Pa Daly (Kerry, Sinn Fein)

I do not have any difficulty with most of the technical amendments, but I will make a few points about the wider issue.

This is the Supports for Survivors of Residential Institutional Abuse Bill 2024 and it has the word "support" in its title, but it includes little in the way of practical support for former residents in its contents. It is more virtue signalling and promising something while delivering nothing on the part of the State. In fact, the State is washing its hands of some vulnerable citizens. The Bill contains provision for complex health needs of infirm former residents who apply for certain payments, but nothing relating to contributory pensions, end of life care or support for spouses. The Minister will fund psychological support and chiropody services, so, as one writer put it, residents can be told about the aches and pains in their bodies and heads while their toenails are being cut, but there is nothing about the exclusion of thousands of former residents of mother and baby homes from the payment scheme.

I refer the Minister to Patrick Anderson McQuoid's letter to The Irish Times last August. He was sent by the Bethany Home which was open until 1972 to a nurse mother where he was kept hungry. He was then sent by the Irish Church Missions to a family in the Six Counties who beat him until he escaped to England at the age of 16. What does the Minister's payment scheme offer to Patrick under this or any other Bill? Nothing. I think of James Sugrue from Kerry who was one of the children boarded out in some of the schemes. They have received nothing as well. I have to wonder. It is easy for the State to blame the Catholic Church and other religious bodies and institutions, but why are the boarded out children, the people who were in Bethany Homes and Westbank Orphanage in Wicklow, which was connected to the Church of Ireland, excluded from the scheme? It is worrying that they are. It is easy to find a scapegoat in one particular church because that kind of absolves the State from the overarching responsibility it had to the children. The Bill does not offer former residents of Wicklow's Westbank Orphanage anything as they are excluded. It is a collective stain on our history and a source of deep shame that those people are being ignored. They include people like Patrick Anderson McQuoid. They had similar horrifying treatment under the watchful eye of the State.

The Bethany Home was inspected by the Department also but, strangely, it has been excluded. The State is in effect washing its hands of a lot of these survivors, but their struggle will go on to be given treatment equal to the people dealt with under the other schemes. It is unfairness that has not been dealt with. The struggle of Mr. McQuoid and James Sugrue and the other boarded out children is unbelievable because at every stage from the moment James Sugrue was put into the boarded out home in Killarney, he was under the care of the State. When he was boarded out he received horrible treatment. His two brothers are now both deceased. At every stage, the State was responsible for him and it has washed its hands of him and that is not fair.

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