babies aged under six months in Tuam and whether the Government would bother to exhume them or not or just leave them in the septic tank. It was a rhetorical question and she was not expecting an answer. However, the Minister replied in his summary, which shows that it just did not hit home for him.

The commission’s authors state that 70% stayed six months or less. This means Mary was not alone. No money can ever compensate for the trauma. No sum of money, millions or billions of euro, can ever make up for the separation of child from his or her loving and devastated mother. However, as a mere token of remorse and sorrow in a desire to restore, money can recognise the wrong that was done.

Drawing the short straw does not get the Minister off the hook.

He has to be able to take on the protection of the status quoin his Department. Change the system and change the scheme.

See this speech in context