Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I rise to oppose amendment No. 56. We are supposed to be legislating in a generous spirit, but the language of the Minister's amendment No. 56 is rules based. It requires the person applying, "within 60 days of the date on which the notice is sent to him or her, to comply with the request". I understand that if you are designing a legislative scheme, there is a lexicon around it. In this instance, however, the scheme's provisions have to be more open ended. My reasoning for this is that the persons applying to the scheme have gone through such trauma in their lives that there needs to be a kinder and gentler approach, not an arbitrary one that puts deadlines on the applicants. I fear that this will get wound up into a technocratic and bureaucratic scheme that will leave people further traumatised by dint of their experience in applying for the scheme in the first instance.

At this, the eleventh hour, the Minister needs to examine how the scheme is devised. It puts too many obstacles in the way of the applicant. I appreciate that, when devising a scheme, there needs to be a rules-based approach, but we must also be sympathetic to the people who are making the applications on the basis that we believe the veracity of the information they are providing, given that they are, for the most part, already part of a database or on record as having been residents in an institution and so on. It is on this basis that we are opposing the amendment. It is too arbitrary.

I believe strongly that our generation of politicians – I include the Minister in my generation – had a wonderful opportunity to deal with this legislation in a comprehensive way that would not have excluded people. For the life of me, I still cannot understand why up to 40% of survivors – "survivors" has become the de facto word – including children who spent less than six months in an institution and those who were boarded out, are excluded from it. One can only conclude that this is about money and resources. A decision was taken somewhere on the Minister's side of the House between officials and between Ministers that we had to resource cap the scheme because they were only thinking about its financial cost. There is a generation of people who could avail of this scheme and who we believe have a right to do so but who will now be excluded by dint of the fact that they do not meet the six-month requirement. That is too arbitrary and permits no consideration of the context of a person's life. That is fundamentally sad - it is the saddest thing. Our generation of politicians had an opportunity to be more inclusive of people in designing this scheme. It would not have been perfect, but it would have included more people who, as of right, should have been included. Even if the Minister had to revert to the House at this eleventh hour with a revised scheme that was more inclusive, he would be pushing on an open door with us. As the legislation is constituted at present, though, we in the Labour Party cannot support it.

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