Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Acting Chair. I signalled on Committee Stage that my officials were examining a complex issue in consultation with the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel and the Office of the Attorney General, with regard to the county home institutions included in this scheme, and that I intended to bring amendments to the Bill on Report Stage to address this issue. This is an issue that came to the attention of my Department recently, hence the reason for the amendments being brought forward at this stage. The amendments are necessary purely to protect the scheme for its intended recipients, and I circulated a note on this amendment to Senators on Monday.

Before I outline these amendments and speak to each individually as appropriate, first, I reassure Senators and the eligible applicants that these amendments will in no way affect how people should apply, or who will benefit from the scheme. It is in no way designed to narrow the scope of the group of 34,000 former residents for whom this scheme is designed. I want to make that clear at the outset. The amendments are being made to provide clarity now and for the future, and to ensure that the Bill faithfully reflects the policy objective of the scheme, which is to recognise time spent, harsh conditions, emotional abuse and all other forms of mistreatment, stigma and trauma experienced while resident in mother and baby and county home institutions.

Moving on to the issue itself, it is known that women were admitted to county homes in the same circumstances as those who were admitted to mother and baby institutions. The county homes were successors to workhouses, and the conditions in these institutions were extremely poor.The women who spent time in county homes sometimes experienced even worse conditions than those who were residents in mother and baby institutions. It was the understanding of the interdepartmental group that developed the proposals for the payments scheme that all county homes had closed by the early- to mid-1960s, with many of the locations shifting towards the care of the elderly and becoming nursing homes. The commission's report noted that the practice of admitting unmarried women to county homes ceased in the early 1960s with the number of unmarried women in these homes across the country being in the single digits by 1963.

However, it has come to light that while many county homes did transition to provide services to older people in the 1960s, a number of them were co-located with county or district hospitals which provided medical or surgical services and also mainstream maternity services to women, both married and unmarried. Notably, these mainstream services continued to be provided at these locations for many years and in some cases beyond the term of the commission's investigation, which was 1998.

As Senators know, the scheme is currently construed so that women are eligible for a general payment based on having been admitted to and spending one night in an institution. The Government took this approach as we wanted to acknowledge the particular stigma and trauma experienced by women as a result of being admitted to a mother and baby or county home institution. However, because of this requirement to be resident only for one night, an issue has come to light which if not addressed would have implications for the scheme with the risk of access inadvertently becoming broader than those for those on which the scheme is intended to focus, namely, survivors of the institutional experience.

To address this, it has been decided to make amendments to the Bill, which fall into three broad parts. First, I propose to amend Schedule 1 to the Bill to provide greater clarity in relation to the names of the county home institutions. I also propose to amend Schedule 1 to the Bill to provide a concluding year in respect of all institutions under the scheme, including county homes. Finally, I propose to amend the definition of a “relevant person” in section 2 to include a reference to the provision of shelter and maintenance to provide clarity on the purpose and main function of mother and baby and county home institutions.

I will look at each of those elements separately. Schedule 1 to the Bill is being amended to provide greater clarity in relation to the names of the county home institutions. Amendment No. 52 sets out the revised Schedule 1. In order to be eligible for the payment scheme, an applicant must have been resident in one of the listed mother and baby or county home institutions. The issue in question arises in circumstances where county homes and county or district hospitals were co-located on the same site, although in most cases they were separately and distinctly managed. The co-located sites apply to 15 of the 29 county homes which carry eligibility for the payment scheme. In all cases, the county home is within the remit of the scheme but the hospital is not.

I propose to amend Schedule 1 to the Bill by creating two distinct columns. The first column, column 2, refers to the county home institutions and the second column, column 3, gives further information in relation to the other or later known names for those institutions. In some cases, this other known name also pertains to a county or district hospital. This amendment is a first step to ensuring the policy intention of the scheme is clear and protected. However, it will also provide clarity to applicants as in many cases institutions were renamed or given a religious name at a point in time and so an applicant may not recognise the institution by this newer name, depending on when they spent time there. This more detailed Schedule will also address an error that was identified in relation to the Waterford county home. This had previously been listed in the Bill as “St. John's Hospital" in Dungarvan, but it should actually be described as "St. Joseph’s Hospital" in Dungarvan.

Schedule 1 to the Bill is also being amended to provide a concluding year in respect of all institutions, including county homes. This is for the purpose of providing additional clarity pertaining to the timeframes in which these institutions operated as mother and baby and county home institutions. My Department is currently engaged in a detailed piece of work with regard to the institutional records for the scheme in preparation for its opening. This exercise, in conjunction with the work undertaken by the Commission, has allowed the Department to ascertain a concluding year for each institution. The Department is satisfied this represents the last year that women or children were admitted to these institutions for reasons relating to this scheme. While the issue has arisen relating to county home institutions, there are similar implications for the mother and baby home institutions under the scheme, which are included in Schedule 1 to Part 2.

The commission's term of investigation was from 1922 to 1998. As part of its terms of reference, it was given the authority to amend the relevant period in respect of any component part or institution. It was considered appropriate to do so. In some cases, where the commission's report indicates that an institution closed or ceased to operate as a mother and baby home, this year is set as the concluding year in the revised schedule. Some institutions continue to operate beyond the period of investigation, either in a different capacity or operating a model that was vastly different from that of earlier decades. Therefore, in these cases, the concluding year is set as 1998, which was the final year of the commission's investigation.

To support these changes to Schedule 1, under amendment No. 52 there will be a number of necessary consequential amendments. Amendment No. 2 inserts the definition for “concluding year” in respect of the relevant institution into section 2. Amendment No. 4 amends the definition of a “relevant institution” to specify that it is an institution that is named in column 2 of Part 1 or column 2 of Part 2 of Schedule 1.

Senators will see that Part 1 of the revised Schedule 1 contains four columns, with column 2 listing the names of the institutions for the purposes of this scheme, in other words, the county home. Column 3 of Part 1 contains information on other names that the county home may have been known as or referred to as. However, as I just mentioned, this may also pertain to a county or district hospital. Therefore, it is important that the definition of a “relevant institution” makes reference to column 2 only in Part 1 with column 3 intended to provide supporting information.

Part 2 of the revised Schedule will contain three columns with only column 2 referring to the institution names. Amendments Nos. 12, 13 and 25 are consequentially technical in nature to sections 18 and 24 and provide for these sections to be amended to make reference to column 2 specifically when referring to institutions in the Schedule. Amendment No. 26 provides that in circumstances where an applicant was admitted to an institution up to and including 31 December of the concluding year, then their eligibility for the scheme will be calculated on the entire period of residence, even if that goes beyond the cut-off year in question. For example, if a person was admitted to an institution on 20 November 1960 and was resident in the institution for a 12-month period and the concluding year for that institution is 1960, the scheme administrator will base their award on the full 12 months they were resident in that institution, even though it will go beyond the concluding year.

The final consequential amendment arising from the revised Schedule 2 relates to section 50 of the Bill and additional institutions. Amendments Nos. 20, 21 and 48 to 50, inclusive, all concern this aspect. I will first speak on amendments Nos. 48 to 50, inclusive. This section of the Bill is being renamed to more accurately cover the provisions that will now be contained within it. Amendment No. 48 and the first part of amendment No. 50 refer to where the Minister, with the consent of the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, is adding an additional institution, because we have the power to add additional institutions. This is basically saying that if an additional institution is to be added, a concluding year will be added with that new additional institution.

Finally, amendment No. 49 provides for a small change to section 50(1) and the language in the criteria which would be used to establish if an additional institution should be added to the scheme. It replaces the word “maternity” in this subsection with the term “pregnancy related”. This change is being made purely to avoid confusion with where the word “maternity” is used elsewhere in the Bill to describe mainstream maternity services. The final part of amendment No. 50 provides that the Minister, with the consent of the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Delivery and Reform, can positively amend the concluding year to a more recent year for existing institutions under the scheme, should evidence come to light that necessitates this change. This means that while we are putting in a concluding year now, if evidence arises that an institution was acting as one of these institutions subsequent to that year, then similarly to the way the Minister can add a new institution, the Minister can also amend that concluding year and can bring more people within the remit of the Bill.

Amendments Nos. 20 and 21 amend section 20 of the Bill, which deals with the treatment of further applications of the scheme when an institution is added. These amendments provide that further application can now also be made to the scheme where the Minister, under section 50, amends the concluding year for any of the institutions currently listed in section 1.

Finally, in relation to the amendment to the definition of a "relevant person" in the Bill, amendment No. 5 changes paragraph (b) of the definition, which is the part that pertains to mothers, to now include two parts. The first part, which is currently in the Bill, refers to residents in the institution for reasons relating to pregnancy and the birth and care of the child as a result of that pregnancy.The second new part relates to being resident in order to be provided with shelter and maintenance. The second part of the definition is being added in order to refer in the Bill to the particular purpose of those institutions, as aligned with their specified purpose in the underlying legislative framework for county homes. It is, therefore, included in order to distinguish between the mother and baby and county institutions and other general medical settings, including hospitals, in terms of the reasons for being admitted which was ultimately because the women in these institutions and circumstances had no alternative and nowhere else to go.

Before I move on to explain this further, I am cognisant of the language we are using and the word "shelter". The word implies a level of support and care and is one that many survivors feel does not align with their experiences in those particular institutions. The reason we are using the term "shelter" is to align with the terms used in the existing legislation that pertained to the county home institutions. In particular, section 54 of the Health Act 1953, for example, provided for institutional assistance, meaning shelter and maintenance in a county home or similar institution, and was the legislative provision governing the maintenance of unmarried mothers and children in the mother and baby and county home institutions.

It is the case that these institutions had a specific function under legislation, distinct from the function of providing medical services which was legislated for separately. That is why amendment No. 5 refers to the term "shelter and maintenance" being a primary purpose for a person's admittance to a relevant institution. It is why the amendment should be read in conjunction with amendment No. 7 which seeks to be clear that the reference to shelter and maintenance in the definition of a relevant person does not include where this is incidental to a person receiving medical, surgery or maternity services.

Finally, amendment No. 6 makes the change to subsection (2) of section 2 of the Bill which outlines what is required for a person to be considered to have been resident in an institution. As mentioned at the outset, in the case of mothers only one night in an institution is required in order to be deemed eligible for the scheme. This amendment is required to clarify that the residents must also be reckonable under section 24(2), in particular the newly inserted section 24(2)(b) covered by amendment No. 26, meaning the start of the period of residence must occur before 21 December of the concluding year for the institution concerned. This outlines this issue and the proposed amendments in this group.

Before we pass over to debate, I want to again make clear that these changes are not about in any way reducing the eligibility for the scheme. Rather, the changes are about clarifying a particular issue that came up in terms of county homes. Once these amendments are passed, the scheme will continue to provide for the 34,000 individuals concerned, as we have discussed previously.