Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I notice that a group of amendments have been taken together. Amendment No. 1 is in relation to conclusion dates, so I have no idea why that is there. Deputy Funchion has asked that question, and I will repeat it.

First, I want to thank the Department for its work. When I attended the Irish-language committee today, I realised that there is an extraordinary number of vacancies in the Department and there is huge pressure on the Department. I will not repeat the figure, which I think was more than 100. The Minister may feel free to tell me the number of vacancies in the Department. The staff are working under extraordinary pressure. Let me say that at the outset.

A question has been asked in respect of Seanad amendment No. 1. When Senator Boyhan clearly pointed out the problems in that regard, the Minister's response was to say, "He has put it on my radar". I do not know what that means in legal terms. We are here to finalise a Bill, and it is on the Minister’s radar that the institution where Senator Boyhan spent time - indeed, where he was born - was open for much longer than the Bill suggests. Senator Boyhan said he was born there in 1961, whereas the concluding year has been listed as 1935. That was discussed in the Seanad in far more detail than I am prepared to discuss here. I have no idea what the Minister’s answer to that was, other than to say it is on his radar.

I do not wish to be personal towards the Minister in any way, but from day one this has been a cost-containment exercise from start to finish. The best thing that the Minister can say here and publicly is that he is doing better than what the commission recommended. Yet, that is a commission that has been utterly discredited by any right, reasonable-thinking person. This is a commission that produced a report that has an appendix attached to it, which I will come back to. It is in the Oireachtas Library. The Minister’s best claim there is that he is doing better than that and he is doing better than the interdepartmental committee. I do not find that to be warm praise. After what we have been through in this country, what residents of former institutions have been through, and the various apologies we have gotten for what spanned two centuries, was it not time to get it right? We have had ample warnings about how to get it right. The Ombudsman pointed out to us how to get it right when he referred to the malfunctioning or maladministration of the Magdalen and Caranua schemes.

I have said all of this before and I have to get my energy to say it. I am not saying it for me but for those who are coming to us. The staff in the offices, in consultation with me, had to answer hundreds, if not thousands, of emails. Over and over, a sense of despair and frustration came across. Only recently, this happened again in relation to the Department of Education and two years afterwards it came back with a gun to the head. That is the wrong type of imagery to use but there was a Zoom meeting on finalising the details of a scheme for enhanced medical cards and so on. The point I am making is that there was a gap of two years and then the group of people affected was told there would be a Zoom meeting and a decision had to be made. Then they found out that the decision had been made already.

I would love to say that this is marvellous work, that the Bill is based on evidence and human rights and that we have listened to the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, ICCL, and the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission. I wish I could say that because that is the way we should be going and I am sure, in his heart, that is the way the Minister wants to go as well. That is not what is coming across in this Bill, however. Let us look at it. The motivation continues to be to seek to exclude as many people as possible. The Government is excluding more people than it is including and the Minister is telling us this is a great Bill. We are excluding all those under six months, which is an arbitrary decision. If my memory serves me right, over 30 therapists put their names to a letter to the Minister saying this exclusion is arbitrary, wrong and not based on psychological evidence. That advice on the six-month period was ignored completely.

I can only stay with the conclusion I have formed because I have not seen any other evidence that would help me change my mind that this is a cost containment exercise. Tonight, the first amendment is a cost containment exercise and there is no justification for it. The Minister is telling us the information came to him recently but we have no idea how it came. We have had the Magdalen inquiry, the main institution for the industrial schools, the Caranua scheme and the interdepartmental committee that looked at the Magdalen laundries. The Departments have all of the information. It is a David and Goliath set-up all of the time. The Government has the information and suddenly there is certain information at the end of this process that the Minister is telling us is now leading the Government to distinguish a mother and baby home from a hospital or county home on the basis that the mother just went in there, had the baby and was not getting shelter. I heard the Minister explain the reason for the terminology and I accept to a certain extent that the Minister is caught with that terminology.

I ask the Minister to listen. We are not going to listen to the mother who went into home in whatever manner she was put in there. According to the commission, these women walked in and loved every minute of it. That is what the commission said; it said there was no coercion or anything. We are going to exclude those people. If they spent two days there and their evidence is that it caused psychological trauma, surely we can look at that? Surely this scheme is flexible enough to look at that? We are talking about a finite number of people. The first amendment is about an exclusion and a conclusion date, and it goes on then to refer to the relevant person and the institution. The amendments all continue to seek to exclude, and on what basis? We are going to talk about a surplus of €10 billion, €12 billion or €15 billion this year and going into next year. Surely we could have used some of that to make the scheme stand up based on human rights.

This scheme will be brought to the courts. The Minister cannot stand over a scheme that has an arbitrary cut-off of six months, whatever about standing over excluding all those who were boarded out, which the commission, in its wisdom, had to acknowledge was terrible for them. It was cruelty, not to mention those children who came from a mixed race background. They were totally excluded and that was all done to contain cost. An interdepartmental committee let this and its sole purpose was to contain cost. The Minister then went a little further than that.

The Minister has not given us any update on the negotiations with the religious orders, led by Sheila Nunan, on their contributions to the scheme. Is there any chance of giving us an update on that? I am from Galway city. In my time as a councillor, which is a long time ago, we begged the religious orders to give Lenaboy Castle, a former industrial school, as a gift to the council. They refused but subsequently had to give it as part of the redress scheme. I know what happened on every level, personally and professionally. It was packaged and sold on the local radio by the nuns and the local arts group as a gift when it was part of the redress to make up for what happened to children in that school. The industrial school in Galway city has been sitting empty since 2009, officially since 2011. Imagine what that says to those who attended. Every single year, a small group come from England and from throughout Ireland to visit the grotto, not for any religious reasons but because it was the one place where there was sunshine in May, flowers and a certain life and beauty. They go back to that every year, and they are left begging that this be preserved, while the building stands empty.

I welcome the excavation of the Tuam site, which has been approved. However, it is only one site and there is no certainty about all of the other sites. There are 798 children down in chambers that were variously described as sewage chambers and empty chambers. The commission managed to ask a question and make a statement on how the children could have been buried like that and how that happened. Mind you, it did not manage to answer those questions.

The commission made a weak recommendation that the Government write to the religious organisations and ask them to preserve and protect the records they have. That simple and mild recommendation has not been acted on. Maybe the Minister will tell me I am wrong. I like to be told I am wrong and I like to apologise but I have no evidence that I am wrong. What I have is a letter, and again we get worn out. Mind you, we are paid a decent salary and it is a privilege but one gets worn out by continuously following up on items like this which should not need a follow-up. The commission made a basic recommendation that the records be preserved, minded and made available. Nothing has happened with that recommendation or with any compensation or money from the nuns, brothers and priests. There has been nothing. An Taoiseach responded to me on 27 June with a two-page letter, in which he told me that nothing has happened, although he did not quite put it like that. He stated:

I understand that the National Archives is also embarking on a process to identify the list of organisations/institutions holding relevant records not subject to the National Archives Act and in the ownership, or custody, of private/religious institutions and/or individuals.

The commission was set up in February 2015, following many other entities before that. It is now 2023 and we have done nothing about the records that are being held by the religious institutions. I received a line telling me now, in the 21st century, that "the National Archives is ... embarking on a process". I am not told that the Government is embarking on it or has written.

Then we have the misquoting of the OAK research. An independent company was employed to go out and communicate and it was then misquoted continuously. The Minister has done so, as have Ministers of State. The big theme and feedback there was that survivors wanted access to their records. That is not a correct interpretation of the research carried out by OAK and the feedback from the survivors. When I reread it, as I did on more than one occasion, the feedback was that we should have an inclusive redress scheme, and that substantial numbers of people should not be excluded in the manner the Government has done. That has never been quoted by the Minister. It is self-serving to say it was only their records.

I cannot repeat that often enough. At the moment, we are looking at an RTÉ debacle. With every single minute of RTÉ's time and all the media taken up with it, there is no time to analyse a scheme that has been faulty from scratch. The ICCL has highlighted that over 40% of survivors are being excluded, and that the scheme is based on a report by the commission that is flawed. It has said it is "concerned that the Redress Scheme is therefore based on a report which the State itself agreed was flawed." How did the State agree it was flawed? Following a court case, it was agreed that an appendix would be added to the report. According to the ICCL, "The Final Report omitted survivors’ testimony and drew conclusions that do not align with survivors’ testimony." It goes on to give examples of that. The commission's report contained a caveat regarding "the contamination of some evidence" of those who came forward, the survivors. How can we stand over describing the evidence of people who came forward, with all the pain that entailed, as contaminated? It was described as contaminated because they talked to each other. Yet, the evidence of those who came forward from the religious orders and other backgrounds was given a premium, even though in one of the interim reports it was stated that it was not reliable. I have quoted that in the past. That was completely ignored. The ICCL has also stated that there is a problem with the work-related payment and that it is inadequate. Its briefing mentions the failure to deal with the waiver that is still contained in the legislation, and so on.

I am going to finish on this amendment by saying it is too late to appeal to the Minister to withdraw it. It is important, for the record, to use our voice to say we believe those who came forward. I believe, and I have seen with my own eyes on many different levels, and I have had that privilege in life. I have known of nobody who has come forward to speak without being pushed and pushed to do so. People who are so traumatised rarely talk. I had the privilege of representing people in Dublin at the redress board. Their lives were summarised in two paragraphs, after spending a lifetime in an industrial school. They came forward to that commission to tell their stories. I pay tribute to the work that went into many of the chapters in the document, which is 3,000 pages in length, but the narrative in the executive summary and the conclusion was nothing short of disgraceful.

It is my last chance to mention what the executive summary took great care to put an emphasis on, namely, the internal memos within whatever Department it was. At this stage, I have lost track. A few of the pages of the document were used to say that various Deputies and members of the media waived these memos but there was no evidence. They absolutely decried those memos. I am going to quote, for the record, a document which is very important. When you bring in a redress scheme, you must look at basing it on fundamental human rights and basic principles of justice based on maximum information. That is not what happened here. Information was drip-fed bit by bit. As the Minister is doing today, information has come to our attention just now in relation to various institutions, and when they stopped and when they did not. For the purposes of the two wise women and the wise man who put their name to the commission and took great trouble to discredit what various Deputies and members of the media said, I will refer to it now. It is a memo dated 12 October 2012, that is among other briefing papers, from the consultant public health physician to the assistant national director of the HSE medical intelligence unit. We left intelligence behind a long time ago.

It came up in the context of the inquiry into Magdalen laundries. They were not looking at mother and baby homes, but in the context of their inquiry into Magdalen laundries various pieces of information emerged, which the Government still has and yet we have no idea about them. Luckily, I have a copy of this document in my hand. It states that during the ongoing examination of the relationship between the Magdalen laundries and so on, a number of issues of concern arose in two of the mother and baby homes, one in Tuam in Galway and the other in Bessborough in Cork. Of course, the mother and baby homes were not included in the remit of the inquiry into the Magdalen laundries, but so serious was the issue that a strictly confidential briefing paper was produced. It stated that records for the Bessborough mother and baby home go back to 1922 and contain a wealth of information about mothers and their infants. One area of concern noted was the home's practice of recording more than one date of discharge for each resident. The first date was the date that the mother was geographically discharged from Bessborough, and the second date was when she was removed from the books, a period that might span several years. The Government has this detailed memo. All I have is the copy of it that was given to us in the corridor outside the Chamber. The document mentions a culture of protracted detainment at Bessborough, and refers to the fact that mothers and babies were often kept long after their babies were born, when they should have been fit for discharge. It states that there was also evidence that women were detained if not against their will, then certainly under strong coercive elements including a lack of questioning of the religious orders that ran the homes. Would the Minister not ask why this was not looked at by the commission or why it was looked at it and dismissed? Would he not ask why a few pages in the very important executive summary were given over to dismissing these memos, not looking at them and not questioning them? Somebody as high as the consultant public health physician took the trouble to write this memo. How many more memos are there? What information do we not have?

I will finish on my own city and county, and the Tuam mother and baby home. According to the memo, the mother and baby home in Tuam was similarly involved with the provision of babies to the American adoptive market. It stated that there are letters from senior church authorities asking for babies to be identified for the American adopted market, and that the records relating to Tuam are detailed and extensive. I wonder where they are. The author of the memo stated that it would take time to go through the records, but there were one or two areas of deep concern that needed to be looked at. The memo referred to letters from bishops and senior church officials who wrote to the home asking for babies to be made available for adoption. It concluded that in both cases, there were issues of concern in relation to historic patient safety, medical care, accounting irregularities and possible interference with birth and child certification which required further investigation.

I mention all of that because I recall that we invited an expert from Northern Ireland to look at the adoption records. I am on record as asking the Minister to correct me, but as I understand it, she asked for her name to be taken off the report because she was unhappy with the changes. When I spoke previously on this issue I said the exact same thing and nobody, including the Minister, has corrected me. First of all, she asked for her name to be removed, which it was not. Secondly, that report has never been discussed in the Dáil. Records were changed and falsified or whatever. That was never discussed in the Dáil. I am looking at amendments today that are numbered, just as people were numbered in institutions. It is ironic that we are concluding the debate on numbers once again, with no change in the substance of legislation that really needed to be changed substantially. I will not be supporting the legislation. I acknowledge that many of the amendments are good amendments in the sense that they are technical, avoid further mistakes and provide clarity. I do acknowledge that.

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