Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)

In my four minutes, I will make some general comments rather than going into the terms of reference, although I share the difficulties. I would have preferred if the terms had come before the Dáil so we could have looked at them and discussed them. We should have learned from previous debacles, but that has not happened. I welcome the Minister’s work but we are now left with a fait accompli in relation to the terms of reference.

We are looking at the period from 1927 to 2013. Incidentally, 2013 was the year the Magdalen report came out and, finally, the State could not get away from the one strong finding that it was fully involved in the oversight of the Magdalen laundries and in using them and providing money. We have had over 100 years of institutionalisation and utterly failing to learn. We have terms of reference here setting out how we have failed to protect children and prevent sexual abuse, the concealment of sexual abuse and so on. This is not new. In my time, we had an apology from the Taoiseach in 1999. Ten years later, the Ryan report showed systematic and systemic abuse at every level in the boys’ industrial schools and serious emotional and physical abuse in the girls’ schools. That was in 2009. We then had the Murphy report on the Archdiocese of Dublin and the Ferns report on Wexford, which makes for the most difficult reading. I cannot imagine what it was like for the victims. We had this over and over. In the case of the mother and baby homes report, even though the body of the work is very good, the executive summary is absolutely appalling. It distinguished between contaminated evidence, which was that of the survivors, and those whose evidence had great value placed on it, namely, the social workers, the religious orders and so on. Have we learned from that? Have we learned from the redress scheme I attended – I am giving it the wrong name – in Dublin, where, even now, I would still be committing an offence if I dared to tell what award was given to the person I represented? Even more important, that person would still be committing an offence if they disclosed.

Then, there is the mother and baby homes redress scheme. I feel the Minister’s former Cabinet colleague, Deputy O’Gorman, was captured by the Department. Babies under six months were left out of that scheme. Imagine leaving out babies under six months. The Minister has been there as a mother. We were told the logic, which was that six months did not matter, the babies' brains were just a tabula rasa, let them cry, it did not matter. It was only after six months they suffered and so we then included them in the redress scheme.

What I am saying with all this – and I have very little time left to say it – is that the institutions have been forced every step of the way. The religious orders have not come on board at all. Each Government has been forced every step of the way to do something on the backs of courageous victims, in this case, the two Ryan brothers, one of whom is now dead. We saw their courage in coming forward in an RTÉ programme. That has been the same throughout, so one has to ask the question how come there has been report after report and still no proactive action from a government, except to set up another commission because the evidence of the thousands of allegations is so overwhelming. What type of society allowed sexual abuse to go on while we decried talk about sexuality as abnormal? That is the environment we were raised in. One did not talk about sexuality, the normal part, while the perverse and perversity continued. While I welcome this commission, I am not full of hope given my experience of commissions of inquiry and given the Grace case and so many reports.

I hope I am wrong.

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