Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. I watched his speech from my office. To state the obvious, in all our work we should aim for equality and inclusion. I certainly do not need to tell this Minister that.

However, the Government is proposing to ignore some survivors. When we finally have the opportunity to acknowledge the hurt and trauma caused by forced family separation and loss of identity, the Government has instead made the decision to continue the kind of treatment we have seen of some survivors by successive governments. At worst, this scheme reduces cost and liability, and increases mistrust among survivors. It will create a hierarchy among those who have suffered so much. The Government states this will the largest scheme of its kind in the history of the State as regards numbers of beneficiaries. That may be but it ignores the 24,000 people who live every day with the consequences of forced family separation and will be excluded from this scheme. It also ignores the thousands who survived abuse in adoption or boarded-out placements.

Even those who will receive redress under this scheme, will receive minimal compensation that is itself dependent on arbitrary factors. For example, a mother detained in an institution for up to three months will receive €5,000. In exchange for this, she will have to waive her legal right to sue the State. She and all mothers institutionalised for less than six months will also be denied an enhanced medical card, even if they were subjected to vaccine trials. Unless she was detained in the Tuam home or a county home, she will also be prohibited from claiming a work payment. Her child, having been separated from her before the age of six months, will also be excluded from the scheme. The Government claims that access to identity and early life information is sufficient redress for those excluded from the scheme and yet, even this redress, such as it is, has not been forthcoming. Some 60% of those who have applied for their record since October are still waiting for a response. That is unacceptable. Not only is this unacceptable, it is contrary to the express wishes of survivors. Concerns raised by Dr. Niall Muldoon and the special rapporteur on child protection in a report commissioned by the Department are also not addressed. Arguably, this scheme flies in the face of calls from the UN special rapporteur, the UN Human Rights Committee and numerous human rights experts. They have all asked the same that we are asking of the Minister today, which is to remove legal waivers, remove arbitrary time and location-based limits, address the full range of issues faced by child survivors and provide appropriate compensation.

I suppose the Minister has received the same outpouring of emails in opposition to this scheme that we have all received this week. I appeal to him to work with those survivors once again and work with the Opposition. As Senator Boyhan said, this Bill does not go far enough and this is a revising Chamber. As Senator Seery Kearney said, we can do better. The Seanad will rise to that challenge, if given the opportunity.