Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Did you ever hear the question, "What is a university?". You then point at the university and ask whether it is the university. There are different schools within it, and different this and that. It feels like that in respect of this matter. What is the mother and baby home? What is the county home? I am struggling with the fact there will be women who may not have slept in a county home but went in there and were possibly treated by the same nurse and doctor, gave birth the day before in a beautifully empowering way within a family that did not need the intervention that came later, went home with her child that week and everything was fine. I understand we need to find a way for such women not to be captured in the provisions of the Bill. I cannot imagine them applying for it because they will not see themselves in it. They would not opt into something like that anyway.

To shrink it down, let us pretend it was just a ward. On one day, at one hour, that ward was servicing the county home, or women coming in whose children were given up for adoption against their will but who did not go into the county home. That same staff treated the woman who had a secure home and place and was just there for maternity services. The staff treated that woman with respect, and with whatever she received, and she went home. However, that same staff also treated a different woman whose child was going to be taken from her, to whom they refused medical care as regards pain relief, or any type of social supports or respect. They did not send her to the county home because her family agreed to take her home, but she still had all the same traumas and abuses, apart from the time in the county home. At one minute that maternity service is just a maternity service but we are saying that an hour later, when it was a different woman, it was not. Somebody coming in to take a child away was facilitated. People have said that they refused to sign forms but their babies were taken anyway. That could have all happened on the maternity ward in the maternity service.

The whole matter of mother and baby institutions was not only about the institutions but the separation of family, the forced taking of children, the refusal of maternity care, the refusal of respect due to marital status, and all these different things. If that was facilitated on the same co-located site, that maternity service cannot be separated from the county home. It was part of the county home, just as the Seanad office cannot be separated from the Dáil office. They are relational and attached to each other. Women who spent time in those maternity services, located on the same places as those county homes who lost their children and who experienced refusal of medical care for all those different stigmas and institutions, should be able to come under this scheme. Ultimately, one is called a county home and one is called a maternity service, but they were both doing the same thing to some of those women on those co-located sites, apart from where their beds were located that night.