Holly Cairns (Cork South West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Amendment No. 1 is about inserting "concluding year" in respect of different residents of institutions from "hospital", but creates a cut-off point based on information that is incomplete. Senator Boylan highlighted better than any of us could how problematic this amendment is, but tonight marks the end of an incredibly disappointing and infuriating journey for tens of thousands of survivors of mother and baby homes. This redress scheme is flawed, callous, inhumane and discriminatory. Even at the last hour, there is an attempt to insert another amendment to further limit the number of people who will actually get any kind of redress. That is coming from a position of 40% of survivors being excluded, while two thirds will be denied healthcare, 24,000 people will be ineligible for any compensation and many survivors will receive only a token amount, despite their lifelong trauma and suffering. I have to ask, following, as the Minister said, 30 hours of debate - for what? To come up with a scheme that excludes so many people so cruelly as that. Anyone who as a child spent less than six months in a mother and baby home will be excluded because somehow the Minister and the Department do not seem to acknowledge the trauma of infants who were snatched from the arms of their parents and kept separate for a lifetime. There has yet to be an explanation for how anybody ever came up with the six-month criterion.

The other amendments we will debate are largely technical. Any amendments we discuss following amendment No. 1 will be largely irrelevant to the legislation as a whole, and will be largely meaningless to people watching who will be affected by this legislation. They are irrelevant to the importance of the entire context of what we should be talking about. We are talking about some of the worst human rights violations imaginable, including suspicious deaths that were never investigated, forced labour, servitude, forced disappearances, torture, ill-treatment, discrimination based on sex, race, ethnicity and class, forced family separation, non-consensual medical trials, arbitrary detention, and interference with family life, private life and freedom of expression. Instead of taking into account these harrowing experiences, the Government scheme was solely about compensation based on the amount of time spent in a mother and baby or county home. This goes against the Government's own report, the OAK report, which found that redress should be based on several other things, in addition to, further down the list, time spent in an institution. Those who suffered horrific abuse while boarded out or placed in unvetted foster care will be entitled to nothing.

The amendment proposed by the Minister to insert "concluding year" in respect of all the relevant institutions serves only to narrow the scheme even further. It is a continuous trend of an insulting, miserly method for determining who qualifies for redress, creating hierarchies of victims and weighing unimaginable harm against unimaginable harm. I do not think there are any words to adequately describe how the State has failed survivors, but I assure the Government it will not be forgotten.

It is difficult for me and many people to imagine what it was like to be in one of those institutions and all that goes with that, including the lifelong trauma, suffering and all the different things those people carry with them throughout their whole lives. To think that finally, following the commission of investigation and all the different things that took years to come about and were very reluctantly carried out, there might be some acknowledgement, some recognition and some redress, the emotional rollercoaster that might be for somebody can be imagined. To be again rejected, slapped down and disregarded, and to find out that despite the fact you went through all that, and that we had a commission of investigation and there will be a redress scheme but you will get absolutely nothing - it is not possible for me to understand how difficult that is. It is not possible for any of us unless we were in one of those institutions. It is important to highlight how horrific it has been for people to go through that journey. For the people who are not getting redress, it would have been better if none of this happened. That, in itself, is an indictment of the Government's approach to this.

We debate a lot of issues in the Chamber. One can see how people might be coming from a different perspective and sometimes one can understand that, even if one disagrees. I feel that a lot but, on this issue, I do not understand where the Government is coming from. I do not even believe it thinks it is okay or fair to exclude people like this from a redress scheme. I know from people I have met over the years, through the committees chaired by Deputy Funchion and so on, that it is not only many people in the Chamber who recognise and understand how awful what they have been through is and that they deserve so much more, but the general public agree this scheme is not representative of what everybody else wants.

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