Gerard Craughwell (Independent)

I acknowledge my friend and colleague Victor Boyhan, who laid details of his private life not just before the House but also the country in order to advocate on behalf of those he lived with and those he had lived experience of. He is one of the great heroes of this entire debacle. I also acknowledge the ladies in the Visitors' Gallery who quietly advocated outside the gates of Leinster House in wet and cold weather. Your bicycles outside the gate, your teddy bears on the wall, all of that brought the message home to us.There has been some discussion about the religious institutions and, yes, religious institutions were horrendous but let me go back to the time of my childhood. When a girl found herself pregnant the first thing was to bring her to a particular priest in a particular church in Galway and arrangements were made for her to go on holidays. These girls went on holidays and many of them never came back. They were pregnant. My father, who was born in 1905, was as Victorian a man as you could find. When it came to a girl being pregnant outside of wedlock he would ask what she did that was unnatural. I thought it was such a humane approach to take.

I worked in the Magdalen laundries on the heaters for the washing machines. I saw the girls who were there. Some of them had Down's syndrome. Some of them were girls who had fallen pregnant. Some of them were girls who, I understand, were too good-looking to live in society. It is absolutely shocking what we did.

A year after her husband died, a cousin of my mother's mother found herself pregnant. On hearing this, her father-in-law took her two sons and dropped them in Letterfrack and took her daughter and dropped her in an orphanage. He had her committed to a mental institution. After the committal to the mental institution she had the child. My grandmother went to visit her and that same man came to my grandmother and told her nobody was ever to visit her again. Years later - I am talking about 70 years later - my mother was in Merlin Park hospital in Galway where she heard the surname of a man. She went to the man and told him it was a very peculiar surname and that she had relations of that surname. The man became totally overwhelmed. He had been looking for his relations. It turned out he was the half-brother. He was the child of the pregnancy. After 70 years he was reunited with one of his brothers and his sister. The youngest of the three originally put into care died in Letterfrack. When we would ask his brother what happened he said they beat him to death.

What my colleague has said about the religious institutions is right. If they are not willing to pay up, we should seize what they have and force them to pay up. Constitutional rights can be set aside, as we saw during the financial crisis, when a state wants to do it. If a religious institution has assets that would pay for some of the damage that has been done, then it should do so.

I would also ask the question today as to whether any one man in the State has ever come forward and said he fathered one of those children. Does anybody know of a man who was said he was responsible for Mary Whatever-her-name-is or Julie Whatever-her-name-is being put into a Magdalen laundry or sent to Bessborough House and that having had his way with her, he deserted her? I have never heard of one man coming forward. I grew up in Salthill in Galway. There were girls who found themselves pregnant and went away. I know some of them now have a relationship with the child they had but I also know none of the guys I hung around with ever came forward and said they were the father of the child. In fact, they would use the entire resources of their family to deny fathering a child.

Let us be honest about it. We can blame the church and anybody we want but it was a societal issue. We talk about the religious doing it and it was them and nobody else knew anything but when I grow up in Salthill in Galway the great cry was, "If you do not behave yourself I will send you to Letterfrack". People knew what was going on in Letterfrack. I also worked in Letterfrack with my dad. I worked in the kitchens there. I saw the young lads brought down from Dublin to the back end of Connemara to be flogged whenever it suited whoever was there. It was a societal issue.

I will say that €3,000 towards the cost of healthcare for people living outside the country is simply not good enough. There has to be a way in which people who have critical or chronic health issues as a result of their treatment can have ongoing support. I agree with Senator Boyhan that Martin Fraser, our ambassador in London, has a particular grá for those who were in institutions. I have to compliment him on what he is doing. He is a wonderful man.