Garret Ahearn (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I first acknowledge the Acting Chairperson, Senator Boyhan's contribution to the debate. It is very appropriate that he is sitting in the Chair today. I hope it is symbolic of where we have come to as a country, where we have someone with his life and experience holding that seat during this debate. I thank the Minister for being here and for the work he has done over recent months. It is incredibly difficult and I know the work he is doing is very genuine. The outcomes he wants are the ones the survivors want. It is not easy to do but commitment and support across the board and across the House are what is needed. I commend as well my colleague, Senator Seery Kearney, on the work she has been doing over recent months within our party in educating an awful lot of us in the detail of this. I do not think anyone can pretend to be an expert on this and have a full understanding of it. It is such a detailed report and a detailed time.

I will focus on County Tipperary and the Sean Ross Abbey because it is my own county and the gravity of the story of the mother and baby homes is very strong in Roscrea. There were 6,414 women admitted to the home and 6,079 children were born there. It was privately owned and privately run. It secured major funding from the hospitals commission, which though technically independent worked closely with then Department of Local Government and Public Health, DLGPH. The hospitals commission inspected the homes, commenting on facilities and matters that required improvement. It acted in a similar manner with all institutions it funded. When the Department of Health proposed turning the Sean Ross Abbey into a home for children with special needs in the 1960s, the Bishop of Killaloe rejected the proposal. His intervention resulted in a number of visits to the bishop by senior civil servants and letters from Ministers. The closure of the Sean Ross Abbey was delayed for several years until the bishop had died and his successor subsequently gave his approval. During those years, many children died.

The outcomes for children in mother and baby homes like Sean Ross Abbey changed significantly, however, from the late 1950s when legal adoption became common. For children who were in the Sacred Heart homes before 1960, the most common recorded outcome was that they were left with their mother or a member of their family. This creates the impression that the child was brought to his or her mother's family home and may have been raised in the family. However, the overwhelming majority of these children were placed at nurse in foster care, as it is called, either privately by the woman or by her family.

Sean Ross Abbey had a much higher incidence of mortality from major infectious diseases, more than any other mother and baby home. The transfer of mothers to the local fever hospital, where they worked as unpaid nurses, and their return to Sean Ross Abbey, where they appear to have transmitted the infection to their children, was responsible for the loss of many children's lives. A total of 1,090 of the 6,079 babies who were born at Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea died.That is more than in Tuam. Some 79% of the deaths occurred between 1932 and 1947. The worst years were 1936 and 1942. Within two years of Sean Ross Abbey opening, the congregation acknowledged there was a problem with the high rate of infant mortality and sent a sister from Liverpool to investigate the cause. Registers of burials were not maintained. There is a designated burial ground and the commission has established that the coffined remains of some children under the age of one are buried there. There is almost no information about the 99% of mothers admitted to Sean Ross Abbey.

I acknowledge that the commission members did their job and found fault. It is now the responsibility of the Government and the Minister to bring a certain level of humanity to this. I commend the Minister's action plan with the 22 points and hope he gets the time to deliver on them. I know that is certainly his commitment. I recognise that the Taoiseach was right when he called out the State's failings of the mothers and the children. The first thing we need to do is to give people born in these institutions the right to know who they are and where their records are, to gather what we know about them, to try to place it as best we can and to give them access to it. They have the right to their information without delay. I appreciate the Minister is publishing legislation that brings those rights even beyond that entitlement to family documents and I commend him on that.

I find it incredibly difficult to speak about this for a number of reasons. As politicians we often feel obliged to speak about things of which we do not really have a full understanding. My only understanding of this matter is that I myself have a child who is a baby. More than 1,000 kids died in an institution in Tipperary, and I do not think there is any reading I can do to ever fully understand that. I commend what the Minister is trying to do. We are a different society and a different country now, but what happened back then was wrong back then, just as it is wrong now, and that should always be remembered. Time does not change what is right or wrong between now and then.