Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am not sure it has because scenarios keep arising in my mind. We are recognising that the hospital or the maternity wing within the hospital and the county home were one and the same thing in a sense and that they cannot be separated. If someone's time in the maternity services is an extension of her time in the county home, it must be recognised in the other direction as well where someone did not go into the county home first and only attended the maternity services. Maybe her family kept her at home until the point of delivery and then brought her to the maternity services, making those services the first space in question, with a decision then made that the family could not take the child home with them because they did not have space for it. Or maybe she concealed the fact that she was pregnant right up until the last moment and she ended up in these maternity services. Does it not go in the other direction then?

Does the Minister know what I mean? When someone arrived in the maternity services, I imagine she would not automatically have been a resident of the county home first and, by extension, the maternity services. If we are saying that it flows in that direction, then we are saying that all circumstances were the same, but that is not the case. Someone could have been in the maternity services first, a situation occurred, and then she alone went back to the county home for a time, whatever that might have been. Are we saying that what happened in the maternity services in the other direction of flow was part of the abuse? We are saying it is when it flows one way, but are we saying the same about the reverse flow? Does the Minister know what I mean? If we are going to connect them so tightly in one direction, it means that we are connecting them as a whole and that what someone experienced in the county home was effectively what she experienced in the hospital and vice versa. We are saying that they are an extension of each other when it comes to comparing and considering circumstances and time. It is clearer in some places where the homes were just one institution, but there has to be something different to address co-located sites. In reality, all they were was separate buildings, but the abuse and institutionalisation may have been the same regardless of what buildings people were in.