Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will be brief. I really only want to flag this and am not expecting the Minister to come back with another response. There are a number of issues here. A lot of these people were not ever abandoned by their families. They were abandoned by the State. It is too simplistic to say that.

In relation to the county homes, a lot of these women were held back. They went in as young girls of 16 or 17 and were actually impregnated in county homes. Let us call a spade a spade. I can provide documentation which shows that they were then sent from these county homes to St. Kevin's Institution or the Dublin Union as it was known then, which is now St. James's Hospital. They were brought back in again and their babies were taken away from them forcibly. There was terrible shame, guilt and a whole load of other things going on. This is why this issue is so complex. There are people who were put into care, grew up in care and ended up becoming pregnant in those institutions. This was quite common. Ms Mary Raftery touched on how common it was in her "States of Fear" documentary. The women were brought back in and brought back out and we see a lot of that in Bessborough in particular.

Furthermore, they were not all unmarried mothers. Remember there was no divorce in Ireland in the 1960s so people were forced to stay together. They were husband and wife but many of the women were brutalised within those marriages. However, that was their marriage and their Church was telling them that they had to stick together, through thick and thin. They continued to be raped within marriage and continued to have ten, 11 and 12 children. Then the State stepped in, in many cases, because it considered the parents to be unfit. The fathers were gamblers, alcoholics and so on and the State thought it was doing good by taking the children into care against their parents' wishes, even though the parents had constitutional rights. It is so complex. We cannot generalise and say they were unmarried mothers. A lot of people were forced to be in a union. They were married and that was it. That is what the Church and the State said. They were in and out of St. Kevin's and that makes it all a bit more complex.

I just wanted to flag this and do not necessarily want the Minister to respond again on it. The Minister appreciates the complexity and understands why it is so difficult to box this off in a legislative way. It is clear that so many people were in and out of care. In some cases, not once but twice or three times, they had children who were then taken away from them. They were labourers and work staff within the institutional structure.