Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Social Democrats for tabling the motion. It will be a comfort to survivors and campaigners that these issues are again being raised in the Dáil. There is an attempt by the Minister and the Government to say that outstanding issues and concerns of survivors have been dealt with, but that is not the case. It is a gross injustice that these issues are outstanding.

I wish to briefly address three of the outstanding issues and how painful they are, and show how the State continues to fail survivors and the women involved. First, there is the redress scheme and what we know of it. It continues to look like the work of a cold-hearted accountant whose chief job is to minimise the cost to the State. I hope I am wrong in that regard and that when it is debated in the House, the Minister will have listened to the women and survivors and experts and designed a scheme that does not draw an arbitrary line at six months spent in an institution or ignore those who were farmed out as forced labour, in effect, or suffered additional trauma from abuse as a result of their colour or ethnicity. By insisting on this, the Government is ignoring expert advice and the needs of thousands of people directly affected by the legacy of these institutions.

The Minister said the design of the scheme was based on a cold calculation of time spent in institutions and would ensure that survivors did not have to face a re-trauma of being called in and asked questions. That is very good but what about those who do not qualify and who have suffered trauma because of that, and believe me they do? The Minister needs to understand that their exclusion is re-traumatising. It is unconscionable and must be addressed.

The second issue is on the cost of the scheme. It may cost €800 million in total, with some 34,000 survivors being eligible but I question these figures and many have. I want to ask where the religious order and institutions are in their contribution to this. My argument here is not about saving the State money but is a fundamental issue of justice, redress and atonement for the wrong that was done.

I make no apology for repeating what I said last year. Those who bear particular responsibility for those centres, particularly the religious orders who ran them, should be made to pay for what they did. The Bon Secours Sisters ran the Tuam home. That order is now the second largest provider of private healthcare in the State, with revenue in 2019 of €314 million, including €5 million in public funding. In 2019, the HSE gave out more than €1.3 billion in public funding to services owned by five religious-owned healthcare facilities. In 2021, well over 90% of primary schools and a large majority of secondary schools remained under the control of the Catholic Church. Rather than giving them a slap on the wrist and a packet of public money, we should be seizing the assets of religious orders to fund the redress properly for all victims and move towards fully separating church and State.

My final point is tied to this. In designing the scheme as it stands, in ignoring the promise to have the testimonies reviewed by an independent expert and in refusing to expunge or amend the insulting passages and narrative of the commission’s report, the State and the Government are compounding the injury and historic injustices done. As with the failure to seek contributions from the religious orders to pay for the redress scheme, they add insult to injury by leaving unchallenged the official account of what has happened and leaving the gross and multiple inaccuracies contained in the report to stand.

The overwhelming impression of that report was that society and everyone in society was responsible for what happened in these institutions, and equally responsible. As someone said at the time, if everyone is responsible then no one is responsible and we have reached the logical conclusion here of that narrative. This is a redress scheme that seeks nothing from the orders who ran the homes, with a neutral and frankly inane promise to hear the testimonies again, but without any idea of restorative justice or holding the church and State to account. We essentially end up with the State shrugging its shoulders and saying it happened, so let us move on.

These institutions, the deaths in them, the forced labour camps, the beatings, the humiliations and the abuse did not just happen. It was not the natural outplay of a society at the time; these were worked for, planned for, defended, known at the time and justified by both the church and the State. They were resisted and fought against at the time by some by some women and children and even by many on the outside. Even some civil servants campaigned against them. Those who saw and knew and implemented what was happening were responsible and need to be made accountable and that is the church and the State.

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