Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch. I always value her contribution to this House. I hope that the next time they meet in the Lazy Daisy Café in Notting Hill ? it will be famous now ? she can say that 60 Senators and 166 Deputies will be there with her in spirit. I agree with everything other Senators have said.

Owen Skeffington, one of my predecessors, tried to persuade the House that adults should not beat children. John Boland, also a Member of this House, implemented the measure. I do not know where the tradition of physical force that is found throughout the McAleese report came from. The right to beat other people was accepted so casually, as was the right to imprison them. There are so many awful things in the report. I commend former Senator McAleese on his report. On page 26 of the report there is reference to the mass exhumation and cremation of people in High Park in 1993 in order to sell the site to a property developer. To do such a thing makes one think of the worst excesses of Nazism yet it happened in this city. It is a sign of a lack of respect for people?s human rights. I refer also to the level of judgmentalism towards women who live what would now be regarded as a normal life.

Our prohibition on family planning was enforced in the most ruthless way against those who infringed it, many of whom were exiled.

Senator Bacik referred to a book on coercive confinement in Ireland written by Eoin O'Sullivan and Ian O'Donnell, which cites the following statement by Ciaran McCullough:

It is certainly part of Irish ?folklore? that the use of mental hospitals to dispose of ?surplus? children was an important resource in the preservation of the inheritance system in rural Ireland. A son, inheriting from the father and bringing a wife into a farm which could only offer a subsistence income, may not have been pleased with the presence of his unmarried and ageing brothers and sisters in the household. Commitment to mental hospital may have seemed an attractive solution in these circumstances.

As O'Sullivan and O'Donnell show, from the 1920s through to the 1970s, we incarcerated on average 30,000 people per annum, including approximately 6,000 people in institutions that were investigated previously and perhaps 1,000 in the laundries, although the numbers in respect of the laundries differ.

Ireland had an incredible culture of locking up people. Families locked up their family members in mental hospitals. Notwithstanding our discussions about what happened to the women who were so disgracefully treated, they also had fathers and brothers. As O'Sullivan and O'Donnell note on page 268 of their book, members of the religious congregations were not recruiting people for their institutions, families were leaving people they did not want.

As the Taoiseach so graphically stated, the Magdalen laundries illustrates the level of hypocrisy in this country. While we were inventing an image of ourselves as an island of saints and scholars, appalling things were taking place. I met some of those who have been involved in this issue, including Shane Butler who gave me a copy of the book, Birds' Nest Soup, by Hanna Greally who was locked up for 18 years in Mullingar Mental Hospital for no reason. In her book, Ms Greally wrote of thinking of the friends she made at the hospital, "the outcasts, the unloved, the incurably embittered and dispirited", who were "still fighting for their liberty". We must end of all of that and support the Minister of State and the people she met at the Lazy Daisy Café as they seek to make it up to those affected. Everyone in the House agrees on this.

The use of violence within families towards mothers, sisters and daughters that the McAleese report encaptures is a shameful episode. I wish the Minister of State and Mr. Justice Quirke the best of luck in completing their task quickly. Given that they made such an impression on us all last week, perhaps the ladies in question will be invited back in three months to be briefed on how much progress has been made on their case. Everybody supports the Minister of State's efforts on this matter.