Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

First I will address the people who are here in the Public Gallery. I welcome them. I am glad they are here but I am sad that they have to be here. Like others over the years, I have heard the horror stories about what people have had to endure.

Children born into this world have only one chance at childhood. For the majority of people, all we want is that our children have happy-go-lucky, carefree and happy times and that when they grow up into adulthood, they can look back on their memories with fondness and smile and think of long summer days maybe out in a field of hay or going to the bog cutting turf and helping out, doing the ordinary, simple things such as going up a country lane to pick strawberries. We wish that they will have nice memories of doing nice things.

Some of us are fortunate enough that when we look back on our youth, that is what we think of. We now have to think that there are other people, who are adults today and who will think back on when they were little boys or little girls, who were being physically, mentally, sexually or any other way hurt or mistreated, or not being dealt with kindly. That is an awful thing. It is robbery of the worst type. It is the robbery of your youth, a thing that nobody can give you back.

I do not stand here today criticising the Minister or saying that he did anything wrong; I do not. What I am saying is that he inherited this problem and his issue on this is how he reacts to the problem. I feel that the Government has been brought kicking, dragging and scraping along with this. The advocates and abuse sufferers themselves, their families and the people who have helped them tried to seek redress. When I say “redress” I am not talking about anything to do with money or anything like that; what I am talking about is that these human beings would feel that the State recognises, “we were hurt, we were harmed”. Their childhoods were robbed from them. That is the big concern they have. Deputy Mattie McGrath and the others in the Rural Independent Group feel strongly about this because each one of us, in our political lives, has come across survivors of the abuse. It is so upsetting. I have heard other people speak far better than I speak this evening, and give their account of what they have come across. Other people are able to put the words together better than I can. We are so sorry for the people who are not here today, people who have gone on to their eternal reward. They will never get their youth back again. All everyone must try to do is try to make a young person’s life happy and joyful but we cannot do that for these people. What we have to do, politically, is do our best. We have to try to let them see that the politicians from all sides care, and we are all sorry and disappointed for what happened to them.

It is important to say, and survivors would have to agree with this, that there were people in the institutions of the State who were not like this. There were nice people in the clergy and in different institutions, who were kind. They did not want to hurt or mistreat anybody, and they never did. It is like everything; we have to be careful. Of course, there were horrible people who did vile things. There is the issue of people being out in the community and being hurt in the community. That was an awful thing to happen. People were entrusted to take care of a child and bring him or her into their home. There is no problem in the world with the work if a person was what I call “helping”. That was great but there is a great difference between helping and being treated like a slave. There is a great difference between being kept busy and being treated cruelly and between being part of the family and being shunned from the family; in other words, being with a family but not being with them. That is an awful thing to do to any child because a child is such an innocent, open page, with a pure mind and pure body, and a child will soak up everything. If they are treated kindly they will soak that up and enjoy their childhood. That is not what happened, in many cases. We also have to be mindful not to condemn all the institutions of the State, not to condemn all the clergy or all the priests and nuns because they were not all like that. To say that they were, would be wrong. There were kind people. I am so sorry that the survivors of this abuse did not meet those people. I am so sorry that what happened to them, happened to them. However, politically our job now is to try to do the right thing for the survivors, and let them see in what I call their “getting older years” that the politicians of today, from all sides of the House are there to stand up for them, to fight for them and to look them in the eyes meaningfully and say, “We are so sorry that the State let you down, we are so sorry that you were hurt while you were in care and we are so sorry that such a thing could happen in the Ireland that was there before”.

We have to remember that to this day probably awful things are happening to children. We should always do everything that we humanly can to make sure that type of abuse, or any type of abuse, of our lovely little boys and girls, will never happen again, or be allowed to happen, on our watch, or on anybody else’s watch in the future.

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