Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister, as always, is welcome. I want to address the key concerns regarding to this Bill. First, the payment scheme excludes people who, as infants, spent less than six months in a mother and baby or county institutions. Second, the controversial legal waiver remains. Third, no agreement on remuneration with religious orders or pharmaceutical companies has ever been reached. Fourth, boarded-out children have been completely excluded from the payment scheme and enhanced medical card. It is disappointing that the Minister did not address any of those in his speech. These are the issues that we all know about. I ask the Minister to address each of them in turn when he responds to us at the end of this debate. I watched his speech and I watched the contribution of my colleague, Senator Boyhan. As always on this topic, I compliment Senator Boyhan in particular on the courageous way that he has argued very reasonably that, as this is a revising Chamber, we need to take that on board, do our job, be allowed to do job and revise this Bill. While some progress can be pointed to, it is limited and, ultimately, it is not good enough.

I will take the time to read into the record one of the many pieces of correspondence that we receive because it is important to put it on the record. It is from Mary Harney – not the former Minister – born in Bessborough in 1949. She is now 74 years old. In her letter, she states:

I spent 2 years and 10 months in this mother and baby institution. I was then “Fostered” out and suffered physical abuse, malnourishment, and neglect for another 2 years and six months. I was eventually removed from the "foster parents" by the ISPCC and sentenced to 12 years incarceration in an industrial school by a Cork County Court judge.

She goes on to say, "Minister O’Gorman has deemed in this Bill before you that the cost of my suffering separation from my mother and the abuse suffered at the hands of the people who fostered me is not worth reparation." She then addresses all of us in the Seanad:

You are our last hope for justice to be seen to be done. Please do not consign us to the dustbin of history. Please vote your conscience and not the party whip line. We are your brothers and sisters, your grandparents and parents. We are Irish citizens, yet, for a measly sum we will have to sign a waiver of our constitutional rights and our human right to redress. You are the gatekeepers of Ireland’s legislation. Do the right thing in the name of humanity and justice.

I cannot top the words of Mary Harney. Hopefully, she speaks for everyone in this Chamber.

I do not want to divide this Chamber. If we speak to people informally, most will agree that this Bill has fundamental flaws in it. The difficulty that faces us is we have two choices at this juncture. The first is to continue to go through the procedures, complete Second Stage today, move onto Committee Stage and have the Government adopt a line of “We are not making any further changes.” That is the wrong thing to do. All of us know that this Bill can be improved. We have the legal right and the opportunity to put forward Committee Stage amendments to make it so.

Ultimately, I agree with Mary. This is a fleeting career at times, let us be honest about it. None of us know how long any of us will be here or when we will be asked to leave by our electorates. I scraped in by, I think, a vote and half the last time, so I am very conscious of it. However, when we finish in here, ultimately, we need to be able to hold our heads high. When people ask us whether we did the right thing and stand by right, we need to be able to answer that in the affirmative.

I would respectfully suggest this is not a normal issue. We can disagree on issues such as housing and healthcare. We have different solutions based on ideology, experience and so on and so forth. However, surely, all of us should be able to come together on this issue and this Bill and recognise that it does not go far enough, as Senator Boyhan so rightly said. If we can recognise that, we then have to go further. We have to understand the points made by Mary Harney and we need to address them; not just for her, but for all of the survivors of mother and baby homes. I am thinking in particular of the one in Castlepollard, where I grew up during in my teenage years - an absolutely notorious home in its time. I am thinking of the homes in Limerick as well and all the institutions listed.

This is our opportunity to do the right thing. I am appealing in particular to people on the Government benches to work with us, accept that we can do better and use this, the last opportunity on this Bill, to do just that, so that whenever we finish up in this particular Chamber, we can hold our heads up high and say that when push came to shove and when it was put to us, we did the right thing. We can say that we knew this Bill did not go far enough, we worked collegiately together across party lines to make those improvements to make the difference. That is how we will be judged.