Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is very welcome to the House. I thank him for the sensitive approach he has taken to deal with this specific issue. The society I grew up in took young women who became pregnant - and they did not become pregnant on their own - and sent them off to institutions. The society I live in today likes to blame those institutions for the way those women were treated. The first time RTÉ did a documentary on Bessborough House I got a phone call from a woman I knew as a young girl in Galway who, like many young girls in Galway, went away for a holiday. Of course, everybody knew what the holiday was. She rang me to tell me how upset she had been about the documentary the night before. I said, "Instead of being with a family in Cork, you were in Bessborough and how horrible it must have been for you". She said, "No, step back for a moment. Actually I was treated very well there." She said some people were treated terribly, but she was treated very well. She said, "I had my baby and the only regret I ever had was that I had to give my baby up for adoption." She was there for a number of months. She said that some people were very kind to her and some people were very cruel. We must take this on board. This is somebody who was there. We must understand that not everybody who worked in these places was brutal and that not everybody sent there was mistreated or ill-treated. We must look back into ourselves and ask ourselves what sort of society were we that we allowed this to happen. It is right and proper that the State steps forward and takes full responsibility for those who suffered. In terms of the suffering I am talking about, yes, there may have been physical and mental abuse in these institutions, but the greatest suffering of all that they have had to live with all their lives is the loss of the child that they had. We have heard stories of people who got married afterwards and the child they had had been put up for adoption. The couple lost the child. Not only did the child lose their mother and father, he or she lost his or her family as well. That is something we have to take on board.

As we progress through this, there are mothers in Ireland today who are petrified. They have had a secret all of their lives. Many of them are now elderly. They have kept that secret from everybody, including their spouse, their children and their siblings. Nobody ever knew they were pregnant. Nobody ever knew they gave birth. Those women today are faced with and confronted by the rights of the children they delivered. That is something on which I know the Minister has worked very hard to try to reconcile the issues.

I ask that the Minister remembers that the fathers who fathered those children have walked away scot-free. Nobody will ever know who they were. Many of them took up important roles in society. Many of them went on to do great things. The one thing they did, which is unforgivable, is they left the girl they impregnated and left her on her own.

The society we live in today is not much kinder to a single mother than it was then. The only difference now is that we do not chuck them into institutions, and we do not take their children from them.We have a huge amount to learn with respect to the treatment of mothers and the fathers who desert those mothers. No woman should be left to bring up a child on her own. These fathers who abandoned their girlfriends and sent them off to places and institutions around the country, not one of them will ever be called to account for their actions and for the most part, nobody will know who they were. It is really sad that this has become a gender issue and that the people who will have to pay the price and confront the demons of the past are the women on their own.

The Minister pointed out that many of these women are now elderly and, as such, need to be compensated quickly and with as little pain as possible. No amount of compensation can compensate for the pain of losing one's child so all we are trying to do is show that we care in some small way.

As far as I know there is a group of women who are not covered by the scheme. These were the women who were sent to families and not institutions. However, they suffered the same pain and suffering. They lost their child and they will not see that child again.

Finally, we have stipulated a demarcation line of six months for babies and I really think that needs to be revisited. If you were born into an institution your future was already set in train and you had no choice, so the six-month limit needs to be waived completely.