Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I pay tribute, as others have done, to the women of the mother and baby homes and to their families and campaigners for maintaining dignified pressure on successive governments to see the process through to completion. Five interim reports have been published and the inquiry was granted a one-year extension. That extension was necessary in part owing to the lateness of materials submitted through the discovery by the Department of Health and the Department of Children and Youth Affairs. Despite these setbacks, the women concerned never gave up hope that the completion of the commission's work would bring a measure of closure and leave a legacy. I can only imagine their disappointment when they learned that a Bill was to be rushed through the Upper House that would hide away for another generation the attitudes, policies and shameful neglect that condemned thousands of women to incarceration and robbed them of their dignity.

In an answer to a question by Deputy Mary Lou McDonald last month, the Minister indicated that once the report of the commission was published and read by him, the offering of an apology to the women and their families would be considered. Is that still the intention when the report is published on 30 October?

Under the terms of this Bill, some of the records gathered by the commission, referred to as the "database and related records" of women and children detained in 11 mother and baby homes, will be given to Tusla. The rest of the archive will go to the Minister for "sealing". How is it acceptable to release some, but not all, of the records? How did the Minister decide which records would go to Tusla and which would be retained and sealed away by the Department for 30 years?

I disagree with previous speakers. It is our belief that Tusla is not the appropriate body to retain these records.Tusla operates legally troubling and discriminatory practices, including defining adopted persons' birth names as third party data and undertaking risk assessments of all adopted persons who request their records. We need a body with the expertise in archival upkeep and associated skills in interpretation and historical placement. The work of the commission should not just be used to set the historical record straight. It should be used to a much greater effect and there needs to be input from those very people who suffered in the first place.

To be clear, this will not be the last inquiry or commission of inquiry. There are many more issues around how our society treated some of its most vulnerable people. We need to see solutions emerge with any findings, recommendations or reports such as this. Does anyone in this House doubt that some day in the future we will see a commission of investigation into the shameful practice of direct provision? I hope that when that report is released the associated records and testimonies are not locked away because when that happens we can never learn from the mistakes and injustices of the past.

The public needs to know that the vast sums of money and long periods spent on the work of the commission impact positively on those who were so badly let down. The clear message that my colleagues and I are hearing is that the Bill does not meet that test. We will table robust amendments on Committee Stage. As I stated earlier, I welcome decisions to commence legislation in the Seanad but the process in this case has been stifled, especially as we look towards Friday when the House will debate Committee and Remaining Stages in one day. I also pointed out that guillotining a Bill after a few short hours is right out of the Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil playbook. Sinn Féin will propose robust amendments on Committee Stage and we will also propose an amendment to Friday's Order of Business to prevent what will be, in effect, a guillotining of the Bill.

We need to be conscious of public opinion. Senators have mentioned the thousands of emails we have received in recent days concerning the years of delays and extensions to the work of the commission, which will potentially be lost to poor and rushed decisions at the end of this process. The volume of correspondence all of us have received over the last few days is a sign of solidarity from citizens with the women affected. For many years, citizens have listened in shock to the stories of these women. They now see that this legislation has the potential to retraumatise people who have been through so much. The idea that people gave testimony, hard as it was, only to find out at the very end of the process that it will be hidden away from any examination is hard to accept. We will table amendments to see that this does not happen. If we cannot secure amendments on these key issues of access and openness, Sinn Féin will not be able to support the Bill in its current form. We want to see this process bring closure to so many who were wronged and we cannot condone the sealing of abuse records. We stand in solidarity with those women who entered this process in the belief that they would have access to the entire truth and that the horror they endured would be held up as a warning to us all to never allow this to happen again.