Fiona O'Loughlin (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Today is the start of local enterprise week. I pay tribute to Jacqui McNabb and her team in Kildare, who have been doing amazing work, pre-Covid and during Covid, in supporting our local businesses and helping them through this difficult time. Not so Bank of Ireland. We had the devastating news this morning that branches in Kilcullen and Monasterevin are to close in these two vibrant small rural towns, which are on the cusp of really good things. That really goes against what we were speaking about over the last few weeks in regard to reimagining life after Covid, where we will have people at home and not having to travel out of their towns to work. It is a retrograde step. I ask the Leader to ask the Government to step in and try to reverse this decision.

Over the last few weeks, KFM, our local radio station, has been doing an absolutely wonderful job in unearthing the dark stories around the Kildare county home based in Athy. While Kildare did not have a mother and baby home, we now know that 7.5% of those in the Sean Ross mother and baby home came from Kildare. Personally, I know many who were born in Pollardstown.We know many of our "unfortunate mothers", if I can use that term, were sent to the Athy county home. Local historians Frank Taaffe and Mario Corrigan have done excellent work on those who gave birth and were born there.

This morning as I was coming to Leinster House I listened on the radio to a gripping story from Eddie McEntee, an 80-year-old gentleman who was in the Athy county home and was boarded out, as my colleague said, at the age of six. Listening to what he underwent, man's inhumanity to man and child comes to mind. We need to have an investigation into the other places where children were born and into those forgotten children, as he termed it, not covered by the mother and baby homes commission.