Mary White (Fianna Fail)

I would like to outline my vision in this regard. This was a problem of social class. I would like to take this opportunity to call for the crimes that these young people were supposed to have committed, stealing a bar of chocolate for example, to be expunged. In the years in question, the district judges came from a superior class in society. We had a much more defined class structure when these things were happening. The district judges had the audacity to condemn little children and people in their early teens to industrial schools. How dare they? I would like to call for these supposed crimes to be expunged immediately. The people who committed the abuses that were exposed in the report published yesterday will not pay for them, whereas the children who were deemed to be guilty of minor offences - I am sure 99% of them came from poor families - continue to have those puny crimes on their records. I am calling for these crimes that were committed by these poor children to be expunged from the records. I am ashamed and embarrassed of my country. For people of my generation - I was born at the end of the Second World War - nothing could be worse than how the Nazis in Germany treated the Jews. The abuses perpetrated by men and women of the religious orders were just as bad as the actions of the SS men. It is shocking that people who were supposed to be carrying out Christ's work could treat children in such a manner.

I remind the House that 5,300 children are currently in the care of the State. Some of them are in foster homes or partly fostered, others are awaiting adoption and others are in residential institutions. Believe it or not, 16 of the 21 recommendations made in Mr. Justice Ryan's report relate to children in the care of the State who are in institutions. Mr. Justice Ryan went to the trouble of setting out 16 recommendations on how children in residential care should be protected. I have compiled documents on child care, ageing and ageism and suicide prevention. I have said on many occasions in this House that this is a great country for publishing reports and putting them on shelves, but we are hopeless at implementing them. I ask my colleagues in Seanad Éireann to demand the implementation of Mr. Justice Ryan's report. It should be followed through until its aims have been achieved.