Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats)

I welcome this Bill and acknowledge the fact that the Minister has progressed this very quickly in her position. My colleagues will go into more detail about the specifics of the Bill, but I will just use these few minutes to ask that when the Government is looking at this redress scheme it learns from previous redress schemes and the mistakes we have made in the past. Oftentimes our previous redress schemes retraumatised and really failed people over and over again in the most public and inhumane way.

I want to talk specifically about Westbank Orphanage in Greystones, Wicklow. There were 30 to 50 children in Westbank Orphanage at any one time. It moved to Wicklow in the 1940s and closed its doors only in 2002. The children within that orphanage were beaten with electric flexes and coat hangers. They were starved. They were used as forced labour. They were trafficked up to the North to unregistered foster homes. They were used for fundraising purposes by the woman who ran that home. She treated them absolutely awfully. The children even lost their names in that process. They all had to have her name, Mathers, so they did not know who they were and it was years before many of them even realised that their own brothers and sisters were living with them in that home. It is really awful that the trauma of the children - they are adults now - who suffered at the hands of that woman was not acknowledged by the State and was left out of the mother and baby home scheme. They asked in 2014 and James Reilly at that stage refused to incorporate them into it. They have spent all that time fighting and pushing for their trauma to be acknowledged and for them to be recognised.

I welcome the fact that the Minister of State, Deputy Neale Richmond, in the Seanad in recent weeks has acknowledged the difficult time those victims experienced. He called it out for the historical injustice that it is and gave a personal commitment to get the institution included in the redress scheme. He also said the Tánaiste, Deputy Simon Harris, would also support that, not in this scheme but in the previous scheme. I welcome that move and I absolutely will work with him as much as possible to get this done. These people have been calling for this for many years, so I hope that in this term of Government, finally, they will be heard and acknowledged.

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