Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Gabhaim buíochas leis an Teachta Cairns. The Social Democrats will forgive me if I do not thank them too much because I wish to use the remaining four minutes. However, I appreciate that they have given us this opportunity and put on the Dáil record the fact that there are voices in the House that care. I am not saying that the Minister does not care, but he has been captured by the mantra of the Department and the society that was portrayed in the final report of the commission of investigation. In his speech, which I listened to carefully and read, he spoke about the apology given by the Taoiseach, but let me set out what the IHREC and the UN have said about apologies. At the most basic level, public apologies have been placed on a statutory footing in other jurisdictions. The motivations for public apologies are:

generally both backward- and forward-looking, acknowledging past harms but also signalling a better future. The backward-looking elements include the taking of responsibility for past human rights violations, the honest acknowledgement of what occurred and naming the wrongness of those harms. The forward-looking components [which are missing in this instance] address the image of a "redeemed individual or nation", the beginning of a new era and a break from past cultures of violence, but also signal the social and political transformation required to ensure that such atrocities will never be repeated.

Will the Minister look at this description and see where his scheme fits into it? To me, it does not. The scheme is piecemeal and the Minister is doing a certain amount but going no further.

There are nine requests in this motion. They are the most basic requests. One of them is that we rely on the OAK consultation and what it found. One of the findings was that losing a child or losing the bond with a child was the most traumatic part. The Minister has excluded babies who were in institutions for less than six months. On reflection, what is his opinion on this provision? In his RTÉ interview, he called it the best approach, but on what is it based? I do not mean to be flippant, but I might as well ask why I spent six months of my life breastfeeding, minding and being up all night with two children if it did not matter? I say this with the greatest of respect to men and women. What was the point of me investing all of that love, which I regard as my duty as a mother, when it was all unnecessary? The child is a tabula rasaat nought and a tabula rasasix months later. The harm only starts after that. Trauma experts have written to the Minister. The cross-party committee has asked him to remove this provision, as has the IHREC, and the UN has serious difficulties with it.

When I look to see what transformative action is being taken, all I see are figures. The interdepartmental group told us that 24,140 people spent less than six months in a mother and baby home. Clearly, the Minister is excluding these people deliberately. He is the representative and I do not mean to personalise this at all, and I wish we could sit down and talk about how to do this right, given that it is a golden opportunity, but it is down in black and white that these people will be excluded. The scheme will exclude those who were boarded out. It will also not address the systematic racism that is being brought to our attention repeatedly by people who suffered from that racism and by the UN. On we go, though, and the Minister will come forward next week with another prepared script to put matters in perspective.

He congratulated himself that the scheme was much better than what the commission had recommended and that he had gone further than the commission in extending the scheme, including the times, but he did so without acknowledging something about the commission's conclusions. While I pay tribute to the body of the commission's work, its conclusions were absolutely without foundation. The Minister has admitted this, yet he is praising himself and basing his scheme on an extension of those faulty conclusions and recommendations. That any commission would describe testimony from survivors as "contaminated" begs serious questions about what was going on, as does claiming that their testimonies were not in accordance with the narrative without telling us what that narrative was. I grew up with the narrative and I knew what it was, namely, that "They knew best".

The institutions knew best, the priests knew best and the judges knew best. This was the narrative. This commission has perpetuated that narrative. I thank the Social Democrats. I hope, but do not think, this will be a momentous change and a way of saying enough is enough i ndáiríre agus tá gá le rud eile atá bunaithe ar chearta daonna ach níl dóchas agam beag ná mór.

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