Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

First, I commend all those who have fought and campaigned, and continue to campaign with the emails they are sending to us in this House and particularly to the Government. They are appealing to it, even at this late stage, to rethink what it is doing and not to deny the survivors of mother and baby homes the closure and justice they deserve. After all they have suffered and been through and all they have had to fight for, this day should be the day when they get that closure and justice. Instead, as the Minister well knows, they will not get that. Tens of thousands of people will feel excluded and insulted. The abuse, suffering and injustice they endured at the hands of the church and the State for decades and decades continues if the Minister denies them that closure and that justice. This is not just an insult to those who are excluded on the arbitrary grounds on which the Minister has excluded; it is an insult to every mother and child who suffered forced separation in the mother and baby homes. It shows a singular failure on the part of the Government to understand what the crime and the abuse was that it can come up with this arbitrary, unjustifiable scheme which includes some, excludes others and has a league table including a price tag which commodifies your suffering. Does the Minister not understand how insulting that is for all the people have suffered?

One of the particularly dark, terrible ironies of something else going on at the moment is that there are dark and sinister forces running around this city for the last few weeks who are claiming utterly falsely that vulnerable, desperate immigrants and asylum seekers are a threat to women and children in this State because they are foreigners. Those people need look no further than this House, the political institution that is supposed to represent the Irish people and the religious institutions. The Irish religious institutions and Irish political institutions orchestrated decades and decades of systematic abuse of mothers and children - not poor, desperate immigrants or asylum seekers - and the State is continuing to do this and to insult and abuse those who suffered. I searched the Minister's speech on Second Stage and his other speeches in vain for any justification by him of this arbitrary exclusion.

I am an adoptee, as the Minister knows. I was born in a mother and baby home. I was in a couple of them, actually, because I was sent off to England to be ushered out of sight. The child of a fallen woman, an illegitimate child; that is how the mothers and the children were characterised. I was then brought back. I do not even know how long I was in a mother and baby home. It is irrelevant whether you were there for one week, one day, six months or two years because the central crime that church and State committed was the primal wound of separating a mother from their child which, from the moment it happens, has a lifelong affect on mother and child. It is the primal wound that begins on day one. I always say that my story turned out to be lucky. I was eventually reunited with my mother and I was adopted by a wonderful family. Regardless of whether your story of what happened is terrible - and for some it is absolutely terrible; they suffered all their lives because of the primal wound inflicted by church and State when they were boarded out, suffered abuse, as mothers were forced to work essentially as slaves, were shamed all their lives and had to endure the stigma of illegitimacy - the truth is that to a greater or lesser extent everyone had a crime committed against them from day one when they were torn out of the arms of their mother and the lives they would have lived were taken from them because of the twisted, perverted morality of church and state that deemed some people legitimate, some people illegitimate and some women "fallen women". It is shocking, perverted and twisted stuff. Now we have a league table of arbitrary exclusions and a failure to acknowledge the individual, specific suffering that some people may have endured because of being boarded out, because of discrimination because they were mixed race, or whatever it was. It is shocking and still we have no justification.

I appeal to the Minister, if he is serious, and to the officials or whoever came up with this plan, even at this last moment. We do not just want a report. That is just a way of trying to force a debate. I am putting it to the Minister at the last minute that he needs to rethink this so that people can finally get the closure and the justice. He should step back from this now and listen to the survivors, the people who are at the wrong end of the systematic abuse and crimes that church and State committed. For God's sake, do not negotiate with the religious organisations that were responsible. There is no negotiation required. Take their assets off them and make them pay the redress and all the compensation for the crimes that they have committed. We should not be talking to them. We should be telling them.

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