Fiona O'Loughlin (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

May I add my words to yours, Acting Chairperson, in your very dignified and emotive response last week to this report? I know it was deeply personal. We all learned from your dignity, so thank you, Senator Boyhan.

When we talk about the mother and baby homes, we are talking about our mothers, our aunts, our cousins, our sisters and our neighbours. We are talking about people within our own communities. These women were incarcerated, tortured, forced into servitude and systematically degraded. They were denied identity and denied education. Worse, they were denied access to their children. We all heard whispers and rumours growing up in the not-too-distant past. Now it is all laid bare for us all to absorb and to try to understand but, as the previous speaker said, we will never understand. Identity is exceptionally important - we all think about it and talk about it - whether to us as individuals, as a family, as a community or as a political party. The definition of identity is who we are, the way we think about ourselves, the way we are viewed by ourselves and others and the characteristics that define us. Our own personal identity, which many of us take for granted, is absolutely immense but it was denied to so many in the mother and baby homes. This report has made us stop and look at ourselves, our identity as a country, who we are as a nation and how people have been treated here.Ireland in 2021 feels so much more modern and progressive and it is a jolt to remember that in our very recent past we were controlled by conservative, patriarchal and cruel church and State. The church and State stigmatised and punished women for having children outside marriage and allowed the fathers, many of them pillars of society, the church and the State, to continue living their lives unaffected by their actions although like everything, there were exceptions. We are left with a legacy of devastated women and their devastated children. These women, despite what the report may say, were forced to give their babies up for adoption and generations of people have had no access to vital information about their birth, including to whom they were born and from where they came. They were denied the keys to their own identity.

When we hear the phrase "mother and baby", we think of the Madonna and of a loving mother and child relationship. When we hear the word "home", we think of warmth, love, respect and protection. However, the mothers who went into these institutions, which I cannot call mother and baby homes, were forced to go there. Indeed, the institutions existed to punish, denigrate, humiliate, abuse and shame them. Many of the women stayed in institutions for all of their lives. Many others, due to the shame and stigma of being "fallen" women, were exiled to England or America and never came back. Mr. Patsy McGarry wrote a very moving piece in The Irish Timesabout his own aunt in that context.

I have friends who were born in these institutions who were, thankfully, adopted into very loving and warm homes. However, they now understand what their own biological mothers went through and their hurt is immense. They are very conflicted and I have no doubt that the same is true of all of the survivors. I am not happy with a report blaming wider society for what happened. Irish society throughout the 20th century was 100% influenced and shaped by the Catholic Church and its teachings. I am old enough to remember my mother being "churched" for the sin of conception, even in marriage, which is appalling. This is the society the report references. The Catholic Church was able to turn people against the women and their children. It did not just turn society against these citizens of Ireland; it also ingrained hatred and disgust towards them. I lay the greater proportion of the blame at the door of the Catholic Church. People were terrified of the church and the shame it preached from pulpits across the country. The church should pay a greater proportion of the compensation that the survivors deserve and this process should not be dragged out; the Government must act swiftly in that regard. While no amount of money can compensate for the mental anguish and mistreatment suffered, proper reparation is nonetheless very important.

While this report is an important part of the story, it is not the most important part. We must publish the testimony of those affected, in a manner similar to the publication of In Her Shoes - Women of the Eighth. I listened to some of the personal stories at the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Education and Skills when it was dealing with legislation relating to some of these institutions and I will never, to my dying day, forget those testimonies. Access to birth documentation is now the most pressing issue and all of the recommendations of this report must be implemented as soon as possible.