Rónán Mullen (Independent)

I welcome the thoughtful contribution made my Senator Harris. I also echo Senator O'Toole's call for a debate on Mr. Justice Seán Ryan's report, repeating the call I made yesterday.

As a practising Catholic I feel sorrow and shame because some of those who officially represented the values of the gospel in which I believe failed to live that gospel in the way they treated children and in the way they failed to prevent and punish evil doing among some of the members of the orders running the institutions. They failed to rise up against this and on some occasions exemplified the cruelty of the times. This is a day to focus on those who suffered in these institutions, not everybody, but a very significant number. This should be our sole focus. There will be another time to make the points that this is not the full story of the church's good work in Ireland nor the full story about the legacy of the religious orders. This is the very sad, tragic and despicable side of the story.

I was intrigued by the comments of Senators O'Toole and McCarthy. No doubt, there were head bangers around in the 1970s and 1980s and various campaigns. I would encourage them, because I am interested in what they have to say, to use their Seanad privilege to give us chapter and verse on that. It is important to distinguish between people who feared certain programmes, however mistaken they may have been, and people who would willingly place children in danger. We need to be careful of being too general. Let us get specific and avoid blackening whole classes of people.

The immature relationship between the church and the State is part of the story. However, we should all be conscious - I know we all are here - of the current failings of our State with regard to the protection of the most vulnerable children in our society and the fact that Children First is patchy in its implementation. We should be conscious too of the failure of other states. I think of the case of Victoria Climbie, the child who was abused so badly and whose social workers failed to intervene due to a politically correct fear of being seen to be hard on minorities. This happened in Britain. Therefore, abuse is not just a story about religious orders or Ireland.

Undoubtedly, there is something we must reflect on and learn from about power and about that immature relationship that existed between religious and State authorities where there was not sufficient responsible oversight so that evil doing was rooted out in time. As a result of that failure, much more evil doing happened and that is the great tragedy of all of this. At all times let the dignity of the person be at the front and centre of our policy choices and let us focus on that most of all at this time.