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

Sometimes it feels like there is a disconnect in respect of how the Minister speaks about this issue and the lived experience of people. I will give one example. In 1960, 18-year-old Madeleine Walsh was sent to Bessborough. Her baby son, William, fell ill when he was three days old and was taken from her. He died when he was six weeks old. After years of requests for information, she was informed by nuns that he lay in an unmarked grave at Bessborough folly. She visited that spot for years to be near her son and to speak to him until 2019, when the fifth interim report revealed that the nuns had lied. William had actually been buried in an overgrown famine graveyard on Carr's Hill. There seems to be no end to the cruelty that is heaped upon these women by religious orders and the State. At every step, the Department has failed them. So many women and children who were in Bessborough have been excluded from the discriminatory redress scheme. Every woman who was forced to scrub floors, do laundry and clean nappies, day in and day out until her hands were raw, is completely excluded from the work-related payment.

As the Minister said, a planning application was rejected recently because of the known unmarked mass grave of children. There is no reason the State should provide a survey for the excavation of Tuam and not for the other sites. We know that survivors are not a homogenous group but how can the Minister say that one group deserves answers and justice while another does not?

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