Gerald Nash (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I acknowledge the work that the former Minister, Senator Reilly, did in the previous Government. It was very necessary work which started then and we all want to see it finished. The rights of those who suffered so badly have to be vindicated and respected.

I wish to pay tribute to my colleague, Senator Ruane, who spoke so movingly about her own personal experience. I thank her for sharing that testimony and hope she will never be averse to doing so. She is an example to everybody in this Republic in terms of what can be achieved and the contribution everyone can make to society. Everybody has a function and a role to play in a true republic.

I acknowledge the presence of survivors in the Gallery. Looking at their faces, I can recognise them from our television screens. I also know those voices from radio stations. I pay tribute to their courageous and selfless work in raising these issues in difficult personal circumstances. I wish them well in their quest for truth and recognise the great dignity they have displayed in all of their work.

Sometimes one can become so sickened and saddened about something that when one reaches out to find the right words they are just not there. I sometimes find it difficult to come to terms with what people in our society have experienced for a long time. The horror of Tuam is one such instance. When I was growing up in the 1980s, one had to switch on the television to identify experiences of mass graves. We usually found it in Second World War documentaries or programmes about the killing fields in Cambodia. Little did I know back in the 1980s when I was entering my teens that we had our own mass graves in Tuam and, as is likely, elsewhere.

What happened to those children offends and insults us all. It is truly a crime against our common humanity. We have to ask ourselves what kind of a warped and messed up country we were born and reared in. We are living with the consequences to this day. The children whose remains lie in cold unmarked holes in the ground in Galway, and their mothers, were victims not just of the Bon Secours order or of the institutional Roman Catholic Church, but also of a callous and cruel society that allowed that grip to take hold. That grip poisoned personal and family relationships for generations.

However, that is not to deny what my colleague, Senator Ned O'Sullivan, said earlier that, of course, there are many examples of good and great priests, nuns and others in religious orders who have done tremendous work over the years. To the best of my recollection, however, there were very few who put their hands up, acknowledged that what was going on was wrong, or made any kind of intervention that mattered. That is the problem we are dealing with here.

To this day, difficult clerics like my own good friend, Fr. Iggy O'Donovan, are generally sent to Coventry when they decide to stand up, be counted and seek to reform a church that they and many hundreds of thousands in this country still care about.

We should imagine, for a minute, a society that preferred to banish pregnant single women to a life of communal slavery in a church run like a prison, rather than running the risk of having a daughter with a child bringing some disgrace to a family.That is what we are dealing with. There is no doubt that it was the fault of society. However, that society was shaped and sculpted by a dominant church that reached into every part of people's lives in this country. How did we ever had the neck to call ourselves a republic? We certainly did not merit that nomenclature.

Like many other people, I believe there is more to come. To think that Tuam is the limit of this experience is delusional. I am glad that there is the potential for other sites to be examined.

I do not know how our society can come to terms with the enormity of what has been personally experienced by our friends in the gallery or by their family members. The commission, established by the previous Government, is a good start.

We must acknowledge, as others have done today, the sterling work of Catherine Corless. She shone a very bright light into the dark recesses of our recent history. We know of 796 children from her records. It is thanks to her that we know their names. We remember them now by their names, not merely as victims.

I acknowledge the investigative journalism of my neighbour from Drogheda, Alison O'Reilly, who works for the Daily Mail . She was very tenacious in hunting down the facts to expose this cruelty to the nation.

Many of the survivors of Tuam are still with us. We have heard their stories in recent times. I want to thank former residents of the Tuam home, such as P.J. Haverty. When we see him interviewed on the television, listen to him on the radio or see his picture in the newspaper we are reminded that he could be our father, our uncle, our friend. For many people, this experience has been very close to home.

It is shameful that this society for generations denied so many people the right to be loved by their birth mothers and reared by their birth families. As I said earlier, we are living with the consequences.

I hope to further tease out with the Minister the concept of transitional justice and how it can be applied to the great cruelty that has been visited upon those in the gallery today, their comrades and people up and down this country, not just in Tuam. I thank all those people for their great courage and the dignity with which they have campaigned. They can be guaranteed of the support of everyone in this House.