Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for being in the Seanad today. I sat down to read this report last week and I have been reading for days. I read it with a view that I was a pregnant, unmarried minor, albeit only 20 years ago. I also read it as someone who would have been deemed an illegitimate child when I was born in the early 1980s. When a family is given support and not punishment, the circumstances are very different.

I welcome the State apology to survivors of the mother and baby homes. I cannot, however, welcome the report of the mother and baby home commission. I welcome the survivors who shared their experience with the commission and the confidential committee. Real and tangible truth telling will be the first step to real reconciliation. However, I struggle with everything about this report, including how it describes these institutions, the women and children who entered and died there and the society that was solely responsible for the cruelty. I cannot fathom how a commission with truth telling as its supposed centre and main aim could describe these places in such terms. All week I sat and read, I stopped to breathe and then I read again. My daughter would ask why I was shaking my head from time to time. I would explain and paint the picture of the Ireland we see in this report and she would ask, "Why, Ma? Why did they do that?" I could not answer because it made no sense and it still does not. I cannot make sense of how this happened for so long and so many were complicit in allowing and perpetuating it.

As the Taoiseach gave his apology last week, I believe he further contributed to a culture of blame by unfairly placing the blame on society, families and even the women themselves. It insults the memory of what went on in those homes to say that it was a society-wide failing. I will not be party to a narrative that absolves the individuals and institutions that were at fault and culpable. If the narrative is that we are all to blame, then it is only one small step further to say that no one is to blame, and that is wrong.I cannot see how a report into these institutions and practices could have found so much evidence and yet have found so little fault. That is the responsibility of individuals at the highest levels of our State and the church who have acted as they did, and yet they claim no role in creating the conditions that led to the treatment of women and children in this way, and that these practices were somehow just of their time, as if that provides an adequate explanation in any way.

It makes no sense that this report states that the Catholic Church did not set the time's moral tone. How can the church be said to have provided a refuge when it worked so tirelessly to remove all other options for women in crisis? If refuge is shelter or protection from danger or distress, how can these institutions have been deemed to provide refuge? How could refuge be shown in institutions utterly devoid of humanity and kindness, where the value of a child's life was set at less than nothing, and even as a perverse cause for celebration? No fair-minded person could call such a place a refuge. There are points in this report where women are called inmates. How can one be an inmate in a place of refuge? It then states that it was a harsh refuge in some cases.

I fundamentally reject a report that could characterise these institutions in those terms and frankly, how dare this report denigrate the experiences of survivors who gave evidence to the commission by describing them like that. Survivors who have been so generous with their time and difficult experiences, inputting into a process that the State told them they could trust, have had their trust violated with repulsive attitudes that demean and diminish their trauma. These women and their advocates will not let us give them back their histories in a way that is untrue to them. "You are here for your sins" said one nun and, let us face it, that is why they were there.

In the words of Sartre, "Hell is other people". It is hell that was made up of every man and woman who used their positions of power to abuse within both the State and church. We can go around asking why families, fathers, medical professionals and local authority officials sent women there but the reality is that we should be focusing on what happened when the women got there. Were they treated, supported, encouraged and loved in a supposed refuge? No, they were lied to, shamed, abused and coerced. This report has tried, as has the Government, to create a narrative to shift the burden of the blame for the crimes of the powerful onto the rest of us, and I fundamentally reject this. Not only do church and State have a monopoly on morality, they are still trying to hang on to it now by telling a nation that they too are at fault. It is undeniable that the Catholic Church had a dominant influence on social policy. Catholic teaching in Ireland moulded the social psyche. When someone, usually a woman, deviated from the Catholic Church's idea of life, then it was waiting, as the leading provider of social services, to offer rehabilitation and penance in the form of punishment, slavery and forced adoption. If the State took the energy it uses in making excuses to tell the story in its favour and put that same energy into real, tangible action for survivors, we would be in a different place.

It makes no sense that this report says that women were not forced into these institutions. Again and again, the report takes a woman's story and experience and twists it to suit the narrative of the powerful and the guilty. To say their pregnancy devastated women's lives is abhorrent to me. Was it the pregnancy that caused the devastation or did the church and the State, which were set on making women pay for their perceived wrongdoings, devastate their lives? Abuse, slavery and forced adoption devastated their lives, and now our repeated failures to listen to them, provide their data and their identity continue to devastate their lives.

This report and the process leading up to it, with the rushing through of emergency legislation last year, the use of inappropriate legislation for such a sensitive issue in the first place, and continued denial of access to records and information, all point to a process that has put survivors last where they should be front and centre. As the focus must now turn to access to information, burial inquests, redress and memorialisation, I want to know everything that has been learned from the abject failures of the past. These are outstanding issues. Will the Minister guarantee that survivors will be given full and unredacted access to their own records held by the commission? On access to information held by the commission, I am still hearing that survivors are being denied subject access requests under GDPR due to the Commissions of Investigation Act, despite everything that has happened and the primacy of EU law over any national law.Will the Minister explain this and confirm that a balancing of rights under GDPR will be undertaken as part of every subject access request made by survivors? On access to information more generally, it is, frankly, appalling that today survivors are still being denied access to their birth certificates. Will the Minister commit to supporting the Opposition's legislation on making an emergency amendment to the Civil Registration Act to guarantee access to the most important personal document there is? In the longer term, will the Minister commit to a speedy enactment of legislation on information and tracing for adopted people? We must reject the insulting approaches of the past and take the route of complaint through international human rights law, especially in light of the recent decision of the Court of Appeal, which found our Constitution contains an unenumerated right to have one's identity correctly recognised by the State. I intend to introduce legislation shortly, if a Government Bill is not immediately forthcoming.

With regard to redress we need to know the Government has learned the lessons of the past. Today, we are still fighting for the Magdalen women to have access to the expanded HAA medical cards they were promised by Mr. Justice Ryan. This is from a Government that has been forced to wind down the body set up to fund redress to survivors of industrial schools when Caranua was found to be adding further to the trauma with its intransigence and hostile practices. Any redress scheme must be generous and accessible with a holistic, sensitive and trauma-informed approach. There must be no waivers with regard to criminal liability or the non-disclosure of information if people participate in the redress scheme. This is a red line. The UN committee against torture found the Magdalen redress waivers to be in violation of human rights law and, therefore, invalid. We need to know that the lessons on the silencing of women have been learned. I wish the Minister the best of luck in the coming months and ask him to put the needs and concerns of survivors above all else.