Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Okay. That is the reference to that. As I said in my opening remarks, I intend to concentrate all of my efforts today on this. I do not want to keep getting up here and repeating the same old story. Even now, I find it exceptionally difficult to keep saying the same thing. This is my swansong to a certain extent, in relation to this legislation. I want to thank the members of the committee. I am sorry they felt it was not possible to somehow get it over the line. I recognise that they are part of a Government. They have to work collaboratively and they do not get everything the way they would like it. I would have thought that was important.

Again, in relation to my amendment, I want to acknowledge the important and great work of the Oireachtas Library & Research Service. If the task was difficult, it was made less difficult by them. They summarise each of the recommendations of the pre-legislative scrutiny. They highlight all those that have not got through. They go on to highlight the importance of the issues such as the boarding out, and minors under the age of six months. None of these issues has been covered but they have highlighted these. They have done a service to parliamentary democracy. I want to thank the staff who led that work and did all that was involved. It was important. I want to quote here from their report on page 40 of the Bills Digest on this Bill:

The committee made 21 recommendations, including: The six month residency required for children must be removed. Anyone who was resident in one of the institutions should be entitled to a payment regardless of the time they spent there.

The relevant religious congregations and organisations must contribute significant finances to fund the scheme.

The Minister has made it very clear that he wants a separate track on that. However, it is a focus and it was part of the committee's work and part of the committee's recommendations pertinent to this particular Bill. I accept that the Minister is walking away on that. I am committed in a matter of days now, to coming back with an item on the Seanad agenda on this. I have examined the indemnity scheme in great detail, with the signatures of all the people who signed up to it. I have done a bit of research and I have had external research done on the abysmal failings of some people to live up to what is an honour and a commitment. They have not done so. It is incumbent on Government to chase people who sign up to a Government agreement, who get an indemnity from this State from further prosecution, and then do not keep their side of the bargain. That did not happen in all cases but it happened in quite a lot. That is another issue.

The committee recommended that "those boarded out should be included in the scheme and entitled to redress" but, no, it is not in the legislation. Another recommendation reads: "The waiver should be removed from the scheme". I want to thank the Minister. He shared a letter with Senator Higgins on that.

A further recommendation reads: "The Bill must embody a trauma-informed response, including trauma of counselling and compensation". I think I have made my point of where we are on that. It is only right and proper and fair that we should deal with it. Senator McGreehan was quoted on 28 May in the Mail on Sunday regarding her response at a previous meeting here to the great man Mr. Tony Kelly and her sadness about it all and she was right. She touched very emotionally on it. We can do something for Mr. Kelly. We can vote against the Government if it does not include the objectives that Mr. Kelly sought. If Mr. Kelly sought them, we can include them. That is it. I have spoken to many people and worked with Mr. Kelly myself. I know what he wanted to achieve. I say it here and now, this article was brought to my attention. I believe it was right and good and I want to acknowledge the Senator for acknowledging it here in the House. We now have an opportunity. This is about legacy. This is about supporting people some of whom are now no longer in this world and did not see achieved what Mr. Kelly sought to achieve.

I also want to take the opportunity to thank Ms Claire McGettrick, Dr. Katherine O'Donnell, Ms Maeve O'Rourke, Mr. James Smith and Ms Maria Steen for their work on the key issues that I am talking about here regarding that amendment.

We can hear all the lectures about people who did not walk the road, who did not experience the hurt and the isolation. We can also say that we all know because every one of our families have been touched by the phenomenon of children born out of marriage. Young girls, sisters, aunts, nieces were shoved off to the UK or to the cities to have their children in secret because of societal condemnation and ridicule. How many of us reached out many years later to reconnect with the people we knew in our own families and experiences that we should have reached out to? That is the challenge for each and every one of us. There is no family in this country that has not been touched by the experience of institutional care and the rejection of young women who had children out of marriage. That is an important point.

I believe it only right and fair the we address the issue of the vaccine trials. The record of the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste is strong on the issues that I have raised. They have said that it had been a difficult time. They believe that justice needs to be done. As we know, the vaccine trials happened in many institutions. I will not go into a history lecture on that. However, I want to acknowledge the Irish Examiner and the brave journalists there who ran many a story about Bessborough Mother and Baby Home and the vaccine trials there. I speak of the ones myself that I knew and experienced in Dún Laoghaire in the Bird's Nest children's home. There are many others all over this country. There were trials in Navan and Westmeath among others. What are we saying to those people? We are saying "No redress". There is no real justice for them.

What about all the boarded out children who were illegally taken and transported as agricultural slave labour? What are we doing for them? There is no provision for them in this legislation.

What about the children from Africa and Asia who were subjected to horrendous racial discrimination? They had no support and were segregated within a sub segregation in some institutions and within our State education system. I know many of them.Many of them are my friends and many are regularly in my home, telling me their stories. Many of them are finding it very difficult to move on. Many of them are in public life and one would come across them much more often than one would expect.

What are we doing about all the abused children who had disabilities, who were placed in care and who were, many times, forgotten? They had no voice and no advocate, nobody to do anything for them. We know this is true. It is not as if we do not know. We know that they were left in institutions.

I have dealt with the issues of child labour and forced adoptions. I want to touch on the issue of girls in care who had children and then to compound the issue, those children were taken from them. Let us think of the many mothers who took their oldest daughter's child and said:

Shut your mouth, tell nobody. She's mine now. I will pretend I am her mother. I will arrange with the Church for the necessary baptismal certificate.

Those certificates cannot be authentic. Daughters were imprisoned in a set of circumstances called family where they could not be the mother to their own daughter but had to pretend to be her sister. These things happened and they matter.

Denial of parental access is another issue and I speak from experience here. I do not like standing up and talking about my own personal experience but that is all I can speak about and share with the Minister here today. Many legal parents who arrived at the door of an institution were shunned and refused access to their children. Where was the unity there? Where was the support? How could we have a situation where we had six or seven children from the same family in six or seven different institutions in the city of Dublin in the 1960s and no one seemed to care? We see from evidence of ongoing correspondence with the HSE, or the health board as it was then, and these institutions that there was denial when parents arrived at the door to claim their children when their circumstances changed. They were told that their children were gone. They were told, "They've gone to America", "They've gone to Australia", "They've been adopted", "Leave them alone, they have a chance of a new life, a new beginning. How selfish of you to knock on the door and seek them".

We talked about the trauma and the forced separation. We talked about the denial of family records. The Minister talks about getting records and I salute him but many have been destroyed or burnt. Many a lie has been hidden for generations and generations. Let us consider the injustice of it, the injustice of detention and the failure of ongoing engagement. All of this really touches on what I have to say here today.

People suffered in the past from great isolation. In the context of such isolating experiences, no matter how close one is to others or how close a supportive friend wants to be, no one can fully enter another's pain or anguish. The people who have travelled on the road for so long have waited for justice and while the Bill is not going to give them everything, I want to acknowledge that it will give them a lot. I also want to acknowledge the Minister in particular because I have travelled the road with him since he became Minister and engaged with him. I want to thank his office, genuinely, for its openness to dialogue and willingness to engage with me on anything I have ever asked. I have found him and his officials forthcoming and I want to acknowledge that here today.

It is a difficult story and a difficult journey. I am greatly privileged - and I mean this sincerely - to be able to be here and to be able to stand on my own two feet to articulate some, though not all, of my emotions and my experiences. I am one of the privileged ones. I am one of the lucky ones. I am not the brightest one but I was lucky because I had an indomitable spirit that never accepted the word "No". The more people said "No" to me and the more doors that were closed to me, the more I pushed back.

There were good people in these institutions and there are good people in government. We are shortchanging them by leaving those three critical areas out. I am concerned about those subject to vaccine trials. Some of them never lived and we need to look again at the death registers in many of these institutions. I am concerned about those who were brutalised, physically, emotionally and sexually, in our State care system. Those who were in institutions for less than six months have no redress under this scheme. We have touched on the vaccine trials and on those who were boarded out. We do not really have any sense of those who were farmed out. I think there were thousands but we have no real sense of that because of the illegality of the whole thing, how it was done and how they were transferred. I know from people coming to me and sharing their experiences that they were farmed out as child labourers.

I will finish with a lovely story. One man came to me and told me that he was farmed out to "very nice people" - there were good experiences too - and they left him their farm in Galway. However, he was never formally adopted so he was clobbered for the full tax. That is an injustice and is something we can look at in the future. How can we in some way repay children who were the beneficiaries of a smallholding or a farm and were clobbered for capital gains tax? We have had a conversation about this and I know the Minister has some ideas around it. I ask him to deal with it.

I do not intend to say much more about the Bill. I intend to fold my documents away. I can never erase my memories and why would I want to? As long as I am here, living and in the Oireachtas, I will continue to champion those who need to be championed. I lived in three institutions, from day one right up until my teens. No one gave me a free education. My happiest day was when I earned my first wage and bought a bicycle, which gave me the freedom to move and to meet people.

We see the world as we stand and our experiences in it, and we bring those to our work. Each and every one of us here in this House brings our own experience to this Parliament and shares it. I have always said to the people who went before me that I would continue to advocate for them. I told the people I left behind me that I would champion their rights too because that is empowering in itself to be a voice for them. They were effectively my brothers and sisters, through a strange set of circumstances. The bond is strong and we continue to maintain contact. I would be failing and would be unable to rest if I did not champion their causes. Let us think about this and see what we can do. If the Minister cannot address it in this Bill, he should commit to twin-track legislation that will address the aforementioned key issues of children exposed to vaccine trials, children who were illegally farmed out as labourers with no consent and children who were in institutions for less than six months. They need our support. We talk about cherishing the children of this nation equally; let us demonstrate that. We should remind ourselves when we say that prayer every day that it is not meaningless. Do we want those inspirations? Do we want to walk the road of the marginalised and disadvantaged? Do we want to be strong advocates, to tackle injustice and to support people? I hope that somehow we can see a way to bring forward strong recommendations in this regard.