Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

It is very timely that we are having these discussions back to back today. When we look at the mother and baby commission of investigation and consider what the Minister has said to us in her report I find it very disappointing. It will be another two years before this work is completed. I note that these are institutions and not homes. Somebody said to me recently that they did not live in a home but rather an institution. She told me a horror story. There are the mother and baby home in Tuam which has been much publicised, and horrific things happened there. I will be talking about that in a few minutes. There were also so many other institutions that people never heard about. The records were destroyed. The people did not have the education, well-being, confidence or the emotional state to go out and tell their stories. It is not easy to tell one's story.

I acknowledge the people who are in the Gallery today. I have met many of them. I have shed many a tear with them. It has gone on for years. We are meeting the same people and we are talking to the same people. I do not doubt the Minister's personal commitment but I note that she is an Independent member who is in the Government. That carries its own dynamic. She must look at it.

The Residential Institutions Redress Act was established in which former Ministers indemnified many State agencies from horrific crimes on the basis that there would be a redress scheme. They defined abuse as sexual abuse, emotional abuse and physical abuse. In crude terms it was based on the Canadian system with which the Minister is familiar. They brought people over and they told their story and they got their hour or two. Someone then gave them a certain amount of points for each of these categories and then the survivors of the abuse received some form of compensation. It was a contribution really. In many cases the lawyers got more money than the victims in these institutions. That is a crime in itself. People were left exposed. They were thrown out of the redress board hearings broken. A woman told me of her experiences, where she got the bus back to Dún Laoghaire and had to then get back to Anglesey and back up to London. She got a miserable €7,000 for her heartache and pain and 16 years of hell in an institution in Dublin. They are facts, and the Minister knows many of the stories.It is important to look at redress in a holistic way as it is not about money. It is about how the State can make a very early intervention to assist people to get on with their lives through social housing, medical cards and independent counselling of their choice. It should not be Tusla, the HSE or institutional counsellors but those in whom people have confidence and with whom they can build relationships. They also need help with legal support because this is an ongoing need. There is a journey of healing, there is much deep pain and people need assistance in all these ways.

In The Irish Timesthis morning there is a piece attributed to the Minister about bringing in expert advice and support relating to the Tuam babies issue and I would be grateful if she would share a bit of information about this. Significant quantities of human remains were discovered. A total of 17 out of 20 chambers on the site had something like septic tank structures and the age of death was between 35 foetal weeks and two or three years old. What is the role of the coroner in Galway and how will this role interplay with this?

I pay tribute to Catherine Corless, who has met the Minister, after which she gave an interview to RTE. She was asked about how she got on with the Minister and she said she had related to her what the survivors wanted. They wanted their families "out of that place". She said it was a tank and sewage area and that their main concern was to give relatives, brothers and sisters, the decent burial which was not given to them in the first place. She wrapped up by saying that many of them want DNA as well, to find out whether they have their own little brother or sister. That is a very human call and it is right that they be assisted and supported in that. She said her message was that this needed to be expedited with urgency as these were time-sensitive issues.

Many people were excluded from the original redress scheme because the then Government argued that it was difficult to define what was "institutional". Some people denied they ran an institution and refused to co-operate on the grounds that they were technically a school, or some other place rather than a mother and baby home. It was a scandal that the Government entered into the scheme in the first place, despite the advice of the Attorney General. There was a lot of splitting hairs about what constituted an institution and whether an institution was in receipt of State support or was State funded, leading to questions whether the State was culpable, but the State has a duty of care to all its children.

I have very serious concerns about granting an amnesty to anybody who perpetrated crimes and abuse against children in the State and I hope no Minister for Children and Youth Affairs makes the case for an amnesty in Cabinet. There can be no amnesty for any living abuser of children. There must be zero tolerance as it is too important and sensitive and people have lived with the pain for too long. We cannot heap more trouble and emotional issues onto them.

The Minister spoke of the importance of learning from international best practice and I know she is driven by the search for solutions. She spoke about transitional justice, which means finding out and recording the truth, ensuring accountability, making reparation, undertaking institutional reform and learning from the facts to achieve reconciliation. The word "reconciliation" does not quite sit with what I previously said about amnesty. There can be reconciliation but people cannot be exonerated and they must be held accountable. I hope the Minister takes on board these points as they are important. She has said she will carry out a further scoping exercise of other institutions, and I welcome that, but there are many institutions which have never been given the opportunity to tell their story. Nobody has addressed their needs but they are also very important. Let there be no amnesty for child abusers in this State, whether it is for historic abuse or abuse now or in the future.