Marie Louise O'Donnell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I acknowledge the survivors in the Visitors Gallery. It is a privilege to have them here. It is our privilege to be a conduit for the expression of their pain and suffering and perhaps bring them to a graceful conclusion.

I have very little to say because much has been said. What has been discovered and what is perhaps yet to be to uncovered is unconscionable, as the Minister said. It is outside everything in which we believe, that I value and what most of us have hoped for all of our lives. It is also against everything we hold sacred. The mother and child are sacred in literature and religion.I always think that if that is dented in some way we lose something of a sense of all ourselves.

Most people in the country have been completely excavated by this - by that I mean in their hearts, emotionally, mentally and psychologically - and by the physical excavation of what has happened in Tuam. I speak as a single mother. I have never said that before in the House but I say it now because it was 30 years ago. Even at that time, it was very difficult but had it been 40 years ago my life would have been different. I speak with a certain sense of parallel, a knowledge of what I could have gone through having reared my son on my own for 30 years. Oscar Wilde called a big piece of literature he wrote De Profundis and I think that sums it up like Anne Enright did that the dead speak to us greater than the living. They did in Clondalkin yesterday as well. Sometimes we must remember that we, as women, must protest for the women who are subject to physical and sexual violence and who are thrown out of their homes and have to run for refuge. It is a violence. What happened in Tuam and what happened the mothers and babies was a violence against women and children, an absolute violence perpetrated by the State and by the religious icons of that State. What is happening today, as happened in Clondalkin, is that women are running from violence not only from men but from other situations. They are trying to find refuge which is what those women looked for years ago but they could not find it. We still do not have laws to protect them because the same thing happened in Clondalkin. Those women and their children are dead, having run from something that was thwarting their lives.

I return to the idea of violence and the unconscionable nature of what has happened to women over the centuries. As Senator Noone said, yesterday was International Women's Day. What we are celebrating is how women have survived centuries of despair, isolation and huge loss. There is nothing to equal the loss of a child.

I know the Minister as a woman, a liberal thinker, a feminist - in the greatest sense of that word - and an independent politician and that with her guidance and under her Department, we will get some answers and will at least be able to go back to what I began with, the sacredness of mothers and children.