Nicole Ryan (Sinn Fein)

I join colleagues in what they said about Senator Boyhan's contribution. I thank him for giving it. You can never beat lived experience.

I am here to speak in support of those whose lives have been shaped and often devastated by Ireland's legacy of institutional abuse. I do so not from a place of abstract policy but grounded in the lived reality of someone in the constituency in which I live. She is an eldest daughter, now a woman of immense strength, whose story I carry with me today. From as early as the age of seven, she was not just a child but a caretaker. The eldest of eight, she was responsible for feeding and changing her baby siblings, soothing their cries when visitors called because it was the only time she might receive a glimmer of praise. The praise never came from the one person she needed the most, her mother. Her mother was a survivor of the industrial school system. The trauma she experienced did not stop with her generation. It seeped into the next, shaping her parental ways, which were sometimes distant, cold and devastating. There were no birthday cards, no Christmas presents, no swings, no hugs, no pride, just duty, silence and survival. By the age of eight, the woman to whom I refer was scrubbing paintwork and cleaning floors to perfection. At 16, she had left school to work and support the family. Her childhood, her self-worth and her potential were all collateral damage of a system that brutalised her mother and then abandoned her too.

This is the legacy of institutional abuse in Ireland. It is not historic; it is generational. The Bill in its current form fails to recognise that truth. To the survivors living abroad, many of whom were forced to emigrate as a direct consequence of their institutional trauma, it offers once-off payments, with, as Senator Tully said, no regard for inflation, health needs or the reality of an ageing population with sometimes no family or State support. To the survivors still here in Ireland, it offers a maze of exclusions and conditions while still shielding religious orders from their full financial obligations. What about the children of the survivors, the ones who inherited the trauma, who were raised in silence and stoicism, who never received the love their parents never learned to give? Where is their acknowledgement in this? Where is the support for people like the woman to whom I refer, who endured an upbringing shaped entirely by institutional trauma without ever setting foot in the institution herself?

Who is the Government protecting? It is not the survivors. It is certainly not their children or those who bear the burden of Ireland's unresolved past. To the woman whose words I carried here with me today, I want to say that you were never too big for that swing. You should have had the doll of your own and you deserve every hug that you never got. We can never fully undo the past, and we have acknowledged that today. What we can decide right now is whether to compound the harm that was done or begin to finally heal it.