Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Apologies for being late for the debate. I listened to the previous Deputies, all of whom spoke clearly on the issue. I am really coming here as an alternative to Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett, who is at another committee. I wish Deputy Boyd Barrett was here because, as we know, he was born in a mother and baby home. It is one of the many things that are excluded from this scheme with which the Minister has come up. I cannot say how utterly disgusted I am with what we are doing in this Dáil today. If it was not for the debacle in RTÉ being televised live and everybody in the country being glued to it at the moment, everybody in the country would and should be glued to this. What is happening here is absolutely outrageous. I find it hard to believe the Minister will stand over this. I think this will damage his political and personal reputation for a long time. He will be known as the Minister who carried this through. Unfortunately, that is the way the body politic and political life works. It will stick with the Minister. Unless he is prepared to say he is not pushing for this anymore and accepts the amendments or throws the whole thing out and starts from scratch, it will stick. Sometimes, when mud is flung, it sticks, and in this case, I am not sure why it would not.

I have not been watching this too closely in the past week or so. I realise the Minister is trying to include alternative names for institutions. Apparently, only those in mother and baby institutions could get redress and there was apparently co-location of hospitals and mother and baby institutions on the same sites. The Minister is including a concluding date, as sometimes mother and baby institutions migrated into ordinary county homes. He is including a new definition of "relevant person" to make sure that a woman who was in hospital rather than a mother and baby institution would be eligible. All of this would be fine if we could trust the nuns and religious institutions to keep proper records. How do we know what was really happening on co-located sites, whether the year they say the mother and baby institution closed is the actual date it closed, and about what is likely to have happened with the fluidity with which women were moved between institutions?

The concluding date brings another cut-off point which allows this Government and the religious institutions to pay the least amount of money possible under some kind of a redress scheme. It will see so many women and children left on the wrong side. If a county home and hospital are on the same site and there is much movement between the two, how does one know what is really going on? A Deputy mentioned Senator Victor Boyhan, who was born in one of the institutions named in the Bill. The concluding year for that is 1935. However, he was born in 1961. He knows other people who were born there in the 1960s. Names changed and people were moved from place to place. When one takes this into account, the more rules one makes, the fewer people will be eligible. Those who were hurt by the State and church will be left without redress.

To be honest, this is just more of the same. This Government has consistently had to be dragged kicking and screaming into providing redress for people, whether for CervicalCheck, institutional abuse, Magdalen laundries, or, now, the mother and baby homes. When the Government does provide redress, it often reneges on promises and tries to limit the amount it has to pay while at the same time protecting the church, its funds and its reputation. For years, it was believed that county homes stopped admitting unmarried pregnant women in the early 1960s. That was later changed and it is still changing. We cannot, in all fairness, put in concluding dates. The whole country has been outraged by the revelations of how people in mother and baby homes were treated, how these institutions operated, and how the whole State operated in collusion with the Catholic church, which was dominant at the time, but also other churches.

I want to make the obvious point that one of the things we have to do if we want to be a truly modern, progressive Ireland is to break that connection between church and State and have that separation. I assume this Bill will pass because the Government has the majority, so what we are doing tonight is cementing that relationship, firming it up and tying it down. It is so hurtful to many people.

I mentioned Deputy Boyd Barrett because he is a colleague and should have been here, speaking. Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett was fortunate enough to be adopted by a loving, caring and well-off couple, who gave him a good living and education, and then later in life, he got to know, love and build a strong relationship with his birth mother. He was fortunate enough for that. With all of the exclusions the Minister is making for the very many people who were not fortunate enough to have all those ducks in a row in their lives, he is now insulting them, hurting them and pushing them back more and more. Either the Minister realises it or he does not, but he is looking at me as if I am talking nonsense and none of these things is happening. This hurt, this exclusion and long-term impact is actually happening to so many people who deserve all our love, attention and for us to put our arms around them. I mean us as people, politicians and a State who are responsible for what happened historically and who are able to change that for good and do something decent. We are doing quite the opposite. We will be opposing this Bill for sure but I wish, at the eleventh hour, the Minister would say he is walking away from this and will not be tarnished for the rest of his life as having the reputation of being the Minister who pushed this through.

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