Maire Devine (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Probably. Symphysiotomy, a word I have difficulty pronouncing, is a barbaric and medieval practice, which was carried out for many years in this State. It is a procedure that women were advised to undergo without knowledge of what it involved. Symphysiotomy is a similar to the spatchcock cooking technique used in the preparation of birds. It involves the use of a chainsaw and was often practised without the consent of the women in question. Certainly, the women did not make informed decisions. While the procedure was abandoned by the rest of the western world before the turn of the 20th century, hundreds of cases were recorded in Ireland in the 20th century. I was not surprised to read that the latest recorded case took place as late as 2005, in other words, in the 21st century.

Survivors of symphysiotomy demanded a truth commission and their demand was eventually granted in the form of the review carried out by Ms Justice Maureen Harding Clark. The judge delivered her opinion as judicial assessor on the surgical symphysiotomy payment scheme in November 2016. Ms Justice Harding Clark was tasked with determining the legitimacy of claims made as best as the women's testimony and records available would allow and evaluating the extent of disability and discomfort inflicted by the procedure. She described the payment scheme as an ex gratianon-adversarial scheme under which survivors would be treated in a compassionate and generous manner. For many of the women, who are now elderly, frail and exhausted by the ongoing fight for truth and justice, Ms Justice Harding Clark's report swept aside and demeaned their ongoing experience of ill health and disability. They correctly believed the report was a deliberate whitewash.

We have all been witness to the harrowing accounts given by the women affected by symphysiotomy over the years and the debilitating effects the procedure had throughout their lives. Senator Swanick cited the words of Annie, a woman in her late 60s who recalled vividly her account of the procedure which was carried out without her knowledge and consent. She recalled having her legs in the air, being taken to a different room and not knowing what was happening to her. She saw a "silver thing", colloquially referred to as "the chainsaw", which was inserted in and destroyed her body. Annie lives with the agony of the procedure which persists to this day.

In her report, Ms Justice Harding Clark stated that 142 of the 183 women who were awarded higher payments were assessed as having suffered significant disability. However, she also stated that the majority of applicants made a good recovery. The Minister should tell this to Annie and her fellow survivors.

Ms Justice Harding Clark's report was welcomed by the handful of obstetricians who hold steadfast to their practice and continue to defend the procedure. We must also remember that the hospital system was overseen by senior figures in the Catholic Church, who would have considered symphysiotomy a better outcome than an unholy caesarean section or the possibility that the woman would no longer be able to procreate.

Ms Justice Harding Clark, who did not speak to all of the women concerned, further stated that symphysiotomy did not inevitably lead to lifelong pain or disability and patients did not age in a manner which was different from women who did not experience the procedure. How would a body respond to the trauma of symphysiotomy, a procedure in which a chainsaw is used and cartilage and ligaments split? It involves splitting open the woman and flattening her out almost in the manner of poultry being prepared for roasting. A body cannot heal or knit together uniformly after such a procedure. Such an out-of-kilter body would produce pain and other disability conditions throughout life, which would add to the emotional trauma the women in question continue to suffer.The United Nations and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties called the use of this operation an assault. It was yet another assault on Irish women, another scandal perpetrated against women and girls, joining the revelations about the Magdalen Laundries, the deaths of children at mother and baby homes, sex abuse within the Catholic Church and the case of Savita Halappanavar who bled to death in hospital watched over by a medical team four years ago. A son of one of the survivors wrote recently to Deputy Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin about Ms Justice Clark's report. He wrote that a one-sided report that attempted to whitewash over this shameful episode in Irish medical history had compounded the traumatic stress of the women involved, rather than seeking the truth, which might have gone some way to helping his mother and the other women involved to come to terms with the consequences of their experiences. Ms Justice Clark has aggravated the butchering of the women concerned and undermined their experiences and trauma. Shame on her.

Contrary to the Minister's positive statement, the international community is dismayed by the report and our general approach to historical human rights violations. The Government ignored the United Nations Human Rights Committee's recommendations in 2014 relating to this scheme and ensuring there would be a proper inquiry. It has now been criticised by another UN body, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, which recently examined the issue and will be giving a judgment in the coming weeks. We do not seem to have learned from the past litany of horror and cruelty. The State continues to punish, harass, criticise and humiliate women for its failure in its duty of care to them and its own severe lack of compassion.