Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

We have debated the institutional payments Bill extensively in both the Dáil and Seanad. It has undergone at least 30 hours of debate across both Houses. It is important that we get this legislation passed prior to the end of the term in order that we can enact this legislation and put in place the mechanisms so that survivors can make applications and draw down the payments and enhanced medical cards to which they are entitled under this legislation.

I will speak to the first group of amendments. These amendments are intended to clarify an issue that came to the attention of my Department necessitating changes to the Bill at a late stage in the Seanad. They are necessary purely in order to protect the scheme for its intended recipients. Before I outline these amendments for Deputies and speak to each individual amendment, as appropriate, I want to confirm that these amendments in no way affect the potential 34,000 eligible applicants or how the scheme will operate for them.

The amendments are being made to provide clarity now and for the future and to ensure that the Bill faithfully reflects the policy objectives of the scheme, which is to recognise time spent, harsh conditions, emotional abuse and all other forms of mistreatment, stigma and trauma experienced while resident in mother and baby and county home institutions.

Moving on to the issue that has come to light, it is known that women were admitted to county homes in the same circumstances as those who were admitted to mother and baby home institutions. The county home institutions were successors to workhouses and the conditions in these institutions were very poor. The women who spent time in county homes unfortunately experienced particularly dire conditions. It was the understanding of the interdepartmental group that developed the proposals for the mother and baby institution payment scheme that all county homes had closed by the early- to mid-1960s, with many of the locations shifting towards the care of the elderly and becoming nursing homes.

The commission's report noted that the practice of admitting unmarried women to county homes ceased in the early 1960s, with the number of unmarried women in these homes across the country being in the single digits by 1963. However, it has come to light that while many county homes did transition to provide services to older people in the 1960s, a number of them were co-located with county or district hospitals, which provided mainstream medical or surgical services, including mainstream maternity services. Notably, mainstream maternity services continued to be provided at these locations for many years and in some cases beyond the term of the commission's investigation, ceasing in 1998.

As Deputies will know, the scheme is currently constructed so that women are eligible for a general payment based on having been admitted to, and spending one night in, a mother and baby or county home institution. The Government took this approach as we wanted to acknowledge the particular stigma and trauma experienced by women as a result of being admitted to a mother and baby or county home institution. However, if there was any confusion regarding these co-located mainstream services, the requirement to be resident for only one night could have implications for the scheme, with a lack of clarity and a risk of access inadvertently becoming much broader than those that the scheme is intended to focus on, that being the survivors of a very difficult institutional experience.

To address this, it has been decided to make amendments to the Bill which fall into three parts, as follows: first, to amend Schedule 1 to the Bill to provide greater clarity in relation to the names of county home institutions; second, to further amend Schedule 1 to the Bill to provide a concluding year in respect of all institutions under the scheme, including county homes; and finally, amending the definition of relevant person in section 2 of the Bill to include references to the provision of shelter and maintenance to provide additional clarity on the purpose and main function of mother and baby and county home institutions. I will now look at each element in turn.

Schedule 1 of the Bill is, first, being amended to provide greater clarity in relation to the names of the county home institutions. Amendment No. 61 sets out the revised Schedule 1. In order to be eligible for the payment scheme, an applicant must have been resident in one of the listed mother and baby or county home institutions. The issue in question arises in circumstances where county homes or county or district hospitals were co-located on the same site, although, in most cases, separately and distinctly managed. These co-located sites apply to 15 of the 29 county homes which carry eligibility for the payment scheme. In all cases, the county home is within the remit of the scheme but the mainstream hospital is not. I propose to amendment Schedule 1 to the Bill by creating two distinct columns: the first column, column 2, referring to the county home institution; and the second, column 3, giving further information in relation to the other or later-known names for the institution. In some cases, this other known name also pertains to a county or district hospital. This amendment is a first step to ensuring the policy intention of the scheme is clear and protected. However, it will also provide clarity to applicants as in many cases institutions were renamed or given a religious name at a point in time and an applicant may not recognise the institution by this newer name depending on when the applicant spent time there. This more-detailed schedule will also address an error that was identified in relation to the Waterford county home, which was previously listed in the Bill as "St. John's Hospital, Dungarvan," but should have been named as "St. Joseph's".

Schedule 1 to the Bill is also being amended to provide a concluding year in respect of all institutions, including county homes. To supplement the additional clarity relating to names, I also propose to provide additional clarity pertaining to the timeframe in which these institutions operated as mother and baby and county home institutions. My Department is currently engaged in a detailed piece of work with regard to institutional records for the scheme in preparation for its opening. This exercise, in conjunction with the work previously undertaken by the Commission, has allowed my Department to develop an understanding of the last year that women or children were admitted to these institutions for reasons relating to this scheme. Based on this work, the Bill now includes a concluding year for each of the institutions concerned. Acknowledging that further information may become available on the institutions as work regarding institutional records continues, there is a facility to amend any of the concluding years by regulation if necessary. I will speak further to this amendment shortly.

While the issue that has arisen relates to county home institutions, there are similar implications for the mother and baby home institutions under the scheme that are included in Schedule 1. The commission's term of investigation was 1922 until 1998 and as part of its terms of reference, the commission was given the authority to amend the relevant period in respect of any component part or institution it was considered appropriate to do so. In some cases, where the commission's report indicates that an institute closed or ceased to operate as a mother and baby home, this year is set as the concluding year in the revised Schedule. Some institutions continued to operate beyond the period of investigation, either in a different capacity or operating a model that was vastly different to that of earlier decades. For example, Miss Carr's is still in operation today working with families and providing a range of parenting supports. Similarly, the Regina Coeli Hostel also remains in operation today providing services as a homeless women's hostel. Therefore, in these cases, the concluding year is set at 1998, the final year of the commission's investigation.

To support these changes to Schedule 1 under amendment No. 61, there will be a number of necessary consequential amendments. Amendment No. 1 inserts a definition for concluding year in respect of a relevant institution in section 2. Amendment No. 3 is a technical one, which amends the definition of a relevant institution to specify that this is an institution which is named in column 2 of Part 1 or column 2 of Part 2 of Schedule 1. One will see that in the revised Schedule 1, Part 1 contains four columns with column 2 listing the names of the institution for the purposes of this scheme, that is, the county home. Column 2 of Part 1 contains information on another name the county home may have been referred to but, as I have just mentioned, this name may also pertain to a county or district hospital. Therefore, it is important that the definition of "relevant institution" makes reference to column 2 only in Part 1, with column 3 intended to provide supporting information.

Part 2 of the revised schedule will contain three columns but only column 2 referring to institutional names. Amendments Nos. 11, 12 and 22 are consequential technical amendments to sections 18 and 24 and provide for these sections to be amended to make reference to column 2 specifically when referring to institutions in the schedule.

Amendment No. 23 provides that in circumstances where an applicant was admitted to an institution up to and including 31 December of the concluding year, the applicant's eligibility for the scheme will be calculated on the applicant's entire period of residence, even if that goes beyond the cut-off year in question. For example, if a person was admitted to an institution on 20 November 1960 and was a resident in that institution for a 12-month period and the concluding year for that institution is 1960, the scheme administrator will base the applicant's award on the full 12 months the applicant was resident in that institution even though it goes beyond the concluding year.

The final consequential amendment arising from the revised Schedule 2 relates to section 50 of the Bill on additional institutions. Amendments Nos. 15, 17, 18 and 57 to 59, inclusive, all concern this aspect.

I will first speak on amendments Nos. 57 to 59, inclusive. This section of the Bill is being renamed to more accurately cover the provisions which will now be contained within it. Amendment No. 57 and the first part of amendment No. 59 provide that where the Minister, with the consent of the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, is adding an additional institution to the Bill - that was something we added as an amendment in the Dáil - there will also be a concluding year added along with that additional institution.

Amendment No. 59 provides for a small change to section 51 and the language in the criteria which will be used to establish if an additional institution should be added to the scheme. It replaces the word "maternity" in this subsection with the term "pregnancy related". This change is being made purely to avoid confusion where the word "maternity" is used elsewhere in the Bill to describe mainstream maternity services.

The final part of amendment No. 58 provides that the Minister, with the consent of the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, can positively amend the concluding year of any institution to a more recent year for existing institutions under the scheme if evidence comes to light that it operated as a mother and baby or county home beyond the existing concluding year.

Amendments Nos. 15, 17 and 18 amend section 20 of the Bill, which deals with the treatment of further applications to the scheme when an institution is added. These amendments provide that a further application can now be made to the scheme where the Minister, under section 50, amends the concluding year for any of the institutions currently listed in Schedule 1. Similar to further applications where an institution is added to the scheme, the same rules will apply to a further application should a concluding year be amended ensuring the most favourable outcome for the applicant.

The final element of this suite of amendments covers the definition of a "relevant person" in the Bill. Amendment No. 4, to be read in conjunction with amendment No. 6, changes part (b) of the definition of a "relevant person", which is the part that pertains to mothers, to now include two parts. The first, which is currently in the Bill, refers to residents in the institution for reasons related to pregnancy and the birth and care of the child as a result of that pregnancy. The second new part relates to being resident in order to be provided with shelter and maintenance. This second part of the definition is being added in order to refer in the Bill to the particular purpose of these institutions as aligned with their specific purpose in the underlying legislative framework for county homes and to thereby distinguish between mother and baby or county home institutions and other general medical settings, including hospitals, in terms of the reason for being admitted, which was ultimately because the women in these circumstances had no alternative and nowhere else to go.

Before I move to explain this further, I would like to say I am cognisant of the language and I am aware that the word "shelter", in particular, implies a level of support and care that many survivors do not feel was in any way aligned with their particular experiences in these institutions. The reason that term is being used is that it is reflective of the regime and the old legislative framework, which we absolutely recognise was deeply flawed and unregulated. In the case of county homes, they provided for poor relief, general assistance or institutional assistance in these institutions across the decades from the early 1920s. Section 54 of the Health Act 1953, for example, provided for "institutional assistance".

This was defined in that legislation as "shelter and maintenance in a county home or similar institution" and was the legislative provision governing the maintenance of unmarried mothers and children in mother and baby and county home institutions. The term "shelter" is being used in the Bill purely to reflect the existing legislative framework from the 1940s and 1950s that governed county home institutions at that time.

Amendment No. 5 makes a change to subsection 2(2) of the Bill, which outlines what is required for a person to be considered to have been resident in an institution. As mentioned at the outset, in the case of mothers, only one night in an institution is required in order to be deemed eligible for the scheme. This amendment is required to clarify that the residence must also start prior to 31 December of the concluding year for the institution concerned.

This outlines the issue and the proposed amendments in this group. Before I pass it to the floor for debate, I again state that these amendments do not in any way impact on the eligibility of the 34,000 people this legislation has been designed to benefit. The purpose of these amendments is to provide clarity and to protect the existing and agreed policy intention and scope behind the scheme.

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